Topics and resources dedicated to improving your worth as a leader.
Customer Experience Series: When You Screw Up… … and you will screw up (everyone does) … you solve it! Steve once worked for a company where the owner told him, “Even when it costs me money, we always keep our word.” While the owner was a folksy guy with lots of old adages at the […]
How You Treat Your Employees Dictates How They Will Treat Your Customers Excuse the crude language, but there’s a saying you may have heard: “Crap rolls downhill.” We like to add the impact on the customer experience to this saying by amending it to: “Crap rolls downhill all the way to the customer.” Telling your […]
Improving the Customer Experience via Real Reputation Management As you read this post or embark on your own reputation management strategy, it’s important to keep one reality top of mind: The best way to manage negative online reviews is to never receive one. And although companies selling reputation management services will argue their approach is […]
How to Handle an Angry Customer Angry customers are a fact of life. You may be familiar with a Ben Franklin quote that ends with, “…nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” We’d like to amend this to include the Karen’s we face in today’s world to, “…nothing can be said […]
My Pleasure: How Two Little Words Can Improve the Customer Experience If you’ve ever purchased something at Chick-fil-A restaurant and thanked the cashier, you heard, “My pleasure,” as his or her reply. “Quick: We just need to teach all employees to say, ‘my pleasure’ instead of, ‘you’re welcome!’” If only it were that easy. (Creating […]
First Impressions Matter: Starting a Great Customer Experience on the Right Foot There’s a sign you may have seen on the front door of some establishments (mostly restaurants and independent auto repair garages) that sets customer expectations early in a friendly, tongue-in-cheek manner. It reads: We offer three kinds of service: good, cheap, and fast; […]
Understanding Today’s Customer to Create a Great Experience Every Time If you’re committed to becoming a CX juggernaut, it’s important to understand today’s customers versus the ones your industry served in the past. Simply put, today’s customers: Are more demanding. Have shorter attention spans. Are less tolerant. Have more knowledge about your products, you, and […]
The Infamous Overpromise: The Most Avoidable Driver of Bad Customer Experiences There is a subtlety to properly managing expectations that some people just don’t understand. Every competent dog groomer, auto mechanic, barber, plumber, electrician, etc. that we’ve ever stopped using could not manage expectations properly. These otherwise well-meaning and (as we wrote) competent tradespeople continually […]
Improving Customer Communication: Nebulous Term or Primary Driver of Improved Customer Experience? Given that the cause of most customer service issues stem from misaligned expectations, and that customer-first companies both manage expectations and keep their customers informed, you might have concluded (correctly) that the successes or failures of your customer experience efforts depend largely on […]
Keeping Customers Informed: How Realigning Customer Expectations Drives Greater Customer Satisfaction Managing customer expectations is not just about setting them properly, it’s also about realigning the customer’s expectations as the situation warrants. Think of this as a series of minor course corrections in the customer’s mind – keep you informed, the third deliverable of customer-first […]
Managing Customer Expectations: The Simplest Way to Create a Great Customer Experience Every Time! As you may remember from earlier posts, customer-first companies: Make “it” easy Manage expectations Keep you informed Keep their word We’ve tackled the why and how you make “it” easy, so now let’s dive into the why and how you manage […]
Viewing Your Business Through Your Customers’ Eyes If you read the earlier posts in this series, you already know that customer-first companies: Make “it” easy Manage expectations Keep you informed Keep their word In the last post, we learned that becoming a customer-first company (when your definition of good enough meets or exceeds the consumer’s […]
Good Enough v. Good Enough In this post we want to explore Chick-fil-A’s secret to delivering a mind-blowingly great customer experience; though let’s first clear a couple of things up: Chick-fil-A doesn’t provide a “mind-blowingly great” customer experience… and there is no secret to what they do. The customer experience at Chick-fil-A is good. Compared […]
Customer Service 101 The Customer Is Not Always Right You’ve probably heard (more than once) that the customer is always right. They are not. Of course, they don’t have to be right. They are your boss’ boss. They pay the bills. The customer is not always right, but they are always the customer. Given that […]
Ridiculously Simple Customer Experience How to Quickly Build and Maintain a CX Juggernaut “What’s a CX juggernaut?” you ask. We think the simplest way to explain this is to point to Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A is a CX juggernaut. Despite being closed on Sundays and despite the constant calls for boycotts because of stances on controversial issues, […]
The Six Secrets to Accountability Accountability is a word that gets tossed around so much in business that it’s become a cliché or a punchline. It’s become meaningless! At the first sign of lackluster results, those at the top announce: “We need some accountability!” Or “We need to start holding our people accountable!” Great idea… […]
What the Auto Industry is Getting Wrong About the Carvana Experiment Many in the automotive industry are not surprised at Carvana’s downfall. (I’ve been writing about the reasons they would fail and the absurd comparisons to Amazon since 2017.) A few, like Jim Zeigler, were vocal about their doubts very early on. Many, however, are […]
Turn Your Order-Takers Back Into Sales Pros Let’s be honest. Since about August or September 2020, your salespeople have had it pretty easy. Your cars, trucks, and SUVs have been selling themselves… often at prices above MSRP for new cars and at historically elevated prices for used. Most salespeople became order-takers. They quit making calls, […]
It’s the Perfect Time to Start Leading Again Yesterday, I wrote about how the inventory shortages presented a perfect time to restart your sales processes. Because, of course, once inventories begin to normalize, you’ll want solid sales processes in place if you plan to grow market share and hold more gross than your neighboring dealers. […]
It’s Time to Revisit Sales Processes Congratulations! You and your team have likely enjoyed the greatest run of net profitability in the history of your store! Of course, so has every other (non-Carvana) dealer in America. What a great (and weird) time it was to be a car dealer. Tight inventories created discipline at the […]