Continuing on from last month's post about partners and their importance to your ecosystem... you need to make sure you help your partners be successful. When you think about the multichannel and the omnichannel customer experience where partners are involved (they aren't always), it's even more critical to ensure partners are lined up for success. [...]
Are you following the herd or defining your own path to success? In business and in life, there's this crazy notion of the herd mentality. What is it? According to Wikipedia: herd mentality, or mob mentality, describes how people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors, follow trends, and/or purchase items. This isn't [...]
“The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer” – Peter Drucker Sometimes, it seems that companies focus exclusively on the first half of this equation. Sales to new customers are exciting, and resources are appropriately targeted to land new customers. Look at the continual offers coming from TV service and internet [...]
As technology keeps advancing, the gap between in-person customer service and the online customer experience is closing. While there is still no substitute for the personal experience that comes from dealing with another human being, some websites are employing very personalized tactics. To illustrate my point, I’ll relate two recent experiences that highlight the similarities: [...]
Here's the story: A health insurance company came up with an innovation for their health savings accounts, allowing account holders to select among three pricing plans. This would allow their customers to select the plan that best fit their needs. Their market research confirmed interest in the plan, so they implemented the new account types. [...]
The outsourcer’s role of handling a client’s customers for them is unique – and this relationship brings its own set of challenges. Typically, the reason an outsourcer has the business in the first place is because they can do it for less than what it would cost the client to handle themselves in-house, so cost [...]
Customer service used to be just about how nice someone was when they interacted with you – or a phone number that you called when they weren't so nice. But traditional customer service has expanded into so much more. The “customer service experience” encompasses every interaction, or touch point, that a customer has with your [...]
What do you do with an unhappy customer? Refunds are the easy way out. They don’t fix the problem. They just put a band-aid on the situation, without addressing the underlying problem that led your busy customer to take time to call you. But don't take my word for it. A report from Beyond Philosophy [...]
"Treat employees better than customers." What? Isn't that sacrilegious? There's a huge debate in life: what came first, the chicken or the egg? In business, the debate is: who comes first, the customer or the employee? The answer is more obvious than it might seem: it must be the employee, even if it's just slightly [...]
It was just another day of travel. I was flying to Las Vegas, the night before I was to present another customer service speech. The client had arranged ground transportation, which meant I would probably see a driver holding a sign with my name on it at the baggage claim area. As soon as the [...]
