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 […]

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 […]