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 this, 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 … Continue reading The fundamental reason so much service stinks and the first step in moving beyond it.

“So... how do we do this customer experience thing anyway?” I hate this question. It sounds like customer experience, a.k.a. CX, is something you start doing by flipping a switch.  Well, it’s not. CX is like culture, it happens whether you “do it” or not.  CX is everything a customer encounters having to do with … Continue reading You don’t “do” customer experience.

I read a blog post by Ozan Varol (it was originally published in December of 2022) and it resonated with me. If you don’t know him, Varol is an astrophysicist turned inspirer (that’s the best term I could come up with to describe what he does). Anyway, the post is a great expansion on the … Continue reading There are dangers in focusing so much on science that you miss the art.

At the restaurant chain Chipotle, they boast about cutting up the vegetables and making things “by hand.”  Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup, handwrote in excess of 30,000 notes to employees over the years. Despite all the talk and hype about ChatGPT and all manner of other AI, we humans like and need the … Continue reading How about less GPT and more TLC?