In the course of working as a consultant to mend corporate cultures (I’m a consultant on company culture and the customer experience and service)  I see a lot of universal mistakes. (In other words: Unhappy companies are often unhappy in similar ways and for similar reasons, Tolstoy notwithstanding.) The happy part of this means that there are some universal solutions as […]

In hospital and healthcare settings, many of the questions I get as a consultant and speaker are about HCAHPS and how to improve those scores through training and other means. (I work in a variety of settings, including healthcare, as a  consultant and keynote speaker on customer service and the customer experience, which in this case means patient satisfaction and the

The goal of a customer service/ customer experience initiative – what you can ultimately hope to accomplish – is to learn what your customers appreciate, tolerate, and actively dislike, and to creatively redeploy your attention and resources in ways that help you win customer loyalty and improve your bottom-line success. In other words, it’s all about

B2B Customer Service Is Mission-Critical, even though it’s sort of unsexy: For vivid anecdotes that everyone can relate to,customer service speakers and consultants tend to stick to examples featuring household, consumer brands: Apple–Lexus–Starbucks-JetBlue and the like. As a keynote speaker and author on customer service, I understand the impetus for this very well: B2C is

I know it’s been a while since Christmas Past, and this article will work best if I start with a quick cinematic recap: In the movie “Elf,” Will Ferrell plays Buddy, a Santa’s Helper now landed in Manhattan after a sheltered North Pole existence. One day, Buddy spots a sign at a downscale NYC café

“People tell me my employees act differently when there aren’t any managers watching over them.” As a corporate culture consultant and as a speaker, I hear clients frequently voicing this concern. And, it’s a concern that is absolutely on the money. Without a consciously created culture, your business leadership won’t last past the moment that

No matter how superb your product or service is, everyone in business eventually needs to find the answer to this question: “How should I compensate a customer for a service or product failure?” And the answer to the question is this: It depends. Customers have diverse values and preferences, varying even from day to day

Clients frequently voice the same concern to me, in my work as  a corporate culture consultant and as a speaker: “People tell me my employees act differently when there aren’t any managers watching over them.” This concern is absolutely on the money. And you as a business leader should be worried about the same thing

  I’m a keynote speaker and consultant on customer service and marketing and, often, on where the two meet. (In other words, I don’t do movie reviews.) But I know it’s been a while since Christmas, and this article will work best if I start with a quick cinematic recap: In the movie “Elf,” Will

Keynote speakers (including, I admit, myself), authors, pundits around the water cooler: All tend to use consumer (B2C) examples to illustrate what they’re trying to say about customer service and the customer experience. For vivid anecdotes that everyone can relate to, the default is to stick to household, consumer brands: Apple–Lexus–Starbucks-JetBlue and the like. As