Doing Good and Doing Well
Installment 6 of my holiday retrospective is a classic example of how businesses can create truly memorable experiences…. From my book The New Gold Standard … Salazar, age 12, was a champion figure skater who began noticing pain in her legs while preparing for a regional competition as a step toward the Olympics. While originally thinking…
Make it Their Own – Experiences that Connect
Installment 5 of this holiday retrospective, takes me back to my book The Starbucks Experience and the importance of not “doing the experience to your customers” but instead “doing it with them.” At Starbucks, customers must be able to customize their beverage order, with the handcrafted assistance of their barista (the Italian word for bartender…
Service the Way it Ought to Be!
The fourth installment of my reflective blogs comes from an upcoming book about revolutionary changes in patient experience at UCLA Health Systems: Dr. Michael W. Yeh, Assistant Professor of Surgery and Medicine and Program Director of Endocrine Surgery at UCLA, saddressed challenges of the timely delivery of care when taking over leadership of his program.…
5 Steps to Extraordinary Service Recovery
My third retrospective installment comes from my book The New Gold Standard and looks at Service Recovery at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company: Customers are all too often surprised when businesses accept responsibility for breakdowns, thus providing a strategic advantage for those businesses that their admit faults. John Fleming, Ph.D., Principal and Chief Scientist for Gallup…
What’s in a name? The Starbucks Experience
The second installment in my year end reflection brings me back to lessons learned from a Starbucks barista named Joy Wilson, as shared in my book The Starbucks Experience: Welcoming people by name and remembering them from visit to visit is a small thing, but it counts! The great Dale Carnegie recognized this in his…
Being a Leader and Being the Experience!
As this Christmas week commences, I will take time in gratitude to reflect on all those who have supported, influenced, and guided me. During this period of reflection, I’ll provide blog posts which reflect excerpts from my past and upcoming books. Let’s look back to the wisdom of the co-author of my book When Fish…
A Personal McDonald’s Experience…Absurd?
I know this may seem un-American but I seldom eat at McDonald’s and almost never do so by dining-in. Recently, I was very early for a morning meeting and decided to grab a cup of coffee at a nearby McDonald’s. Past encounters predicted that I would get served quickly and that the product would be…
Customer Service ISN’T Customer Experience
As a customer experience design type, I definitely help companies deliver better service! But… Service improvements are just one component in elevating the experiences people have when they encounter your brand. Actually, my favorite definition of customer experience comes from my friend Doug Fleener of the Dynamic Experiences Group. Doug says…. “Customer experience is managing…
Increase tension with your customer – Nudge the LOVE
I was reading a blog post by the ad agency Redpepperland concerning factors needed to create a beloved brand. In it, the unnamed author astutely suggested that people don’t fall in love with logo’s or brand imagery but do so through the personal dimension. In the past, I’ve suggested that “loving” a brand, is the…
The Starbucks Experience is Back…or Is it?
As the author of The Starbucks Experience, I endured predictions of the brands demise from some very esteemed colleagues. With rounds of layoffs, a January 29th 2009 announcement that 3oo stores were closing, a cooling economy, and increased competition for the gourmet coffee market, it was looking like Starbucks was on the ropes! While other’s…
FREE RESOURCES
The Starbucks Experience: Leadership Tips eBook
Elevating Care in Healthcare: Lessons from the UCLA Health System eBook
