Crack the Customer Code

Adam and Jeannie discuss ways many companies fail to get ready for the holidays, and how you can start preventing customer service disasters today.

How much time do you have to get ready for the holidays?

Think about that for a moment... Count the days, then cut that number in half! You and your staff have parties, shopping, kids off from school, and many other things standing in your way. And the holiday season is famous for exposing hidden pitfalls and inadequacies in the customer experience. 

If you have not thought about the holiday season, this is your wakeup call! 

Things you can't control like bad weather, server overloads, and supply shortages can cause huge problems. Now's the time to prepare for the things you can control, including how you respond and react to those things you can't. 

There's no way to be sure what the holiday season will mean for your business, but we have some tips to help you prepare for the unexpected. Listen in! 

Related Content

• Customers That Stick® post, Infographic: What Customers Experience Holiday Shopping 
• 360Connext® post, ‘Tis the Season to Find Pain Points in Your Customer Journey 
• Episode 085: Proactive Customer Service and Worst-Case Preparation

Sponsor message:

Develop your customer experience mission

Do you know how to deliver the superior customer experience you visualize? We can help your team become a force for positive change, starting with a customer-centric mission. The Customer Experience Investigators™ at 360Connext specialize in helping companies across industries and around the globe develop and internalize unique and scalable customer-focused missions. To compete with the other 89% of companies staying afloat by providing better experiences, you need a compass for making astounding changes in the customer experience while breaking down the silos that are holding you back. We offer evaluations, workshops, and roadmaps to keep your wheels firmly planted on the road to a customer-centric future.

Join us on our mission to Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™ today. Visit us at 360Connext.com.

 

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

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Customer engagement thought leader Doug Sandler joins us to discuss highlights from his bestselling book, Nice Guys Finish First.

About our guest

Doug Sandler has over 30 years of business experience as an entrepreneur and leader. His book, Nice Guys Finish First is a #1 ranked Amazon Best Seller.  As a podcaster, Doug has interviewed Arianna Huffington from HuffPost, Dan Harris from Good Morning America, Ron Klain, White House Chief of Staff and dozens of celebs. He specializes in teaching others the "how-to's" of building relationships and strengthening connections. Doug is a nationally recognized speaker and writer.  His weekly posts reach hundreds of thousands of readers. Doug has been titled by a leading social media marketing company in the top 100 of Social Media Thought Influencers to follow.

“You can only be a human being in business. You cannot be a sterile machine…”

Connect with Doug

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Google+
• Doug’s website

Related Content

• Customers That Stick® infographic, 8 Ways to Be Your Customer’s Hero
• 360Connext® post, 3 Rules for Investing in Good Relationships with Customers
• Doug’s free ebook, Providing Great Customer Service
• B’moreBiz Conference
• Episode 038: Bob Burg, Author of The Go-Giver
• Episode 137: Culture and Customer Service

Give your team the customer service training they deserve

Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com, that is customerheroworkshop.com.

 

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we’re sharing tips and best practices for keeping customer journey maps current and making them more useful.

Just when you think your customer journey map is finished…

Changes are happening in your organization, your products, or your customer’s expectations while you work on your customer journey map. Essentially, it's always out of date!

A real, working customer journey map is never “finished.” So, when and how often should you update yours? This can depend on the size and structure of your organization, what you’re using it for, and if you’re even using it at all.

The customer journey mapping process may be different for everyone, but it’s never easy. It takes lots of time and patience, and it can be quite painful. When the time comes to update, are you going to scrap all that hard work and start over?

Protect that invest!  We have expert advice for not only when to update, but how to approach the process to create a customer journey map that drives results.

Related Content

• Customers That Stick® post, The Magic Number in Customer Experience Is Two
• 360Connext® post, 5 Customer Journey Mapping Mistakes that Lead You Nowhere
• Free webinar: Demystifying Customer Journey Mapping
• Episode 120: Jim Kalbach, Experience Mapping Expert
• Episode 025: Customer Journey Maps, Justin Zacks, and Amazon 2-Hour Delivery

Sponsor message:

Give your team the customer service training they deserve

Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com.

