My family just experienced one of the worst things I think people have to go through, euthanizing a pet. The Woodsons are animal people. We love pets. We have had just about everything you can imagine in our house from the typical dogs and cats to snakes, lizards, and a variety of rodents. For a … Continue reading Thank you, George.

Your lowest-paid workers are the ones facing the most important people to your company’s survival, no, not your bank, not your shareholders, no, it’s your customers. Does that scaling of pay make sense? When times get a little tough, you start cutting those “unnecessary” things like training and customer service. But those things directly impact … Continue reading Are you really committed to customers?

Delivering great customer service is such a mystery to so many. And to improve it, the experts swoop in with myriad concepts and “the 64.25 steps to greater service performance.” They dive into daylong workshops to map the customer journey, determine pain points, and create corrective action plans. But even with all of these efforts, … Continue reading Service 101

Have you ever thought this, “Why are my employees so unhappy? What do they want?” In contrast to all of the current “15 steps to higher employee engagement” BS, it’s really not that complicated. Employees want to be involved and contribute whatever they can with both their heads as well as their hands. They want … Continue reading What do employees want? Stop over-complicating it.

It seems today there is a constant mantra being propagated about getting super productive, setting measurable stretch goals, and busting a gut to get them accomplished. I can just hear the likes of entrepreneurship gurus like Gary V now, “F**k yes, make it happen!” But, in contrast to the overused and overstated “what gets measured … Continue reading When you set all of those goals, can you at least make them meaningful?

If you want to improve the level of service your organization delivers, one thing is certain, you need to examine the journey of your customers and ensure that pain and difficulty are minimized. However, there is also a lot of sense behind making each customer interaction, no matter its position in the journey, a five-star … Continue reading WHaT? A Model for Great Service Interactions

We all have limitations. Like it or not, you, me, all of us are not good at everything. In addition, none of us knows everything either. So it is that our effectiveness relies on our ability to know our weaknesses and when to throw up our hands and ask for help. This ability however is … Continue reading Five steps to becoming more of a listening leader people want to follow.

Imagine a bus with a sign on it proclaiming, "Going wherever you want to go." Now imagine that bus being filled with people all gleefully expecting to go places they want to go. Now imagine being one of those passengers and finding out that the bus is going places you don't want to go. Sound … Continue reading Honesty as a service.