I was in New York City for a business trip a week or so before my 10-year wedding anniversary. One afternoon, I stopped by the Tiffany & Co. flagship store on 5th Avenue to look at anniversary rings. A thoughtful representative named Duncan showed me several rings as he explained
I spent a fair amount of time last month on TripAdvisor, Hotels.com, Yelp, and other websites offering hotel reviews. A majority of those reviews were written by hotel guests whose experiences were either very good or a very bad. It seems that when guests have an ordinary or typical experience,
Time and again research confirms that customer encounters in which a problem is resolved quickly and efficiently receive higher satisfaction scores than situations in which there was no problem reported. Obviously, each customer is different with respect to his temperament and tolerance for mistakes. But dropping the ball here or
Last December I worked with a hotel leadership team in Dayton, OH. One of the discussions lead to identifying the obstacles that stood in the way of creating promoters of its hotel. Consumer research firm Bain and Company defines promoters as those customers who are the least price-sensitive, have the
Earlier this week, a friend of mine passed along a copy of Daniel Pink’s latest book, Drive. It was a pleasant surprise because, having read his bestseller, A Whole New Mind, it was on my buy list. One of the reasons I enjoy reading authors like Daniel Pink, Malcolm Gladwell,
When was the last time you checked yourself into a flight and checked a piece of luggage at a self-service kiosk at the airport? Like supermarket self-service checkout stations or ATMs, I find these kiosks helpful. Once they become familiar, they’re easy to navigate and usually end up saving me
Have you ever sensed an adversarial, “us vs. them” mentality from employees of service organizations? Perhaps you were on the receiving end of what you would describe as rude or abusive behavior? Or perhaps it was more subtle—like dismissive body language or an exasperated sigh? Maybe it did not even
The other day I walked by a supermarket employee who was hanging out near the front entrance of the store smoking a cigarette. I noticed him because it always confounds me when employers permit their employees to smoke someplace where non-smoking customers have to pass through their second-hand smoke in
Earlier this month, my brother-in-law ordered a glow-in-the-dark football from Baden Sports as a Christmas gift for one of my boys. When the package arrived this week, my wife opened it to find a glow-in-the-dark soccer ball rather than the football that was ordered. She compared the product received to
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