 

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam and Jeannie discuss leadership skills that drive customer experience success with international change advocate and author of Keep Stepping, Joy Marsden.

About our guest

Joy Marsden has over 20 years business experience in technical textile design, Marketing, Customer Service and Area Sales Management working with blue chip companies including Marks and Spencer, Mars, Next PLC and Avon Cosmetics. 

Today as an influential change advocate, Joy works internationally using her uniquely designed Keep Stepping!® program, which focuses on key principles that must be mastered when going through challenge and change.

She is an author of the book “Keep Stepping! Essential ways to lead yourself and others through challenge and change.”

Joy works with leaders and their teams in both the public and private sector and some of her clients include, PepsiCo, Michelin, BBC, Aon, Chartered Institute for Personal Development, Police Superintendents’ Association, Oracle and National Institute of Health & Research.

Episode highlight

“If a leader really wants to be successful in bringing an organization successfully through change, successfully through challenge, successfully through difficulties that they may be facing, they’ve got to be open to seeing things differently. And seeing things differently has to start with you.

"It has to start with the way you see things: Your own self-awareness, your own ability to reflect on situations, and your openness to ask questions to people throughout the whole of the organization, including the person that sits on the customer service desk… You have to know what your people are going through, and they have to see you.” - Joy Marsden

Connect with Joy

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Joy’s website

Related Content

• Customers That Stick® Post, An Interview with Kate Nasser: Better #PeopleSkills
• 360Connext® post, Destructive Leadership Practices: Is Your CEO in Denial?
• Episode 144: Eddie Turner, Facilitating Change

Sponsor message:

Develop your customer experience mission

Do you know how to deliver the superior customer experience you visualize? We can help your team become a force for positive change, starting with a customer-centric mission. The Customer Experience Investigators™ at 360Connext specialize in helping companies across industries and around the globe develop and internalize unique and scalable customer-focused missions. To compete with the other 89% of companies staying afloat by providing better experiences, you need a compass for making astounding changes in the customer experience while breaking down the silos that are holding you back. We offer evaluations, workshops, and roadmaps to keep your wheels firmly planted on the road to a customer-centric future.

Join us on our mission To Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™ today. Visit us at 360Connext.com.

 

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Has a customer ever left your employees shaking in fear? Today we discuss ways to diffuse customer threats and protect our brands and ourselves from the worst.

Is your front-line prepared for customer threats?

We’ve turned the tables a bit today! Instead of advocating for the customer, we’re talking about protecting our staff, and our brands from customer threats.

A lot of time and energy goes into training customer-facing employees. But few leaders train their people specifically on how to respond when customers behave in a threatening manner. Sometimes they will only threaten your brand reputation, but if you’ve worked in retail like Adam, you know some customers will threaten bodily harm.

What is your protocol for handling a customer who has gone from irate to downright scary? Where do you draw the line between customer service issues and personal safety issues?

If you've never had to ask a customer to leave or file a police report, don’t be so sure it won’t or can’t happen in your industry. How you respond can make all the difference for keeping customers, employees, and your brand happy and safe.

In this episode, Adam and Jeannie share some real-life stories of customer service issues that have escalated to potentially harmful situations. Listen in for tips and great examples for preventing, responding to, and recovering from extreme customer meltdowns.

Related Content

• Customers That Stick® post, How to Handle Customer Threats
• 360Connext® post, 4 Things to Keep You from Losing Your Mind over Customer Behavior
• Episode 096: Jay Baer, Hug Your Haters
• Episode 085: Proactive Customer Service and Worst-Case Preparation

Sponsor message:

Develop your customer experience mission

Do you know how to deliver the superior customer experience you visualize? We can help your team become a force for positive change, starting with a customer-centric mission. The Customer Experience Investigators™ at 360Connext specialize in helping companies across industries and around the globe develop and internalize unique and scalable customer-focused missions. To compete with the other 89% of companies staying afloat by providing better experiences, you need a compass for making astounding changes in the customer experience while breaking down the silos that are holding you back. We offer evaluations, workshops, and roadmaps to keep your wheels firmly planted on the road to a customer-centric future.

Join us on our mission to Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™ today. Visit us at 360Connext.com.

