Often in retail, you will approach a customer to offer assistance and be given some version of the browsing response. “I’m just browsing.” “Just looking.” “Just killing time.” Generally, when you are confronted with the browsing response, it means one of three things: How do you know which one describes the customer in front of […]

Consulting is an important mechanism for business process improvement and engaging an outside perspective can breathe new life into stagnant areas of your business. In fact, a good customer experience consultant can help your organization walk through your entire customer experience and identify the essential touchpoints that define your customer’s experience with your organization. Yet, […]

Working in customer service can be challenging. It’s easy for the daily grind to wear away at teams — routines grow stale, enthusiasm wanes. Keeping your team engaged so that they are motivated to provide consistently great service to your customers is an essential part of managing a customer facing organization. Below are 6 ways […]

When my friend Shonali Burke of the public relations firm Shonali Burke Consulting first sent me an advanced copy of Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s new book Age of Context, I had two thoughts. My first thought was what an interesting topic. My second thought was how will I have time to read it; I […]

We are pleased to present our next installment in the Inside Customer Service video series with Jeannie Walters. Jeannie is the Chief Customer Experience Investigator™ and founder of 360Connext, a Chicago-based consulting firm specializing in the cornerstones of customer experience: customer engagement, employee engagement and connections like social media. In addition to writing and consulting, […]

A few weeks ago I was caught in a tug of war between two large multinational banks — My Bank and my general contractor’s bank, Receiving Bank. I had written a check to pay my general contractor for a retail buildout. Since it was for a construction job, the check was fairly large. (The landlord […]

For National Customer Service Week this year, we decided to run an updated version of our previous post: National Customer Service Week 2011: What’s Your Plan? This week, October 7-13, marks National Customer Service Week (NCSW). NCSW was established by proclamation of President Bush (#41) in 1992. The beginning of the proclamation reads: In a […]

Our post Your Signage Sends a Message: Make Sure It’s The Right One received such a good response, that I thought it would be fitting to share a brief follow up. In that post, we pointed out numerous examples of business signs and showed how important signage is in communicating with customers. The shining example […]

In a recent article in the Financial Post entitled The hidden costs of letting workers act like jerks, author Craig Dowden presented a number of research studies showing the adverse effects of incivility in the workplace. A few of the key findings were as follows: Incivility in the workplace is a drain on productivity and, […]