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, […]

We recently presented a look at two different retail return policies in A Tale of Two Returns. The post looked at a very liberal return policy, Macy’s, and a very customer-unfriendly policy at a mall-based cell phone accessory store. However, this juxtaposition of experiences only scratches the surface of what is involved in retail returns […]

When looking at the customer experience, we are confronted with numerous truths that are universal across industries and organizations. One of those truths is the following: Signage matters. Similar to how language functions — words can have denotation, literal meaning, and connotation, a deeper layer of meaning — signage communicates to your stakeholders on many […]

Whenever we can personalize a customer experience, we have gone a long way towards making that experience great. Every customer wants to feel valued, to feel special, and personalizing the customer’s experience, even in very small ways can go a long way towards accomplishing that goal. Of course, CRM systems are the most popular way […]

We have a new YouTube trailer for our infographic When Customers Stick: Customer Retention by the Numbers. Let us know what you think!

Last week, I wrote about my experience at the Apple store in Even the Apple Store Isn’t the Apple Store Every Day. In that post, I mentioned that I was referred by an Apple employee to a “cell phone” store in the mall. What I did not relate was the customer experience I had at […]

Guest Poster: Jeff Toister Jeff Toister is the author of Service Failure: The Real Reasons Employees Struggle with Customer Service and What You Can Do About It. His company, Toister Performance Solutions, Inc. helps clients identify the obstacles keeping them from achieving customer service success. The double agent looked around nervously to see if anyone […]