My family and I will travel to Breckenridge next month over spring break. As we do every year, we’ll be staying at our favorite lodge at the base of the mountain. When making the reservation back in January, I requested a slope-side view with the understanding that any request would
Voltaire, the 18th-century French philosopher, said, “The best is the enemy of the good.” I love this quote because, to me, it highlights the distinction between extraordinary and ordinary, excellence and mediocrity, and exceptional and average customer service. Earlier this year, I attended a conference at the InterContinental Hotel in
Earlier this month, I read a Wall Street Journal article titled The Art of the Airline Apology. The article features a 2009 study by researchers at the University of Nottingham’s School of Economics in the United Kingdom that found apologies can be more valued by customers than compensation. In the
This is the third post in a series that will explore a set of questions I received from participants during a webinar on the topic of customer service. (I say “explore” rather than “answer” because I’ve discovered over the years that there is rarely a single right answer to these
A story broke last week about the customer backlash against Maker’s Mark after the bourbon maker announced that, in order to stretch its supply to meet global demand, it had begun diluting its bourbon—reducing the alcohol content from 90 proof to 84 proof. It turns out that bourbon shortages are
On Monday of this week I attempted to return a Price Pfister kitchen faucet purchased last year to Lowe’s Home Improvement store. The cashier, Karen, understandably denied my request citing Lowe’s 90-day return policy and the manufacturer’s 12-month warranty. (Although I no longer had the receipt, I estimated that 19
A blog reader recently shared this story: My family recently moved, but our kitchen was not completely finished. Making meals was difficult so we ordered take-out from a local New York Butcher Shoppe that offered a Wednesday meal special: basically $22 to feed a family of four to six, making
This post is the ninth in a series that will identify 10 different obstacles that have emerged from my analysis of customer satisfaction data. Maybe you will have encountered one or more of these obstacles in your own business? The ninth obstacle is deception. Deception encompasses everything from the fine
In his book, Customer Centricity: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It Matters, Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, defines customer centricity as “a strategy to fundamentally align a company’s products and services with the wants and needs of its
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