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Beware of Scary Telephone Customer Service - 10/27/26


As we near the Halloween holiday in the United States, it seems appropriate to discuss examples of scary customer service, particularly on the telephone.  Here are a few common issues that frustrate and annoy customers.  These are experiences to avoid delivering, and alternatives to adopt: The customer calls, describes their Read more

The Art of the Successful Script - 10/20/26


You’re the customer.  You go to the store, and they ask if you have a loyalty card.  You call the doctor’s office, and they ask for your birth date.   You walk up to the counter, and they ask if you found everything you were looking for. These are all valid Read more

The Key Building Block for Your Customer Relationship - 10/13/26


An automotive manufacturer gets supplies for their vehicles from all over the world.  They have arrangements, service level agreements, expectations for timing and quality of all the parts.  And when they gather all these supplies, they assemble the cars.  They test the cars.  Then they take pictures of those Read more

Be Flexible to Fill the Gaps - 10/6/26


The non-profit has the expected challenges.  There are only 3 people in the organization, yet, they have the same responsibilities of a larger company.  They have to do finance, sales, marketing; they deliver their services to the community, and they need to keep a pulse on what’s going on Read more

Is This Good Customer Service? - 9/29/26


A friend of mine reached out to me recently as she waited for the electrical technician to show up at her house to do some minor repairs.  She had never worked with this company before, but they sent a text about the tech who was soon to arrive. The message Read more

Ownership when Fixing Others’ Errors - 9/22/26


We were conducting training with a client recently, and one of the participants, Jackie, is in a role in his organization where he goes out to the customer site to investigate issues, address customer complaints, and fix problems.  While he’s at the site, he often gets an earful from Read more

Why “No” is So Important - 9/15/26


The employee told the caller: “I don’t think that is possible.” The customer eventually hung up, and redialed to ask a different employee the same question. The employee responded to the customer: “That’s probably not the best way to do it.”  Then, the customer kept asking question after question, arguing Read more

It’s Not “You,” It’s “I” - 9/8/26


During a business writing course that I took years ago, the instructor had us write an e-mail.  I can’t recall if it was written to a co-worker or customer, but after writing this e-mail, she had us count every “I” and “You.”  We talked about how we need to Read more

It Shouldn’t Make a Difference, But… - 9/1/26


We have this conversation with lots of our sports clients, but the principles apply across all different industries.  Too many service representatives view a conversation with a customer as a transaction.  Just get him off the phone as quickly as possible.  The customer is Joe Public, not Joseph Pendergrass.  Read more

Use What the Customer Gives You - 8/25/26


Scenario #1: The customer sent an e-mail to the general inbox at the company.  The message noted that the customer needed to get a family member added to their account, but they couldn’t tell from the website how to do so. The next morning an employee opened up the e-mail, Read more

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The Key Building Block for Your Customer Relationship – 10/13/26

Posted on October 13, 2026 in Customer Service Tip of the Week Please leave a comment

An automotive manufacturer gets supplies for their vehicles from all over the world.  They have arrangements, service level agreements, expectations for timing and quality of all the parts.  And when they gather all these supplies, they assemble the cars.  They test the cars.  Then they take pictures of those cars, and they put them in glossy brochures to aid sales.  To sell the cars in the end, the manufacturer relies heavily on the suppliers in the beginning.

In our world of customer service, client retention, and fan renewals and growth efforts, we’re not manufacturing a vehicle.  We are building a relationship.  And we have a lot of suppliers of information regarding the customer.  There’s internal data we have on customers, including work orders, purchase patterns, and service histories.

Your BEST Supplier

But the greatest single source of information about the customer is…the customer.  There’s nobody who knows the customer better than the customer themselves.  Fortunately, we have innumerable opportunities to utilize this supplier.  Every communication we have with them is an opportunity for us to document some intelligence on the supplier.  Every email we get from them, every text they send – these are sources of intelligence.

One source that the vast majority of companies underutilize is research.  Many companies don’t survey their customers, and even more don’t track and append those results to the individual customer.  They’re not utilizing that information in future conversations.  They’re not tapping into that supply of information when looking to increase sales, when trying to renew an annual agreement, when sending an email to make it look more personalized – and less like a generic marketing campaign.

