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Don’t Harp on the Customer’s Mistake - 6/24/25


Seth’s daughter, Sarah, had missed some swim classes, and Seth remembered that the aquatics center had several make-up classes available late in the summer.  So Seth pulled up the class schedule on his phone, found one that worked on his and Sarah’s schedules, and planned to attend a session Read more

Create Customers for Life - 6/17/25


Veronica has gone to the same automotive service shop for at least 20 years.  She bought a new car about a year ago, and this is the third car she’s brought to the shop instead of taking her car to the dealer where she bought it.  She’s had three Read more

Don’t Turn the Customer into the QA Department - 6/10/25


Roberta received a form with information filled in by the company after her conversation with the account rep.  Roberta just needed to review the information, fill in some of the blanks, sign it, and resend it in order to set up a new account. She noticed that the effective date Read more

Imitate to Improve - 6/3/25


Oscar Wilde said that “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”  Now this doesn’t mean that plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery.  Nor does it mean that great impersonators such as Rich Little, Dana Carvey, or Frank Caliendo are always offering flattering portrayals of those that they imitate. Wilde’s Read more

How the Customer Perceives a Truth as a Lie - 5/27/25


You’re the customer, you’re asking about an unused item that you’re returning, and you hear the employee say: “The refund process takes 7-10 days.”  You’re thinking: “Great!  I can get the refund check as early as a week from today!”  The reality is that the company means that they’ll Read more

Tell Customers What’s Next - 5/20/25


In most businesses that have been around for a while, how a process was originally designed is not how it currently operates.  Sometimes this change is referred to as “practical drift,” where the actual process moves further and further away from the documented steps over time.  Maybe the changes Read more

Questions to Guide You to Empathy - 5/13/25


“If I was him, I would do ABC…” If you’ve ever heard somebody say this - whether it’s a friend or acquaintance, whether it’s some TV reporter or podcaster - you may get as frustrated or as annoyed as I do. I get annoyed because we are not that other person. Read more

Negate the Nervousness - 5/6/25


The customer needed a loan, so he walked into the bank, but he was a little nervous.  He knew that launching his business would be easier if he had some working capital, but that’s about all he knew.  He was anxious because he didn’t know what to expect in Read more

Don’t Rush to Resolve Quickly - 4/29/25


The customer is angry, so you use the CSS LEAD technique as designed.  You, listen, empathize, accept responsibility, and deliver on a remedy.  But it doesn’t work.  The customer is still upset, and maybe even a little more frustrated than when you started…why?! If the use of this technique fails, Read more

Energy v. Apathy - 4/22/25


I asked a couple friends who are much more scientifically-oriented the question: What is energy?  I didn’t mean E=MC2.  I meant physiologically, what is energy? They described a lot of things that sounded really good, yet far too advanced for my non-medical mind. Part of the reason why energy is of Read more

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In Hospitals, Personal Care is About Customer Service

Posted on July 7, 2009 in Healthcare Please leave a comment

Patients go to hospitals to take their pain away, to have their broken bones healed, to have their injuries diagnosed, to have their elective surgeries, and to give birth to their bouncing new babies.

And even though this care is provided to address their needs and pains and injuries, how many patients feel that they’re being cared for as a person has little to do with the healthcare.  Instead, it has all to do with the customer service that the patient receives.  Yes, the phlebotomist is drawing the blood, but is the employee so focused on the vein that they don’t interact with the person from whom they’re drawing the blood?  Yes, the surgeon is about to perform surgery, but is the wait so long and the communication so lacking during the wait that the patient feels like she’s been forgotten?  Yes, the emergency room staff will eventually care for the injury, but are they so focused on tasks and activities and paperwork that the patient feels like a cog on the assembly line?

Patients go to hospitals for the healthcare, but they often choose a particular hospital because of the customer service.  Do the employees greet and focus on the patient?  Are they patient with the patient?  Do they take ownership over needs and treat the patient with courtesy and respect?  Do they try to find solutions to problems, or do they simply get defensive or blame co-workers when issues arise?  Are they quick in responding to the call bell or the phone call?  Do they explain what will happen next and why?  Are they empathetic and caring when they perform their services?

The hospital’s product is the healthcare, but the patient’s point of reference in determining how they’re cared for as a person is all about how they’re communicated with, how they’re treated, and what the processes are like.  It’s about customer service.

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


Higher Education – How the Student Must be a Customer

Posted on June 30, 2009 in Education Please leave a comment

The world of higher education is a business.  Leaders may not like to view it that way, but with the tremendous revenue streams they receive, the scope of operations, and the vast size of the campuses, Education truly is an industry with major business and financial considerations.

Many professors have trouble viewing a student as a customer, and, likewise, many others in administrative positions have that same concern.  But if we look at where revenues come from, they come from current or past students to a great extent.  So it is vital to keep your students if you want to keep your revenue – that business impact of the student is what makes them a customer.

Just like many universities, colleges, and community colleges conduct research outside of their organizations, so do those same institutions need to focus on researching themselves.  There are ways to predict which students are most at-risk of dropping out or leaving.  There are ways to anticipate which students are having problems which are precursors to their exit.  There are ways to identify what is driving student retention and growth.

Institutions of higher learning need to take a view of customer service which is research-based, data-driven, internally-focused, and predictive in nature.  If these educational organizations want to succeed long-term, they need to have a student retention and growth strategy which acquires intelligence on the students and leverages its own research capabilities or the research services of outside experts to predict retention.

Educational institutions that understand this need will not have to spend so much energy and time to find high quality new students to replace those they lost.  They won’t have to make the efforts in the admissions process to attract more students and the tuition and other fees that come with them.

Instead, they will form the organizational structures and research processes that will lead them to systematically build relationships with students, identify their most at-risk students, and proactively and effectively take the action they need to retain those students.

Institutions of higher learning need to research inward to continue to effectively grow.


Let Customer Service Crush the Stereotypes

Posted on June 22, 2009 in Government Please leave a comment

Ever since I was a little kid, on TV and the radio and from people talking, I heard stereotypes of “government workers.” The stereotypes were never very positive. They talked about the slow speed with which the employees did their work, the lack of passion and energy with which they communicated, and the low level of responsiveness.

But most of the folks that I and my company work with in government are not anything like those stereotypes.  Yet, it’s still interesting to see what those industry stereotypes have done to the perceptions of employees who work in that industry.  Employees in that industry are stereotyped as being non-responsive, lazy, slow, non-productive.

Those stereotypes come from perceptions that relate to characteristics of customer service. We believe that customer service at the highest level is comprised of two primary things:

  1. The Attitudes, Skills, and Knowledge of employees.
  2. The Processes within which the customers experience the business.

The stereotypes that I refer to relate to judgments and perceptions that residents have of the employee attitudes and processes at municipal governments and other state and federal government agencies. It’s amazing that those perceptions of negativity so often relate to the perceptions of the customer service.

In other words, what many customers perceive or believe about an industry or an individual organization are based on what they perceive of that industry’s or that organization’s customer service.

If you want to change the perception of your organization or your industry in your customer’s eyes, start by improving your customer service.


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