by Kevin Stirtz on September 24, 2012
It’s a trick question. The right answer has nothing to do with how awesome your customers are. It has everything to do with how much you do to help them be awesome. Oh, and I don’t mean just awesome either. Here, “awesome” is a proxy for successful, happy, please, excited, thrilled or whatever experience outcome they are looking for. You can use whatever adjective you want. I use the word “awesome” because it fits with a graphic that tells a smart story about how to keep customers coming back. It’s by Tom Fishburne who calls himself a “marketoonist”. Tom’s a bright guy who [...]
Tonight we had a delicious dinner at Famous Dave’s in Burnsville. I’ll be honest, what brought us there was the offer of a free dinner. (It was in honor of Debbie’s birthday.) What surprised us was the amazing customer service we experienced. As we walked in we were greeted by Jacob. He made instant eye contact with us and delivered a big smile as he welcomed us into Famous Dave’s. The rest of the evening was a pleasant mix of BBQ pulled pork, mashed potatoes and fun conversation with Jacob. We learned a little of the history of Famous Dave’s. [...]
by Kevin Stirtz on May 31, 2012
When Dave Carroll was finally told by a United Airlines employee he would get no reimbursement for his broken guitar (and that it was his fault) he began a journey that even he never imagined. His goal at that time was to write three songs about how United Airlines broke his guitar. He had hoped to reach a million people with his story. Instead, he reached 100 million people, he has elevated his profile as a singer/song writer (a talented one too) and he has become something of a celebrity in the world of customer service. Oh, and he has [...]
Our friends at Dictionary.com define the word communicate this way: To impart knowledge of; make known: to communicate information This is something companies are very good at. They should be. Big companies have entire departments dedicated to communicating. They “impart information” and make their messages known on a grand scale. For decades, big business (and small business too) has spentvast amounts of money perfecting the fine art of communicating. Trouble is, being a skilled communicator isn’t worth much anymore. Because, as the definition above implies, communicating is a one-way deal. To be successful, all you have to do is make your story known. If you are [...]
by Kevin Stirtz Yo, dude, don’t leave me hanging Every day the Internet makes it easier for people to connect. Employees, customers, friends, family, neighbors…you name it. We have more technology than ever before that can help us reach out to people. If we choose to. And that’s a big problem for many businesses. They choose to NOT reach out to customers. Actually it’s worse than that. Too many businesses ignore when customers reach out to them. Every day businesses are served up piping hot customer engagement opportunities and they walk right by. They ignore their customers’ attempts to connect and converse [...]
by Kevin Stirtz on March 17, 2010
In 2006, while writing an article for AllBusiness.com, I discovered Google had about 39,000 listings for the search: “Shamrock Shake”. Today, the same search throws us 877,000 possibilities. That’s like the city of Muskogee, Oklahoma, growing to the size of Detroit in four years. There are over 200 videos about these fun, minty shakes. Roughly 20,000 people do a search related to them every month. There are currently about 11,000 blog posts that mention them. And news items abound. Just this morning I was talking on the radio about it with John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee. I’d call that customer [...]
Today, Erik Qualman, at ClickZ, published his proposed list of social media thought leaders. It lays out his plan to create a crowd-sourced ranking of the most influential people in social media today. As I scanned the list of 32 contenders many of the names were familiar. Some more familiar than others. I counted at least 8 of them (25% of the list) with whom I’ve had a conversation or two in the past year. This is one clue of how powerful social media can be. Back in the day, before social media technology, it would have been highly unlikely [...]
by Kevin Stirtz on February 5, 2010
In 2009, Dave Carroll (a professional musician from Nova Scotia, Canada) engaged a massive worldwide audience to share his customer service story about United Airlines. Using YouTube.com to deliver his message, he wrote and performed a song that has made an impact. Some people estimate 100 million people saw his video. You see, United Airline broke his $3500 guitar then rejected his request that they pay for it. But after his video went viral United changed their corporate mind and offered to reimburse him. I see several important lessons here for management. 1. Do the right thing first, not last. [...]
