This being a rather insane season to travel, it seems appropriate to bring up the most sanity-restoring of all airport signs. Not that this is a race with much competition: The easy winner is MKE’s post-security “Recombobulation Area” sign. (The sign delineates an area where travelers can undo any TSA-enforced wardrobe malfunctions and generally reclaim …
Holiday Travel Post: Security-Line Customer Service Humor Read More »
A guest leaves a room service tray outside her hotel door and it’s not picked up for hours, even as employees walk up and down the halls, practically tripping on that tray. To the guest, the hotel staff just seem sloppy. And it won’t be helpful to explain to her that the problem occurs because …
“The way they pay and treat me here, do they expect me to be loyal?” explained the very-nice-but-very-stressed server last night, as she encouraged me to head to the restaurant across the street if I wanted good food. Employees create the guest experience. What are you doing to enhance the employee experience? From Micah …
The employee experience creates the customer experience. Read More »
My 10-year-old daughter told me recently, apropos to amusement parks: “I like rides that you don’t like until they’re over.” The human memory is highly unreliable: Just think of the multitude of wrongful convictions based on mistaken eyewitness identifications. More to the point for service providers, it’s incomplete and selective. Rather than being able to …
Who should do your customer service? (Of course this is a trick question. The answer is “everyone.”) …This answer isn’t as pie-in-the-sky as it sounds. “Everyone” here is shorthand for “everyone, to the extent of their abilities, to the extent of their trainability and to the extent they interact with customers.” The picture of customer …
Who should do your customer service? (It's a trick question.) Read More »
Language underlies almost all other components of the customer experience. Yet, your company has probably given more thought to the language it uses in marketing campaigns than to the words employees use when having conversations face-to-face with customers. That’s a mistake, because customers don’t generally get their make-or-break impressions of your company from high-minded branding …
Language Engineering: Finding the right words to use with customers Read More »
Artie Bucco, all-too-convivial host, from The Sopranos One day I’ll write a book called Everything I Know About Customer Service, I Learned from Watching The Sopranos. Case in point: The Artie Bucco Syndrome, which I named after the tragicomic character who starts the HBO series as a successful restaurateur. Slowly, though, things begin to fall …
Everything I Know About Customer Service, I Learned from Watching The Sopranos. Read More »
Here’s a hard to shake behavior I’ve been correcting for in customer loyalty initiatives and when consulting on customer service lately. It’s a rushed, cursory sentence, containing its own answer, and it’s been spreading through service, restaurant service in particular, of late: “How’s everything–good?” Instead of really asking how everything is and waiting for an …
When someone attacks your business online, you may be tempted to call your lawyer. My field is customer service, not law–I don’t even play a lawyer on Hulu – so I’m not technically qualified to stop you. But from what I’ve seen, legally threatening the Twanker who made you feel so bad is going to …
SLAPP-happy: How not to respond to social media Twankers Read More »
A chance to save a life–available to you here! (P.S. You win $10,000 from Seth Godin). Please excuse the interruption—but here is one of those rare chances to save a life through the power of networks. You have to take the first step though, and click here. Let me explain. Amit Gupta, the young, much …