When my friend Shonali Burke of the public relations firm Shonali Burke Consulting first sent me an advanced copy of Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s new book Age of Context, I had two thoughts. My first thought was what an interesting topic. My second thought was how will I have time to read it; I […]

We are pleased to present our next installment in the Inside Customer Service video series with Jeannie Walters. Jeannie is the Chief Customer Experience Investigator™ and founder of 360Connext, a Chicago-based consulting firm specializing in the cornerstones of customer experience: customer engagement, employee engagement and connections like social media. In addition to writing and consulting, […]

A few weeks ago I was caught in a tug of war between two large multinational banks — My Bank and my general contractor’s bank, Receiving Bank. I had written a check to pay my general contractor for a retail buildout. Since it was for a construction job, the check was fairly large. (The landlord […]

For National Customer Service Week this year, we decided to run an updated version of our previous post: National Customer Service Week 2011: What’s Your Plan? This week, October 7-13, marks National Customer Service Week (NCSW). NCSW was established by proclamation of President Bush (#41) in 1992. The beginning of the proclamation reads: In a […]

Our post Your Signage Sends a Message: Make Sure It’s The Right One received such a good response, that I thought it would be fitting to share a brief follow up. In that post, we pointed out numerous examples of business signs and showed how important signage is in communicating with customers. The shining example […]

In a recent article in the Financial Post entitled The hidden costs of letting workers act like jerks, author Craig Dowden presented a number of research studies showing the adverse effects of incivility in the workplace. A few of the key findings were as follows: Incivility in the workplace is a drain on productivity and, […]

We recently presented a look at two different retail return policies in A Tale of Two Returns. The post looked at a very liberal return policy, Macy’s, and a very customer-unfriendly policy at a mall-based cell phone accessory store. However, this juxtaposition of experiences only scratches the surface of what is involved in retail returns […]

When looking at the customer experience, we are confronted with numerous truths that are universal across industries and organizations. One of those truths is the following: Signage matters. Similar to how language functions — words can have denotation, literal meaning, and connotation, a deeper layer of meaning — signage communicates to your stakeholders on many […]

Whenever we can personalize a customer experience, we have gone a long way towards making that experience great. Every customer wants to feel valued, to feel special, and personalizing the customer’s experience, even in very small ways can go a long way towards accomplishing that goal. Of course, CRM systems are the most popular way […]