I recently enjoyed participated in a live online debate called, “Is Customer Service the New Marketing?” The event, hosted in a Google+ Hangout by the immensely talented Ashley Verrill of Software Advice, discussed how marketing and customer service have evolved in a world of the empowered customer.              I kicked off the discussion by talking about […]

 Watch live footage of professional business keynote speaker Micah Solomon (above) The customer ‘‘trends’’ that matter most today are individual changes in the individual lives and desires of each of your customers. Although I write a lot and give quite a few  keynote speeches to conferences and businesses about the trends in customer desires and

If you missed my keynote speech as well as all the great speakers from Zendesk who graced the multi-city Customer Service Hero Tour, here’s some good news:  Zendesk and I are offering an upcoming free live webinar December 11, entitled High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service (which is also the title of my new book; click here

Even government employees can find ways to give extraordinary, memorable, attitude-changing customer service, in spite of the constraints and rigors of their procedure-heavy positions. Especially if they share their senses of humor or other warm personality elements with their stressed customers. To wit: Wednesday I was stuck in a  long line awaiting security screening at

Professional conference keynote speaker and author Micah Solomon What if you didn’t have any competition? Would the customer experience you create even matter–if, for example, you ran a government agency or were otherwise lucky enough to have an inherent monopoly?  Would you–should you?–trouble yourself to maintain and improve it? I recently gave a series of

 Watch live footage of professional business keynote speaker Micah Solomon (above) In today’s Yelpified-social media saturated world, is customer service the new marketing? I am delighted to announce that on November 28 I’ll be participating in a live, online debate on this subject as a business keynote speaker and author courtesy of  Software Advice analyst

Here’s a last minute, special opportunity to hear business keynote speaker and bestselling author Micah Solomon (aka “me”) courtesy of Berends Hendricks Stuit Insurance Agency. The event is at the lovely Pinnacle Conference Center in Hudsonville, MI (Grand Rapids area).  There are just a few seats left.  The event is this Wednesday (November 7) and 

Ask a kid a stupid question and you may get a smart answer. My son was asked this question as a baseline warmup on a test: “Can birds fly?” His answer is a classic: “It depends on the bird.  Penguins, for example, are flightless.” Clearly, at age seven he wasn’t at that point so many

“They spelled my name wrong again!” sings Loudon Wainwright III, the incomparable (if hard-to-spell) singer-songwriter. In business, many of our customers with hard-to-spell names can relate to Loudon’s frustration of seeing “my name up there in lights””¦ and then noticing “it’s not spelled right.” The pranks we play in business on customers’ names are legion.

Timeliness is a critical part of creating a successful customer experience.  As a business keynote speaker, I’m often heard calling on company and conference audiences to remember the key principle of timeliness: A perfect product, delivered late, is a defective product. But what does “late” mean?  To throw a few ugly words at it, what