5 Ways Customer Service Should NOT be like Politics
As we come to the end of yet another vicious campaign cycle, I couldn’t help thinking about how “would-be public servants” demonstrate the worst of servant leadership. Service should not be like politics, in that service is: 1) about people not power 2) emphasize those being served not the one serving 3) occurs without making…
What would Drucker Do?
Peter Drucker, undoubtedly one of the world’s most influential management consultants, would have been 100 years old next month. Drucker died 5 years ago but his advise is much needed today. Drucker’s body of work spans 39 books and as such is impossible to capture in a short blog but at it’s core his message…
Is your service visionary or just your hallucination?
My friend Terry Paulson, author of the Optimism Advantage, says the difference between a vision and a hallucination “is how many people see it.” In order for service to be “real,” leaders need to create a roadmap for its delivery. At the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company that vision starts with a”credo” which is placed on a “credo…
Rude and Slow – The plight of service
RightNow’s Customer Experience Impact 2010 report shows that 82 percent of consumers in the U.S. said they’ve stopped doing business with a company because of a poor customer service experience. The main reason for that defection in 73 percent of cases was rude staff and in 55 percent of situations it was the company’s failure…
How to Deliver Service plus Chocolate!
Having recently consulted or spoken in 6 countries in less than 30 days (ranging from Bolivia to Hong Kong), I keep facing questions that center around the distinction between operationally consistent service and emotionally-engaging customer experiences. While I’m not convinced that these two service approaches need to be mutually exclusive, I do know that without…
5 Categories of Customer Preferences You Should Know
While recently consulting with a client about ways to determine customer preferences, I had a random neuronal firing and from the deep recesses of my brain I recalled the work of Professor Noriaki Kano. In the 1980’s Dr. Kano, known for creating the Kano model, differentiated between 5 groups of customer preferences. As best I…
How to Create Brand Equity
Which is it – wide ties or skinny ties? Bell bottoms or straight legs? I am convinced that if you wait long enough the old will become new again and the out-of-vogue will return to fashionable. Recently, I asked if brand loyalty was dead? In the context of that question I posed data to suggest…
Customer Connections by the Facts Not by Total Nonsense
While researching the book I just completed about elevating the “patient experience” in healthcare, I encountered a powerful quote about the “lemming mentality” of business leadership. In their book entitled “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense,” Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton note, “Business decisions, as many of our colleagues in business and your own…
How to move customers up the loyalty ladder
I think of customer engagement as a ladder. The lowest rung is simple customer satisfaction, with subsequent ascending rungs be things like “repurchase intent”, “perception of a brand’s integrity” and the highest levels being a “customer’s identification” with a brand or a “sense of loss” should the brand not exist. A recent study by Epsilon…
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