Don’t ask questions if you already know the answers
A good lawyer never asks a question for which he doesn’t already know the answer. That’s not necessarily just about being smart and being prepared. Frankly, it’s a manipulation technique used to sway juries and judges: When they get a witness on the stand, the most important thing for an attorney is to control the [...]
Employees are NOT your Customers
Can I start a controversial article being completely uncontroversial? Thanks. Here goes: Good employee engagement is an absolute requirement in order to drive good CX. Okay… now, feel free to refer to that as you read on, because I’m not trying to say that engagement isn’t fundamental; in fact, it’s a bedrock necessity if you’re [...]
Do you hear yourself?
Have you ever had to say to a friend, “it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”? I remember a client who used that to describe some of the interactions their managers would have with front-line employees as an example of the need for a professional communications course I offered at the time. [...]
Do you love your Customers as much as your employees do?
We hear all the time that hiring is destiny: You have to be very careful when looking for new team members—especially those who are on the front-line and Customer facing—that they’re empathetic, Customer-focused, and just plain nice. In fact, there’s an entire cottage industry growing around hiring for your support/services/sales teams to ensure you’ve got [...]
When you can’t answer, “Why?”
I wrote recently about an incident at a local grocery store that sparked some thought about how sometimes we provide excuses instead of offering solutions. Likewise, sometimes at my gym, I come across a piece of equipment that’s out of order for some reason or another. Usually, there’s a note pinned to it alerting us that [...]
CYA is not CX
The other day I spent about 45 minutes round-trip (short by standards…read on) and about $45 mailing Christmas cards. Happy Holidays to our family and friends who receive one from us! I use the word “mailing” deliberately because that’s all I was doing. I wasn’t shopping for them, digging through my computer to find the [...]
CX professionals are the best (and worst) Customers
The Wall Street Journal has a daily column called “Best of the Web Today.” Its originator, James Taranto, created it as a bit of a light-hearted end-of-the-day quick-hit piece with a bit of political commentary thrown in as well. A recurring gag is to make little jokes about headlines published around the Web that, regardless [...]
Some non-CX thoughts on Tony Hsieh
The turn in the narrative regarding Tony Hsieh’s death has been striking over the past few days as stories (like these in the Journal and Forbes) began to come to light based on accounts from those who knew him better than the rest of us who had merely admired him from afar. While the universal [...]
Unnecessary escalations
This spring and summer have been rough on travel. My partner and I actually had a hotel cancel our reservation after the world ended. It was complicated by the fact that we’d used a combination of credit card points and cash to make the reservation for two different rooms, one for us and one for [...]