 

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we interview author and customer experience expert Blake Morgan to discuss the future of customer experience and her new book, More is More.

Excellent customer experience as a differentiator

Over the past decade, there has been a huge emphasis on customer experience in the business world, and we’ve come a long way. But today’s guest says we still have a long way to go.

“Very few companies execute perfectly on customer experience and it’s a hugely missed opportunity,” says Blake. So why are many companies still failing?

From social customer care to the importance of creating a better employee experience, Blake shares highlights from her groundbreaking new book, More is More. It’s all about leveraging the many overlooked opportunities to differentiate your brand through excellent customer experiences.

Where do many self-proclaimed “customer-centric” companies go wrong, and how can we prepare for the best possible customer experience in the future? This episode covers a lot of ground. Listen in!

About our guest

Blake Morgan is the author of More Is More: How The Best Companies Work Harder and Go Farther To Create Knock Your Socks Off Customer Experiences (Routledge 2017). She is an advisor, speaker, podcast host and the President of SOCAP's Northwest Chapter. She is a former customer service practitioner having worked with and advised companies such as Intel, Verizon Wireless and many more. She lives in Alameda, California with her husband and their baby girl.

Connect with Blake

• Blake’s podcast, The Modern Customer
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Blake’s website

Related Content

• Customers That Stick® post, 6 Can’t Miss Ways to Kickstart Your Customer’s Experience
• 360Connext® post, Document THIS! Betrayed by Customer Experience Documentation
• Episode 154: Adrian Swinscoe, How to Wow
• Episode 094: Joseph Michelli, Becoming Customer-Obsessed

Sponsor message:

Give your team the customer service training they deserve

Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com, that is customerheroworkshop.com.

 

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam and Jeannie discuss ways you can make noticeable improvements when there’s little or no budget for customer experience initiatives.

No customer experience budget?

We hear this from great leaders in large and small organizations who see the long-term value of investing in the experience.

“Where do we get the resources? How can we convince other leaders? We have no budget!”

Of course, the more money and resources you have to work with, the more options you have. But make no mistake: Money isn’t everything. In fact, expecting things to work out simply because a lot of money has been thrown at the issue is one of the biggest mistakes we’ve seen. Larger companies who aim to become customer experience leaders end up shooting themselves in the foot by assuming larger investments will yield greater returns.

So whether you have a huge customer experience budget or no budget at all, we urge you to forget about the money for a moment and focus more on what really matters to your customers.

Take the opportunity to look at your current resources from a different perspective and really put your best foot forward. With a little elbow grease, you can leverage those resources to make huge improvements one step at a time.

We have some great tips for leaders in small and large companies to get started, gain support, and make customer experience improvements on a daily basis, regardless of budget.

Related Content

• 360Connext® post, So You Have No Customer Experience Budget… Now What!?
• Customers That Stick® post, Upgrade Your Customer Service Technology on a Budget
• Episode 105: Onstage vs. Offstage Customer Experience

Sponsor message:

Give your team the customer service training they deserve

Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com.

 

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christoff Weihman, bestselling author and coordinator of the Excellerate Service 2016 conference, shares his secrets to 5-star service in the hospitality industry.

About our guest

Throughout his career, Christoff Weihman has served in various capacities-as a server, bartender, wine sales rep, catering sales manager, event planner, and banquet service manager. He has worked for Wolfgang Puck in Hollywood; Darden Restaurants, as well as other establishments in St. Louis, Los Angeles, and at the Hyatt in Guam and Nikko Hotel in Saipan. He has spent many years in Sales & Business Development, as well, including in the automotive industry as well as Staffing and Recruiting.

Christoff believes that regardless of the type of restaurant or establishment, 5 Star Service should always be the goal.

He is a life-long learner, an avid reader, and passionate about personal development. He writes a weekly blog about Customer Service entitled Soupfly which has readers in 108 countries. 

He is currently working on his 2nd and 3rd books. Christoff Co-Hosts a weekly online Blab show on 5 Star Customer Service.

