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 […]

Twitter understands that it is often a channel for immediate customer response, and it is not only embracing its role as a customer service channel but beginning to focus on selling itself as an indispensable channel for customer service. On August 6th, Twitter released a Customer Service Playbook designed to convince organizations of Twitter’s importance […]

We’ve all had that awkward moment. We’re shopping in a store or asking about the product we ordered, and the frontline rep we’re interacting with starts to overshare. We hear about their life story, about the seven week saga that led to the order being delayed, or about how much they hate their job. It’s […]

I needed to get some routine blood work done a few weeks ago, and the doctor recommended that I use the hospital network his practice was affiliated with. My schedule was packed and the hospital was not close, so I found a major testing company that was closer to home and gave them a call. […]

In yesterday’s Monday Motivation, a Monday email sent to subscribers to our eNewsletter The Customer Conversation (link no longer active), we spoke about Walter Mischel’s famous  experiment on self control and delayed gratification in children. Here is part of the email: Researcher Walter Mischel at Stanford devised an ingenious experience back in the Sixties to […]

A few weeks ago, I stopped by a big box electronics store to make a quick purchase. I had dropped my wife at an appointment and decided to run a few errands until she was done. In this brief trip, I was reminded of how damaging it can be to ignore customers. I was shopping […]

Now that Be Your Customer’s Hero is on bookstore shelves and being used by frontline customer service professionals across the country (and the world!) to help them deliver Hero-Class® customer experiences, I wanted to take a moment to publicly thank some important friends and colleagues who played a part in HERO. Many of those listed […]