Customer Loyalty

Loyal customers are at the heart of a successful business and career. They will come back more, they will refer others and they can provide the most valuable feedback and insights into making your business, product or service the best it can be. The only way to increase customer loyalty is to deliver the best customer service you can, every time, no exceptions, no excuses.

Thumbnail image for Three Ways to Keep Your Customers Coming Back

Three Ways to Keep Your Customers Coming Back

January 10, 2012

Last week I was interviewed by Daniel Bortz, a writer for Entrepreneur.com. He asked my opinion on some things small businesses can do to keep their customers coming back. The ideas in his article focused on tactics that most small businesses can do and can be made easier using technology tools.  The suggestions centered on [...]

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Customer service can beat low price

September 22, 2011

Many competitive industries rely on low prices and heavy discounting to attract and keep customers. But this strategy is not the only one that can help you increase customer loyalty. Even in a highly price competitive business, customer service can beat low prices. This article shares a perfect example of how one dry cleaner lost [...]

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Social media advice: Get real or go home

May 3, 2011

by Kevin Stirtz Chris Garrett wrote a post a while ago about being real vs. phony. Here’s what he says about real people: Real people rock. If anything, I would always rather meet an imperfect human being than a fake robot. Be proud to be you, mistakes and all. Too many companies hire and train robots [...]

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Use Trust to increase customer loyalty

October 18, 2010

Over 9 million times every month, someone does a Google search on the word “trust”. Google Trends shows a steady upward trend in the word “trust” used in media stories since 2004. We hear the word every day. Many of of use the term daily. Some more than others. “Trust me, I wouldn’t even offer [...]

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How good are you?

May 26, 2010

To be successful, in any business, we need to give our customers what they want, in a way that works for our business. We should focus on doing what our customers want AND what we can do well. Then we need to do it well. In fact we should do it better than anyone else [...]

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Choosing service means choosing responsibility

May 14, 2010

A while ago I wrote about a book called: “Choosing Civility”. One thing I like about the book is that it puts the responsibility for change on us, not on others, Even the title says it well. It reminds us we have the ability to choose how we act. Since my job is to help [...]

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The link between customer service and customer loyalty

April 28, 2010

It seems natural customer loyalty would follow good service. If you get what you want and you are treated right, why would you not return to a business? But sometimes it’s useful to have more than an intuitive argument. So I have done a bit of research and I have found two statistics that tell [...]

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Why customer service matters in SEO and Internet marketing

April 2, 2010

My work focuses a little on getting new customers and a lot on getting them to come back. I believe the best marketing comes from running your business so well, people have a great experience so they come back and they tell others. Recently, I received an email from my friends at the Village Hat [...]

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Send your customers away

January 13, 2010

There’s a coffee shop in London where the owner sends his customers away, into the arms of his competitors. He does this knowing they’ll come back. And when they come back, they’ll probably be more loyal to his coffee shop. His strategy is surprising but simple. He wants his customers to understand his product. He [...]

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Your first contact sets the bar for customer expectations

December 28, 2009

Here is your Daily Dose of Amazing Service: Your first contact sets the bar for customer expectations And here are some additional thoughts on this topic… Is it always a good idea to “wow” your customers the first time they do business with you? Maybe not. Your first contact sets the bar for all future [...]

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Better customer service means staying in the game

December 23, 2009

Too often when a company (or person) fails at customer service, they run from the failure. They never return to the “scene of the crime”. I understand why. Most of us would rather move on to future successes than be reminded of past failures. But the best customer service companies take their failures head on. [...]

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How to give the right customer experience every time

December 22, 2009

We talk a lot about how important it is to give our customers the right experience. It’s extremely important. Because their experience becomes our brand and that determines their loyalty. The challenge with customer experience though is that everyone is different. So every customer wants a slightly different experience. But it’s not as hard as [...]

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Don’t upsell or cross-sell

December 2, 2009

Many companies expect their employees to cross-sell and upsell customers. We see this all the time. Paying for a book at Barnes & Noble I ALWAYS gets asked to buy their membership. Recently, our waitress at Doolittles tried four times to sell me something I didn’t want. I can’t even workout at my fitness club [...]

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You are the company

November 30, 2009

Here is your Daily Dose of Amazing Service: You are the company And here are some additional thoughts on this topic… No matter what your role is, when you help a customer, in their eyes you are the company. What you do and how you do it becomes your company’s image, to the customers you [...]

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Recognize your loyal customers

November 23, 2009

Here is your Daily Dose of Amazing Service: Recognize your loyal customers And here are some additional thoughts on this topic… Recently I was dining at a favorite local cafe. I’ve been going there regularly since they opened. Our server had waited on me dozens of times in the past. Yet when someone in our [...]

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Bad manners are bad for business

October 21, 2009

People miss meetings or show up very late. They take phone calls or let people walk into the middle of scheduled meetings. They don’t return phone calls. The list goes on. We all deal with these annoying behaviors as we do our jobs and manage our businesses. I did some research on Google and I [...]

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