It was 3:00 in the morning at a Marriott hotel in north Dallas. You know how you awake to that feeling that something is just not quite right. I heard a loud argument through the wall to the next room, looked at the fire red clock display and thought, “Are you kidding me, who has the energy to be awake and arguing at this hour?” There came the slamming door in the hallway. A few minutes of quiet where interrupted by banging on MY door with the accompanied female yells of “LET ME IN!” I hurried to the door and
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Archives for Customer Service
Four out of Three People Have Problems with Fractions – How to Really Grow Your Business
Since 37.843% of all statistics are made up, how do you know what you should be measuring? (grin) This is a rant on numbers. Not just any number but one particular item and how it impacts your world. These are the days of eliminating the number of commas in your world. What? Commas. You know those nifty little period symbols with a tail. They, the coma, will allow you, and anyone else, to write sentences, and those, with independent clauses (OK . . . so I only got 6 commas in this sentence.) I have a problem with commas when
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Don't Drink the Woolite
Don’t ask. I can’t tell. Her name will stay anonymous. She was on cruise control as she readied herself for the daily grind. With an aspirin sized headache she looked around for liquid to help down a couple of Tylenol. She spied the small glass of liquid, threw back the pills and washed them down handily with the glass of “water”. That was when she remembered that she had filled that glass with Woolite a few days before. This handy dandy cleaning solution – that will do wonders for “your sweaters and unmentionables” – had done a wonder in disguising
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Pearls and NOT shooting yourself in the Foot
Wanna raise? There is an online retailer called The Pearl Outlet. Now who buys pearls? Especially on line? Well that is something that they wanted to know. If they did a marketing campaign that said, “Say you are sorry with pearls” would that work? So they commissioned a study of 8,000 customers and a real surprise popped up. Those customers who were willing to say they were sorry earned more money. In fact they earned twice as much as those who rarely, or never apologized. It turns out that those who earned $100,000 a year or more were twice as
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I stole a souvenier from the Ritz – Kordell's antics are fixed by Nine Professionals
It has been ten years. That is what the celebration is all about. Ten years ago Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine wrote the book, the Experience Economy. If you have not read it . . . you probably ought to consider it. More about that in a moment. I met Jim for the first time when he was a consultant to our company in Texas. I had no idea that he would, in the future, co-author a book that would change my life and the way that many Fortune 500 companies did business. I have to say that my first
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I Almost Ran Over Mister Incredible – an incredible customer experience
I was just finishing a meeting at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Columbus when pulling out of the hotel breezeway, I was brought to a screaming stop by Mr. Incredible. Actually in the world of Customer Experiences, there is not many that measure up to The Arnold Classic. Each year 150,000 atheletes and visitors converge on the Columbus, Ohio Convention Center for this yearly event. What started as a body building expo for steroid and testerone overdosed Herculian types has now morphed into competition for fencing, archery, karate, and a dozen other sports. Now the interesting thing to note is
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Never have children, only grandchildren. ~Gore Vidal
A month ago we had the arrival of our third grandchild. Of course he is gorgeous. How do we know? We have pictures of him. His mother and father were the recipients of a new Flip Video camera for Christmas, a gift from Grandpa Norton. This neat little device allows the less than competent (like me) to take instant digital videos and then move them at will to other people. How do I know they are so easy to use? Recently I was a speaker at a conference in Mississippi. At the end of my presentation, I pulled out my
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A GREAT Cure for your Virus – If you are reading this on your computer, you need to know about this GREAT Customer Experience.
I don’t know how the virus got through, but attack it did. I had a computer that had a mind of its own, and was as ill behaved as a college freshman away from home for the first time. As I discovered the name of the virus, the prognosis did not look good. As a former executive at one company who had 2,600 computer “engineers” on the payroll (for example, we had 26 people on-site at Microsoft to fix their computer problems) I knew that this problem was going to either 1. cost me a lot of money to fix,
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M.i. crooked letter . . crooked letter. . .i . . . crooked letter
He leaned close and said, “there is not a missing tooth in sight, is there?” The land of magnolias, sweet tea, and southern charm out the Yazoo (Yazoo City that is). Mississippi. Last week I was presenting at a conference in Jackson, Mississippi. Gorgeous country and warm people. While at a luncheon the person sitting next to asked if I had been to his state before. “Nope” came the reply, my witty rapporteur in full swing. He asked what I expected on my first visit and I had to admit that in many ways his state was light years ahead
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The Heroin to Cost Saving Shopping – Addicted to Aldi
We are addicted. There, I said it. I remember one of my most powerful mentors (he has since passed beyond this cacky coil) was so miffed when he found out that each box of Tide soap had an allowance for Soap Box operas. . . daytime TV. He was so incensed that he was the force behind introducing No-Name Generic Food products here in the U.S. Is was during this effort that we connected, starting me on a journey of marketing and consumer packaged goods. I came to know and understand the quality of various products. Is there
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