What do you do with a difficult customer? How do you deal with that jerk who seems intent on making life hard? This is one of the most challenging things for customer-facing employees to deal with and one of the most problematic situations for managers to try and remedy. You will hear all kinds of … Continue reading What do you do with difficult customers? The answer is more, not less.

I recently saw a list of “Six ROI-Friendly Goals for Customer Experience Initiatives” that contained the following: Improve customer acquisition Up-sell, cross-sell or increase purchase frequency Increase retention, active usage, or share of wallet Increase pricing power Generate awareness Reduce costs To most people, these might seem innocuous and perfectly reasonable business goals, however, I … Continue reading There’s more to ROI than how it serves you, and taking that view can help you.

In the 2015 movie, Steve Jobs, there is a scene where Steve Wozniak asks Jobs, “What did you do? You can’t write code; you’re not an engineer, you’re not a designer. You can’t put a hammer to a nail… What do you do?” Jobs’ reply? “I play the orchestra.” This simple dialogue struck a chord … Continue reading Orchestra conductors don’t make any music. A valuable lesson for all leaders.

Dealing with people who are difficult is one of the supreme challenges we all face. No one likes conflict. This may sound odd when you look around and see so much negativity these days, but I have only seen a tiny number of people who look like they enjoy conflict, and I am dubious about … Continue reading How to calmly deal with difficult people.

“Customer service is the business function responsible for fixing what’s broken.” I couldn’t disagree more. Let me begin with a tiny rant. I hate it when service automatically becomes customer service. I define service as helping people. And because of that, I see service as much greater than customer service. We don’t just serve customers; … Continue reading Why thinking of service as problem solving is a bad idea.

As I have written before, if you are aware that the age of experience is upon us, you know your organization needs to focus on service excellence or find itself well behind industry leaders. Perhaps you have built a small band of like-minded individuals and are now ready to grow this band into an orchestra, … Continue reading Inspiring Management to Care About Service

When I was a schoolteacher, I had a particular student who, while talented, acted out a lot. He was loud and belligerent. He was difficult to keep on task and had a hard time seeing the value and need for learning certain things. Long story short, he was a challenge. A lot of my questions … Continue reading What is modeled gets copied. Yet another leadership responsibility.

One of the problems causing poor service in a business is lack of alignment. In other words, everyone on the team not being on the same page. But what page? You see, like a rowing crew, everyone in a business must be rowing together in sync. Everyone needs to understand that they serve. Every employee … Continue reading Great service requires rowing together.

Here’s one question that comes up regularly: Is a company’s customer service competing with their direct competition or others as well? Many years ago, I took a class in Quality Customer Service at the Disney Institute in Orlando. In one activity, they asked attendees to make a list of all of Disney’s competition. As you … Continue reading Do you know who you are competing with? You need to think bigger.

What’s the biggest problem with companies delivering great service? That’s a big question. To answer, I will begin with two short stories. The first one concerns a plane trip where, after boarding, I sat in my aisle seat next to an elderly woman. An announcement came from the captain that we would be a little … Continue reading The fundamental reason so much service stinks and the first step in moving beyond it.