receptionists

Language Engineering: Finding the right words to use with customers

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 […]

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Everything I Know About Customer Service, I Learned from Watching The Sopranos.

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

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Self-Service: From Sketchy Backwater to the Mainstream of Customer Service–Or Not?

 From keynote speaker – customer service speaker  Micah Solomon Richard Carlile, a British publisher, bookseller, and campaigner for press and voting rights, spent 1819 until 1823 in prison for distributing the banned works of radicals and reformists and exposés of officially sanctioned massacres. As soon as he was sprung from prison, Carlile tried to skirt

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A culture of saying yes: Corporate culture models from ice cream to banking to eBay

 A culture of saying yes. There’s an ice cream parlor 40 minutes from our home –  a delicious enough destination that the drive is no deterrent.  The ice cream’s made on premises, the awnings and décor both retro and creative. And the people who work there are nice. Or nice-ish. What they lack is a

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New Customer Service toolkit podcast with Micah Solomon

I think you’ll enjoy this 8 minute customer service radio and podcast interview Greg Corombus did with keynote speaker and bestselling customer service author Micah Solomon (yup, that’s me)  for his Business Owner’s Toolkit. My subject: “The Power of Exceptional Service.”  In the 8 minutes,  we cover whether service has recently gotten better, worse, or

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Consciously creating your corporate culture: Just a frill?

              Consciously striving to create a positive corporate culture may sound like a fluffy, expensive frill.  But it brings hard-nosed, impossible-to-knock-off results.  Ask Southwest Airlines:  A host of low-cost, short-haul competitors  (Remember United’s “Ted” brand? What, you don’t?)  Those copycats are gone now: Southwest’s culture–a culture that’s impossible for

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