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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

Narrow Your Focus to Seek Excellence - 4/1/25


You’ve probably heard companies use phrases such as: “We want to go from being good to great.”  Maybe they’ve said: “We strive for perfection, and although we’ll never reach perfection, maybe we can achieve excellence along the way.” These organizations find some kind of a catch phrase or slogan, but Read more

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Take a Measure from Government

Posted on September 1, 2010 in Business Advice, Government Please leave a comment

When we work with our government clients, whether it’s an economic development division trying to retain local businesses, a property assessment division trying to efficiently serve its customer base, a City/County manager’s office trying to best manage such a large organization, we’ve found a consistent need – measurement.

When government is trying to measure over such a broad organization, they typically create an organization-wide balanced scorecard system. This metrics system will have the typical measures of Revenue, Cost, Quality, and Customer Service. But it will also have some more outcomes-oriented customer measures such as the percentage of residents on welfare and more capacity-oriented customer measures such as the percentage of residents living within “X” miles of a public park.

Let’s translate those last two measures to a typical business. Outcomes. An outcome is some end-benefit from what your service or product provides. It’s not the product itself. For a hospital, it’s the quality of life after discharge, not just how good the care was in the hospital. For a fine restaurant, it’s the enjoyment of the evening, not just the quality of the food. For an automobile dealership, it’s the feeling when driving or knowing you own a particular brand, not just the gas mileage. These outcomes often relate to the feelings your customers have as a result of their engagement with your company. They should be measured to make sure your services had a positive ongoing impact.

The other example metric dealt with Access. How close you live to a park can determine your ease of access and likelihood to use it. Similarly, what percentage of the population lives near a grocery store, what percentage of season ticket holders receive a sports team’s newsletter, and what percentage of long-term customers have online access all help to determine the customer’s access to the company. A greater access leads to a greater chance to develop relationships and retain the customer.

Learn from these atypical measures from government to know how well you impact your customers and to ensure you have adequate access to them.

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

Check out our new customer service book at http://www.amigreatat.com/


Capitol Customer Service

Posted on January 19, 2010 in Business Advice, Government Please leave a comment

The White House held a forum with dozens of CEOs last week, and the topic moved to customer service. The government was trying to learn how to be more customer-friendly, and they were particularly interested in what Southwest Airlines CEO, Gary Kelly, had to say.

Now I know many of you are thinking such things as “it’s about time!” or “isn’t that an oxymoron – government customer service?” But one particular reaction might be “why would a government agency turn to an airline for advice?”

The answer is the same reason why an airline would turn to NASCAR – the stock car racing league – for advice.

You may have heard the story of the airline that was trying to improve the speed and efficiency with which it “turned” planes at the gate. So where did they go to determine how to improve? They went and met with NASCAR pit crews to observe, talk, and learn about how they could do so much so fast so effectively in a 5, 10, or 15 second pit stop.

Kelly suggested at the forum that to satisfy customers, “It’s more important for us to be on time and have great employees…than offer frills.”

In other words, do what you do with great efficiency and great attitudes, and that’s more important in engendering customer loyalty than offering a perk or two.

The next time you’re trying to get better, to learn, to grow, don’t just look at yourselves or at an organization just like you.

Benchmark with the best, regardless of industry.

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


Break Your Customer Service Season into Quarters

Posted on October 19, 2009 in Business Advice, World of Customer Service Please leave a comment

A quarter is a very interesting thing. A quarter can be a form of money.  A quarter is a time period where public companies report their financials. A quarter is the portion of the pro football schedule where most coaches have divided up their season into four sets of four games each. They do this to best approach a segment of their schedule as well as analyze that segment.

To a business, when it comes to customer retention and growth, a quarter should be equally of interest.

When you are assessing the performance of your business as it relates to customer service, satisfaction, loyalty, and retention-driven growth, you need to also think of your measurements in terms of quarters. Those measures can come in the form of mystery shopping, satisfaction surveys, or focus groups. No matter in what form they come, you need to be evaluating your customer satisfaction at a minimum on a quarterly basis.

Keep in mind that customer satisfaction is driven in any organization by three factors:

  • The Attitudes, Skills, and Knowledge of the employees
  • The Processes within which the customers experience your organization
  • The Products and Services themselves.

So on a quarterly basis, you need to be assessing, analyzing, and addressing these keys to customer satisfaction and loyalty just as you would any other set of key metrics in your business.

Through the different methods of acquiring customer data as referenced previously, and including assessments of internal operational service metrics such as process times, wait times, queue times, first contact resolution, etc., you should have a dashboard of metrics that enables you to quickly see trends in satisfaction, loyalty, and growth.

If you always want to be able to make data-driven decisions that are the best for your company’s future performance, make sure you have hard numbers on such metrics as satisfaction with Attitudes, Processes, and Products.  Make sure you have hard metrics on customer retention rates or attrition rates.  Make sure you have hard metrics on average purchases per customer and frequency of visits.  Make sure you have hard metrics on referral rates from existing customers, and make sure you have hard metrics on the financial impact of each customer to your organization’s bottom line.

You need to manage the biggest component of your top line financials (the customer) at least as well as you manage all those detailed accounts on the expense side of the ledger. Create and utilize customer retention and growth metrics to help guide your company’s planning and performance improvement initiatives.

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


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