In order to provide exceptional customer service, your business or organization should understand these fundamental concepts when communicating with customers. Businesses and organizations use a variety of methods when communicating with customers: face-to-face, video conference, telephone, email, texting, and social media. Many of these methods – especially video, email, texting, and social media – leverage…
Connecting, rather than demolishing, customer service silos is the key to strengthening your customer service culture, and here are three simple strategies that will work. During my time as a community college administrator and as a peer reviewer with a regional higher education accreditation organization, a common theme among colleges involved “silos,” a phenomenon not…
Does your business or organization engage in any of these frightening customer service strategies that scare away customers? Halloween is approaching, and we all know what that means: scary costumes, freaky jack-o’-lanterns, and haunted houses. Our local chamber is even sponsoring a “fright hike,” wherein brave individuals hike through the woods, at night, in our…
These three examples of accountability in customer service illustrate how to remain accountable to your external and internal customers. An important goal of customer service is to be accountable to external customers, together with your internal customers, such as your fellow team members, including colleagues from other departments; if we find ourselves making excuses and…
The goal of customer service processes is to enhance, not unreasonably burden, the delivery of exceptional customer service. Last week, I shared Lee Cockerell’s “locked wine cabinet” story. You’ll recall that when Lee began managing a Marriott property in Springfield, a couple visited the restaurant to celebrate their anniversary. The couple ordered a bottle of wine…
When designing a customer service process, don’t forget to ask each other, “Yes, but what if…?” During onsite customer service training workshops, I routinely share the “locked wine cabinet” story from Lee Cockerell’s book Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney. Lee was a former executive leader at Walt Disney World in…
These findings about poor customer service should provide a “wake up call” to all businesses and organizations. Our friends at JitBit, a customer support software company, recently shared an infographic and article about poor customer service with us, and the data are striking. Before providing the link to the infographic, we wanted to summarize the article’s…
Labor Day is the perfect time to exercise your gratitude muscle. This past Saturday, I visited a large retail establishment to purchase a graphing calculator. The store was bustling with shoppers. Indeed, it was one of the largest crowds I’ve ever observed there. Even the customer service representative who assisted me commented about how busy…
What do tires and a customer service culture share in common? They both require alignment. During my senior year of high school, I learned a valuable lesson about tires. While driving to school one morning in my 1973 Cougar XR-7 — with a Cleveland 351 engine, I might add — I experienced a front flat…
The secret to offering A-Plus customer service is not only answering the customer’s question or inquiry, but also adding value to the customer transaction itself. While providing customer service training to a non-profit organization in Memphis earlier this year, one of the participants demonstrated an exceptional example of what we refer to as A-Plus customer service —…