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Use AI to Improve Your Performance - 7/23/24


Many companies are integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) into some aspect of their business.  This could greatly change how they operate, how they communicate with customers. This AI wave reminds me of a story from 20+ years ago when a stock brokerage firm launched a new website that greatly enhanced the Read more

The New Burger Experience - 7/16/24


Floyd loves a good hamburger. Any chance he gets to try a new spin on an old standby, he takes it. Recently, a burger joint opened near his house, and Floyd was very excited! It was owned by and named for a world-renowned chef, so it had to be Read more

Boost Customer Happiness - 7/9/24


There’s a cooking show that a friend of mine watches, and the premise is all about reverse engineering food.  They may take a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, analyze it, and determine the ingredients just by tasting it.  Then they figure out a recipe.  The cook will try to make Read more

Brainstorm to Better Yourself - 7/2/24


I’ve led enough sessions with clients on continuous improvement topics to have solid experience on how to lead ideation exercises, brainstorming to develop new ideas.  Oftentimes these sessions start with the right question; the first answers may not be the ultimate solution, but they can serve as a jumping Read more

The Power of the Pause - 6/25/24


When I’m facilitating a meeting, and it feels like it’s going off-track or the discussion is going a little longer than it should, I may say something like “let me pause the conversation so that…” or “let’s pause just for a minute and consider…” I don’t like the word STOP. Read more

Handle Interruptions Heroically - 6/18/24


In the middle of a project, Jimbo, the customer service team member, had to stop what he was doing because he received an e-mail from a customer complaining about their experience at a recent event. Later that day, Jimbo was asked by his boss to put everything on hold for Read more

From Employees to Teammates: The Shift - 6/11/24


Be a great teammate. Be a good team player. We’re all part of the team. We’re no longer employees, we’re team members! The phrase “Team” is used in describing co-workers so much more than it was used years ago.  Then, we would be talking about employees, talking about staff, talking Read more

Nurture New Relationships - 6/4/24


Freddie was a new business owner in town.  He was launching a franchise, had acquired some funding from a local bank, and was in search of staff who cared about customer service. All the while, he was in the process of renovating a storefront for his business, so he was Read more

There’s Positivity in Patience - 5/28/24


The employee at the financial services firm was working with a new client on a relatively simple loan.  The documentation was about as clear as it could get to the employee, but the customer had lots of questions.  The employee calmly, clearly, and specifically answered each question.  The meeting Read more

The Goal – A Great Experience - 5/21/24


The following is a narrative of a great experience (people, process, service, facility) at a minor league sporting event – key points that could apply to any business are in bold… Mark and I pulled into the parking lot, excited about the game.  The Slapshots had been on a roll Read more

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It’s Customer Service Week…Do You Know Where Your Customers Are?

Posted on October 2, 2012 in Business Advice, World of Customer Service Please leave a comment

You may remember the television commercial that said “It’s 10 o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”

The idea was that there are certain times of the day when you should be acutely aware of what your children are up to and where they are located.

Well this is Customer Service Week, and this is one of those times when you should be acutely aware of where your customers are, what they’re thinking, how at-risk they are of leaving, and who else is trying to make them their customer by stealing them from you. This is also one of those times we need to be aware of where your employees are such as…What is their morale? What are they thinking about the company and the direction it’s going?

This is the perfect time to assemble all of your employees and managers, and have everyone make a personal call or visit or write a card to 3 to 5 customers to convey your company’s appreciation for their business and to ask where are the customers in terms of their perception of your business.

This is also a perfect time for management to model the behaviors they expect of employees by having management show appreciation for staff, having management to recognize those who are “other-focused,” to find ways to motivate the staff, and determine where their employees are in terms of their morale.

It’s Customer Service Week. Do you know where your customers are? Do you know where your employees’ heads are at?

Special note to the grammar police (I apologize for all the sentences ending with prepositions or otherwise incorrectly…we will return to appropriate grammar with the next posting).