Connect with Christoff

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Christoff’s blog, Soupfly
• Christoff’s book

Related Content: 

• Customers That Stick® Post, 5 Principles for Great Restaurant Customer Service
• 360Connext® post, A Road Warrior’s Cry: Micro Matters in The Guest Experience
• Episode 065: Restaurant Customer Service
• Episode 110: Mike Ganino, Guest Experience Expert

Sponsor message:

EXCELLERATE SERVICE 2016 promises to be an inspiring, engaging, & educational 2-Day conference focused on & dedicated to 5-Star Customer Service! In addition to the amazing content you will receive over the 2-day event, you will also be contributing to our larger vision of raising funds for Three Square Foodbank, a subsidiary of Feeding America, who serve food insecure residents in Southern Nevada.   EXCELLERATE SERVICE 2016 is all about customer service and service to a broader community. If you have a passion for service excellence and a heart for service, then this event is for you!   To learn more, go to http://www.excellerate2016.com/

 

 

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we discuss employee incentives and how they can actually work against our long-term goals.

Employee incentives gone rogue!

It’s very common for companies to incentivize goals like sales quotas, new customer acquisition, and more. And while it’s great to reward employees for reaching these goals, the way we do it can create huge problems.

Take Wells Fargo, who is facing multiple lawsuits due to the creation of millions of fake accounts resulting from years of aggressive acquisition quotas. While this is an extreme case, the problems created by your incentive program can go unnoticed until there’s a huge problem.

The biggest problems we hear of stem from focusing on metrics rather than experience outcomes. For instance, your report may show a significantly reduced call time, but it will not tell you how many calls were hastily and poorly executed. It won't say how many customer service issues were ignored to keep those calls short.

Will your employees turn against each other to reach your new sales goal? Will your loyal customers suffer due to an emphasis on acquisition? From making undeliverable promises to creating deeply embedded culture issues, your long-term goals and reputation could be at stake.

Listen in to learn how the best companies think ahead by aligning employee incentives with experience outcomes.

 

Related Content

• 360Connext® post, How Metrics Hide Serious Customer Experience Problems
• Episode 141: When Customers Don’t Want Your Help
• Episode 104: Pat Helmers, Sales Babble Podcast

Sponsor message:

EXCELLERATE SERVICE 2016 promises to be an inspiring, engaging, & educational 2-Day conference focused on & dedicated to 5-Star Customer Service! In addition to the amazing content you will receive over the 2-day event, you will also be contributing to our larger vision of raising funds for Three Square Foodbank, a subsidiary of Feeding America, who serve food insecure residents in Southern Nevada.   EXCELLERATE SERVICE 2016 is all about customer service and service to a broader community. If you have a passion for service excellence and a heart for service, then this event is for you!   To learn more, go to http://www.excellerate2016.com/

 

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam and Jeannie discuss Wow Marketing and the power of adding value for customers with JD Dwyer, founder of The Institute of Wow.

About our guest

John Dwyer (known as “JD” to most) is an Australian entrepreneur, marketing and business coach. He’s the founder of The Institute of Wow, company that helps entrepreneurs and small business owners attract more customers and boost sales through the Wow factor.

The list of professionals that have collaborated with JD includes popular comedian and actor Jerry Seinfeld, who JD convinced to be a spokesman for a Small Australian bank – a campaign that resulted in the bank tripling its home loan market share in just 24 months.

Connect with John

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• JD’s website, The Institute of Wow

Related Content: 

• Customers That Stick® Post, Sometimes WOW Only Takes 5 Seconds
• 360Connext® post, LOVE: Microinteraction of the Month
• Episode 007: Stan Phelps, Founder of 9 Inch Marketing

Sponsor message:

EXCELLERATE SERVICE 2016 promises to be an inspiring, engaging, & educational 2-Day conference focused on & dedicated to 5-Star Customer Service! In addition to the amazing content you will receive over the 2-day event, you will also be contributing to our larger vision of raising funds for Three Square Foodbank, a subsidiary of Feeding America, who serve food insecure residents in Southern Nevada.   EXCELLERATE SERVICE 2016 is all about customer service and service to a broader community. If you have a passion for service excellence and a heart for service, then this event is for you!   To learn more, go to http://www.excellerate2016.com/

 

 

Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices