Unfortunately, for those working in customer experience and customer service, human beings are inherently biased towards negative information. It is why the local news is known for “if it bleeds, it leads” and for promoting stories with headlines such as “is your child’s new toy a health hazard?” We are evolutionarily attuned to watch for […]

President Harry S. Truman once famously quipped, “Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say, ‘on one hand … on the other.” While I can completely relate to President Truman’s frustration, his economists were doing exactly what they should have been doing — adding context and perspective to a fluid and complex topic. Yet, […]

Great customer service stories fascinate us. Perhaps because they represent the customer service we rarely experience. Perhaps because they restore our faith in our fellow human beings. The stories that resonate the most tend to be the ones that touch the heart or make us feel inspired. Most of these stories tell a tale of […]

We are all familiar with dental plaque, the buildup of bacteria that becomes a film on our teeth. Work with enough organizations, and you will easily recognize the similarities organizational policies have to plaque. Here are a few characteristics of plaque from Wikipedia, which could almost perfectly describe the accumulation of policies in  organizations: Sure, […]

National Customer Service Week is coming up next week, October 5 – 9, so we came up with 5 ideas you can use (one per day) to celebrate with your team and your customers. (Looking for more ideas? Check out our 2016 post: 3 Themes for National Customer Service Week 2016) History of National Customer […]

As digital service solutions become more commonplace, it becomes more challenging to maintain the old one-to-one service paradigm to which most consumers have become accustomed. For all of the important talk about omnichannel strategies, what often gets lost in the discussion is the feel of customer interactions on digital channels. In some ways, human psychology […]

As we close out season 7 of American Ninja Warrior this evening, I thought it would be fun to talk about Ninja Warrior and customer service. The Ninja Warrior competition has a number of parallels to frontline customer service. For one, the course is ever-changing. The different obstacles require a number of different skill sets, […]

In Chapter 7 of Be Your Customer’s Hero, I wrote the following: Great customer experiences begin with a great attitude, but so does satisfaction and happiness at work. Attitude certainly isn’t everything; skills and competence do matter. However, without a great attitude, these attributes are almost meaningless. Your attitude will determine your ability to serve […]

Restaurants are one of the few truly universal industries because almost everyone has familiarity with them. From a customer service perspective, this makes restaurant customer service particularly challenging  because almost every customer has both established service expectations and well-formed service triggers. Those expectations are often pegged to price or to impressions created by the physical […]