🙂

Read our New Book – “Ask Yourself…Am I GREAT at Customer Service?” http://www.amigreatat.com/

Listen to our latest podcast episode of “Stepping Up Service” on The MESH Network at http://themesh.tv/stepping-up-service/

Interested in improving your company’s customer service? See more at our new website! http://www.cssamerica.com/


Does the Right Hand Know What the Left Hand is Doing?

Posted on August 28, 2012 in Business Advice, World of Customer Service Please leave a comment

In many large companies, no, the right hand does NOT know what the left hand is doing.

I had 2 web chats and a telephone call with three different individuals with the same internet service in the past week and got 3 different answers. The last answer was best, so I went with that; it will make me more inclined to “answer shop” next time I have a question or need. That creates more work for the company I call, but they’ve brought it on themselves through their inconsistency.

In the article Time Warner should rethink its approach to customer service, something similar occurs. The writer tells the story of a customer who received a letter that told him to call TWC because the discounted rate period was about to expire. So the customer called and was told that TWC couldn’t do anything until the period expired. So why did they tell him to call in the letter?

When Time Warner was questioned about all the issues that the customer had in multiple communications with TWC, their response was “These two agents had other options for better customer service and need additional training.” Nothing like blaming the employee…but the root cause was not the employee. It was the company.

More than any other company, customers have brought up TWC as an example of a company with poor customer service; it’s the long waits; it’s the technician who cut one person’s cable when trying to disconnect their neighbor’s cable; it’s the inconsistencies; it’s the 4 hour windows for appointments or the long resolutions to problems. The occasional good customer service stories we hear about TWC relate to their social media monitoring of customer service issues, so they’re apparently pretty responsive to Twitter complaints.

But for any larger company with issues, consistent issues are not usually the fault of the employees. It’s the fault of a company without a cohesive strategy focused on customer service. It’s about a company that’s too compartmentalized. It’s about a company where the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

Get consistent with customer service by first getting the whole organization on the same page.

Read our New Book – “Ask Yourself…Am I GREAT at Customer Service?” http://www.amigreatat.com/

Listen to our latest podcast episode of “Stepping Up Service” on The MESH Network at http://themesh.tv/stepping-up-service/

Interested in improving your company’s customer service? See more at our new website! http://www.cssamerica.com/


Compassion and Customer Satisfaction

Posted on August 16, 2012 in Business Advice, Healthcare Please leave a comment

We always say that the 3 Drivers of Customer Satisfaction in ANY business are the Attitudes/skills/knowledge of employees, the service delivery Processes, and the Products themselves. And if you begin digging deeper into the components of Attitude, Process, and Product, you realize that Attitudes and Processes are what make up the Customer Service portion of overall Customer Satisfaction. And when you dig deeper into the Attitude piece itself, you realize that this means different things to customers of different industries.

For example, a recent study showed that the aspect of Attitude that is most important to cancer patients is compassion. More than any aspect of the Processes or Products/Services received experienced by the cancer patients as well, having “a compassionate team of care providers…access to a knowledgeable, competent physician…and…being treated as human beings…are the most important correlates with patient satisfaction.”

Why is this important to know? When you think of the hundreds of interactions that a patient and their family may have with employees and physicians on the phone, face-to-face, and via e-mail over the course of an inpatient stay and soon thereafter, when you think about all the processes the patients experience, and when you think of all the services provided to them, it’s a daunting task to try to improve EVERYTHING to have a positive impact on patient satisfaction.

Instead, if a hospital knows the primary drivers of patient satisfaction, it gives them a focus, a “bang-for-the-buck” improvement strategy, and a way to get everyone to rally around a particular aspect of the patient experience.

So think about this for your business as well. Don’t feel the need to try to improve EVERYTHING. We work with many clients including hospitals to identify – in a precise and quantitative fashion – just this: What are the 1 or 2 or 3 aspects of the customer experience with the most significant impact on their willingness to recommend you to others or to return themselves?

Find the “compassion” correlation that applies to your business and your customers.

Interested in improving your company’s customer service? See more at… http://www.cssamerica.com/


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