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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

Prep Enough to Personalize - 4/15/25


Everybody loves Howie.  He is an account rep for the local air conditioning and heating company.  When I say Everybody loves Howie, I’m definitely talking about the customers.  His co-workers love him too, but customers are especially fond of him.  They seem to really enjoy their conversations with him, Read more

Get Your Customers to Brag, Not Bolt - 4/8/25


Here are two customer retention concepts that we discuss with some sports clients: BIRG and CORF.  BIRG is Basking In Reflected Glory.  CORF is Cutting Off Reflected Failure. You want BIRG.  You want the customers feeling so good about your organization that they want to be a part of your Read more

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Student Success Centers and Foundation-Building

Posted on December 20, 2012 in Business Advice, Education Please leave a comment

In today’s strong focus in community colleges on student retention, completion, and success, there are many initiatives being undertaken to try to help students succeed. Success for community college students is often defined as “getting the certificate.” For example, the students get a degree from a community college or transfer to a 4-year institution where they work toward their degree.

To address Student Success, many community colleges are creating Student Success Centers. Here are three examples:

  • Hillsborough Community College’s Student Success Center (SSC) “houses tutorial services, a radio station and a G.E.D. program for those not yet enrolled in college. It also hosts seminars on subjects such as note taking and navigating college.”
  • Central Piedmont Community College has an SSC that provides “guidance, goal clarification, answers to questions, tutorial assistance, advising and counseling, and access to all enrollment services.”
  • The Florida Keys Community College’s SSC offers developmental math courses, a resource-connections service, tutoring, and academic workshops.

So the commonalities are tutoring, communication, getting developmental courses and skills addressed, ongoing advising, counseling, and navigation of school processes and systems. Essentially, make sure the starting point for Student Success involves foundation-building from 3 perspectives: 1) Core academic knowledge, 2) Direction on how to proceed through their program, and 3) Contacts and communications to address their needs and facilitate their movement through the program.

Look at these three perspectives for addressing new students (or for any business, new customers). How can you – from the start – ensure you begin building their knowledge of what you offer? How can you ensure they can understand how to navigate through the experience? How can you proactively stay in touch with them as they move through their journey and relationship with your organization?

To help your students (or customers) succeed, build that foundation of knowledge, comfort, and communications from the start.

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/


What You Must Know to Keep Your Customers

Posted on December 19, 2012 in Business Advice, World of Customer Service Please leave a comment

Bad economies make companies truly focus on good customer service and the importance of customer retention. And when businesses try to retain more customers, they often fall prey to the desire to create a new benefit, institute a new loyalty program, or launch a new customer retention effort which is – in reality – just marketing gone bad.

So instead of suggesting you create some costly initiative, let’s start with creating a common understanding of the knowledge you need to have to best keep your customers:

  • Know why they would leave, and address it. This means, what do they expect from the experience? From the quality of the product or service? From your level of customer service?
  • Know who you want to keep most – and why (typically because of profitability or longer-term impact) – and target more of your efforts on these customers. No company has infinite resources with which to use the most personalized and labor/cost-intensive methods of keeping customers. So you have to know with whom you make the personal visit (high cost touch), and with whom you send the personalized e-mail (low cost touch).
  • Know who’s most at-risk of leaving, and create strategies to keep them. Target, target, target. Don’t spend the same time and energy and money keeping everyone, if you know a certain percentage of customers are almost certainly going to stay with you. And how will you know? Simply ask them, and also look at historical data to identify common characteristics of former customers.
  • Know how to become vital to their day-to-day lives or success. If they can’t efficiently get their job done without your software or research, if they can’t get their need met well without your product, if you are the supplier of something that’s imperative to their daily personal or professional lives, you have significant leverage in retention.
  • Know how to make it easy to become your customer…and more difficult to leave. Is the customer’s signup with your organization a piece of cake? Can a first time customer navigate your organization and your processes/policies as easy as a long-term customer? If so, you’re golden. On the back end of the relationship, you don’t want to make it impossible to leave (then you’re dealing with ethical concerns), but if the customer needs to replace what you provide, and that effort or time (in addition to the effort and time and cost of going to your competitor) are high, they may not make the move.

Know what you need to know to keep your customers.

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/


A Face Lift…for Your Patient Satisfaction

Posted on December 5, 2012 in Business Advice, Healthcare Please leave a comment

When measuring patient satisfaction, healthcare organizations often make two key errors. First, they focus on measuring how often something happens? For example, How frequently did the nurse check on you? How often did they ask about pain? How many times did they clean the room? While these functions are important, the quality of the interaction and care provided are just as important if not more so. Also, some patients want to be checked on continuously and others want to be told how long the wait will be until the next step and only checked on when there may be a delay. So measuring frequency alone limits what you can learn, and it can point an organization down the wrong road in their improvement efforts.

The second error? Focusing too much on employee attitudes. Yes, these attitudes have a huge impact on patient satisfaction, but the best attitude in the world cannot overcome inordinately long waits, redundant paperwork, lack of responsiveness, poor quality food, lack of cleanliness, and unacceptable patient care. Attitudes are but a piece of the patient satisfaction puzzle.

In the article, Dr. Patti Flint Touts Importance of Surveys to Improve Patient Experience, an Arizona plastic surgeon is highlighted because of her improvement in patient care – which she notes as having been driven by the results of patient satisfaction surveys. But what’s interesting about the surveys is that much of the focus was on measuring patient perceptions of key touch points in the care process. According to the article, “Because every interaction from the first phone call to the last follow-up appointment factors into a patient’s overall satisfaction, each point of patient contact is scrutinized for ways to improve the patient experience. Creating a positive atmosphere for her patients involves the entire staff at Patti Flint MD PC, and survey responses lead to constant innovation in practice procedures.”

When asking patients to evaluate their experience, address employee Attitudes, Processes, and the Quality of the Services provided. But don’t just look for overall evaluations. Get the patient and their family to evaluate key contact points through the entire process.

Understand where communications flowed well and didn’t. Learn how hand-offs of the patient and their information from one step to another worked…and didn’t. Identify what needs improvement in the entire service delivery chain…and doesn’t.

To give your patient satisfaction a face lift, first start by understanding all the steps involved in the patient experience through the customer’s eyes.

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

Check out our Healthcare Patient Satisfaction Evaluation and Improvement Services at http://cssamerica.com/csshealth.htm


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