Imagine the following exchange… ME: Hi, I’d like to give you an award because I like you. RECIPIENT: If you want to give me an award, you first need to fill out a 10 page application. If I like what I see, then I will gladly accept your award. ME: Sorry, I think I dialed […]

Management by wandering around is a concept that supposedly derives from the management culture at Hewlett-Packard back in the Seventies. It was later popularized by business authors Tom Peters and Robert Waterman in their bestselling book, In Search of Excellence.* The concept is also known as management by walking around, the term I prefer. Management […]

What will 2013 look like for customer service? Will face-to-face customer service disappear as social media takes over everything? Will the ACSI national customer satisfaction benchmark continue its long term positive trend of rising? Will the entire world wring their hands as another horrible customer service fail goes viral? While the number of potential trends […]

Just wishing everyone a Happy Holidays from the team at Customers That Stick! We will be off the blog this week to spend time with family and wrap up the year end. We figure most of you are doing the same. We will be back on December 31 for some pre-2013 customer service talk. We […]

Readers of this blog know that we like to discuss customer service in the real world. What is this elusive real world? It is a place where customer service slogans like the customer is always right go to die. Now, don’t get me wrong, shorthand slogans are great and are useful in conveying broad, important […]

In a few short years, Zappos has become known as one of the bellwether brands of customer service. I could write a whole book on how Zappos has risen to such great customer service heights (and others have); however, I want to take a look at one little slice of the Zappos experience: the customer […]

Guest Poster: Chase Clemons It is my pleasure to introduce Chase Clemons. Chase is part of the support team at 37signals and the founder of a customer support community at Support Ops. You can connect with him on Twitter. When you think of companies with millions of customers, a good customer experience often isn’t in […]

For the launch of the Customers That Stick blog, we published a roundup post entitled What Is Customer Service? At the beginning of that post, I posited a question: “Is customer service a mere business function, subject to the tight strictures of return on investment? Or is customer service an expression of human decency, something […]

It’s 10:00pm. I just got home from work, and I have a blog post due tomorrow morning. Am I about to write complete junk just to meet my publication schedule? Let’s table that for a moment. A funny thing happened on Monday; I posted some thoughts in our Monthly Mash regarding the publication frequency here […]