With customers being the greatest supplier of information you need to keep them and build your relationship with them, be intentional about how you acquire that information.  Document and utilize what the customer supplies to you to better serve them.

Use the customer as the best supplier of the information you need to build a long-term relationship with them.

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Build Relationships with First-timers – 11/11/25

Posted on November 11, 2025 in Customer Service Tip of the Week Please leave a comment

We’ve worked with one of our sports clients for over 10 years, and although the main focus of our work is research with their fan base, we also provide informal consulting advice and guidance whenever possible.  One approach we’ve talked about on and off for years is the need for them to have a first-time fan or first-time customer strategy for relationship development that is different from their approach with other accounts.

They have an extremely high churn rate with first-time customers, like most businesses do, so there needs to be a clear intent to strategically develop relationships with those customers, learn more about them, and personalize communications and engagement whenever possible.

We had a debrief call recently after one of our major research projects, and one of our client’s staff talked about the fact that they were starting to assign a personal service rep to the new accounts.  This is something we have encouraged for years, and we were happy that they’re doing it, but we wondered why this hadn’t been done after our many prior conversations.

The Reason for the Personal Representative

Why do customers – especially first-time customers – often prefer to have a personal representative?  It’s about ease and simplicity – having one person you know by name and who knows you by name – one point of contact, one to call, to text, to e-mail to address all their needs.  They don’t have to learn your business; they just have to know how to get in touch with Jack, their personal rep.  It could be a question about online account access, optional services, policies, fees, program functions/features, etc.  Regardless of the topic, all they have to do is call Jack.

This approach provides them a feeling of being taken care of – they know someone they can trust to help them.  It’s about their feeling valued – being able to talk to an employee they know, someone who cares about them.

If you want to build true value with your first-time customers, make it easy on them.  Build trust with the customer, convey you care about them.  Give yourself the ability to be responsive by giving them the ability to get to you easily.

Eliminate barriers to the communications that help you build relationships with new customers.

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Familying with Customers – 10/28/25

Posted on October 28, 2025 in Customer Service Tip of the Week Please leave a comment

In our transactional society, it’s hard to think about customers in the long-term.  But if we want to be as successful as we can as an individual or as a business, we need to view customers through a relationship lens. What do we need to know about them to keep them and grow our business with them?  What if we truly viewed customers…as family?

Believe it or not, there is a word (depending on what dictionary you check) called Familying.  It is defined as:  Supporting, providing emotional or practical help to family members.

If we consider customers in a long-term relationship-oriented manner, we could define our role in a customer family as being those supporting, providing emotional or practical help to customers.

To be most effective in helping them long-term, we have to get to know them.  Let’s break down FAMILYING in terms of what we need to know to build relationships with customers:

F is for Fiscally understanding our customers.  They are customers of our business because they are spending money or resources with us.  The better we can understand their economic situation, the parameters within which they can spend money on the types of products and services we have to offer, the better we can tailor our offerings to meet their needs.

A is for understanding the customer’s Attitude and their emotions.  Some customers in the moment or in general are very emotional, and we have to be cognizant of that and address the emotions as much as the topic at-hand.  Others are less emotional, and we can deal more with them on the facts and the figures.  The better we can understand the emotions, the better we can understand how to engage them effectively.

M is for understanding their Motivators.  Why are they with us as a customer, and why could they leave?  The more we understand the reasons behind their decisions, the better chance we have of affecting their decisions to stay or to go, to spread positive or negative word-of-mouth.

The ILY is embedded in understanding our customer’s fiscally, attitudinally, and motivationally.

The ING in FAMILYING with customers is the ING I’ve brought up a few times before in these tips. The better we understand their Issues, Needs, and Goals, the better we can help them resolve their Issues, address their Needs, and support them in achieving their Goals.

To develop a long-term relationship with customers, get to know them Fiscally, Attitudinally, Motivationally, and what are their Issues, Needs, and Goals.  Start with a little FAMILYING.

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