Had a business lunch at the Crooked River Grill on Thursday. Melody was our waitress and she greeted us with warmth and enthusiasm. She engaged us in conversation and her interpretation of the menu was nothing short of epic! I had to stop her half way through her explanation of the menu that she’d interpretated as [...]

The monthly report from E-zine Articles just arrived in my email.  Once again – the number one article for the month is one I wrote a few years ago entitled How Do You Define Customer Service. I wrote the article before the economy took a turn for the interesting, when companies were still staffed and [...]

I’m reading the book “Two Weeks to a Breakthrough” by Lisa Haneberg. An interesting book about being focused on a goal and working each day towards bringing it to life. In the Day Two exercise she has a great analogy and it made me think of companies trying to bring customer service to life. Think [...]

I met a customer at the local Barnes and Noble bookstore over the weekend.  We both decided to grab a cup of coffee.  My customer, Kathy, is a loyal – no, more like an obsessed Starbucks fan. Everyday she has to have her Starbucks – not just in the morning but several throughout the day. [...]

Customer Service isn’t a title or a department – it is a culture. In a recent post over at Duct Tape Marketing his lead paragraph says it all Here’s something your customers won’t ever tell you but that you had better understand: Your employees probably treat your customers about the same way you treat your [...]

I often speak about the importance and value of building customer relationships but today I want to talk about relationships within an organization. Glenn Ross asks a lot of really valuable questions in his post The Most Important Component in a Relationship.  What is it? Communication. He starts the article by quoting Dale Carnegie: “90 [...]

They sound similar but do they mean the same thing?  I asked the question of the Build Customer Relationships group on LinkedIn this week and overwhelmingly the answer was NO.  Everyone agrees that customer service is the foundation – what gets customers in the door the first time and turns them from prospects to customers [...]

All this week the preacher at the Chautauqua Institute is the Very Rev. Alan Jones, dean emeritus, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. In his sermon this morning he had a quote that made the congregation chuckle but perhaps the laughter was a little uncomfortable because of the truth of his statement: “I know that I’m nothing [...]

I used to have a little cartoon from the paper that said “Shrug off Apathy.”  How ironic, I’d chuckled, as I snipped it from the paper, and yet so many of today’s workers in the retail and food service environments have an attitude that is just this side of apathetic.  Some would call it “indifference.”  [...]

I am always focused on the customer and our relationship with them but the other key component to successfully building a reputationfor putting customers first is how your employees feel about the whole thing.  Happy employees equal happy customers.  “If mamma hate happy, ain’t nobody happy.” In the book 30 Reasons Employees Hate Their Managers [...]