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 […]

The folks at Software Advice, a site that reviews and compares customer service software, released an interesting infographic a few weeks ago entitled The Great Retail Experience Race. The infographic was based on an original study done by Software Advice for their Customer Service Investigator blog, and I thought it would be interesting to learn a […]

We live in a world of mythologized companies, and in the customer service sphere, few companies are as mythologized as Apple. From Apple’s revolutionary product design to the experience design of its stores, Apple’s almost obsessive focus on the user experience helps it rank consistently among the elite customer service companies in the country. As […]

DoubleTree (a Hilton brand) uses an innovative and effective mechanism for monitoring and improving its customer service at its properties: the CARE committee. DoubleTree describes the CARE Committee as follows: The CARE Committee – The Heart of Our Hotels. The CARE Culture at DoubleTree by Hilton is a commitment to total service quality that equates […]

We released our first Customers That Stick infographic this past Monday: When Customers Stick — Customer Retention by the Numbers. In the infographic, we included numerous studies that show that increased retention leads to increased profitability. One aspect of this phenomenon that our infographic did not explore, however, was the following: Why does customer retention […]

From small businesses to huge corporations, everyone wants to know the secret to keeping customers. How do we earn repeat business for years and years to come? In the infographic below, we use various customer retention statistics to break down the three most important aspects of customer retention: Understanding customer retention begins with understanding the […]

We are human beings first and customer facing professionals second. We are subject to the same psychological processes on the job as we are off. We carry with us the same baggage and perceptions — and the same conditioned responses. On the job, we generally do a better job of regulating these responses — but […]

One of the challenges with feedback from individual customers is that it can often be unreliable and can actually understate or overstate your service delivery. We have all seen anecdotal data at work in our lives. Let’s say you are looking for a new clothes dryer, and you decide to ask your neighbor for a […]

MIT recently released a new study showing that customers sometimes review products with companies that they’re loyal to even when they have not personally used the product. To quote the article (emphasis mine): “Even a company’s loyal customers are inclined to write negative reviews about its products, regardless of whether the customers actually have purchased […]