Moments of Truth

Simply satisfying our clients just won’t cut it. It’s a competitive market place and no one is going to talk solely about good service. They are going to talk about an exceptional experience.

Cheers to a Moment of Truth from my favorite brew pub – Hopworks Brewery. We recently showed up as we do several nights a week. This place can get pretty packed, but we found a parking spot without a problem and assumed it wasn’t too busy. We were totally wrong.

I love when people are intuitive enough to recognize the opportunity to turn a bad experience into an exceptional one. The other day I went to a new dentist for the very first time…

Inavero’s 2011 Best of Staffing Client competition is complete and the winners have been announced.

I am obnoxiously smitten with the hosting company Rackspace, so much so that my co-workers wonder if I secretly work for them in my off hours. We recently migrated our entire surveying and reporting technology…

The following is a real life example of how American Airlines missed an opportunity to turn me into a promoter of their customer service, and instead their customer service became the topic of my blog post on poor customer problem solving. American Airlines customer service manager says: “We can only take 50% of the blame [...]

So you think the customer is always right?  Saks 5th Avenue would disagree.  And they’re willing to stake their brand, relationship with customers, and insane legal fees on it. 

Saks is making news for all the wrong reasons.  This happened in Portland, OR – but it’s making news around the country.  Check out this video for a 30 second overview of the situation.

In troubled economic times, the customers you’ve already earned are even more valuable than when growth is more stable. It is vital that you not only provide great customer service on a regular basis, but that you occasionally provide service that is worthy of other people telling the story. The authors of Freakonomics, a fantastic [...]

In my last post, I used Nike+ support as an example of a company that really gets the nuance of service recovery. I finished my experience with them happy, even though they actually didn’t even fix my initial problem. I guess I’m a sucker for the little things. Now let’s use LinkedIn as an example of a company that missed an opportunity to further cement my support (I remain an unabashed fan)….

The impact of service failures depends largely on the way recovery happens. At a base level, it is often not the mistake that makes us tell a dozen people about the experience, but what the company or organization does to recover. There is reasonable evidence (this Journal of Marketing Research article, for example) that what [...]