Whenever I ask audience participants to describe why they are loyal to a business; inevitably the characteristic of TRUST is mentioned. Trust is not won overnight, trust must be earned. Accuracy, consistency, and honesty on the part of the business helps to win that trust with a customer. I had been noticing a rattling sound [...]

Our economic downturn has forced us to examine many of our institutions and several of them are getting failing grades. While Wall Street, banks, and our regulatory agencies are rightfully catching most of the heat, our colleges are not looking too good under renewed scrutiny. Less than 60% of entering freshmen will graduate from 4 [...]

What better time than Valentine’s Day to let your employees know how much you love and appreciate them. Without them, where would you be with your customers? There is a direct correlation between excellent internal customer service and excellent external customer service. Here are some suggestions: 1. Send a handwritten note. Supervisors can send them [...]

    I was told I could return a dress my mother had purchased for me at the Fresh Produce store in St. Augustine to the Orlando store as long as I had the receipt and was within the 30 day timeframe. The Orlando store is located in the center of Universal Studios Park – [...]

It was once perceived that higher education was unique to its own and that best management and organizational practices like branding, imaging, and customer service were not applicable. Somehow higher education was inured to group dynamics and best organizational and management practices. Higher education is now being scrutinized as lower graduation rates, lower retention rates [...]

> Going into a Subway restaurant that I had never been into before, I stood in line behind two other customers.  A young mother with a child in a stroller was at the counter and the employee (called “sandwich artists”) greeted her by name and asked if she wanted her usual – turkey on wheat [...]

>Following are five things you should do when your business has made a mistake with a customer. 1.  Quickly admit to the mistake and not try to cover it up.  When you come forward and admit a mistake, customers are more forgiving.2.  Take ownership and don’t try to blame it on others.  Notre Dame School [...]

>According to a CNN report, we Americans spend hours and hours waiting for technicians, furniture deliverers, and the cable guys to show up.  In 2011, this time spent waiting on services cost American workers $37.7 billion!  The average wait time has been 4.5 hours and the average number of times a year for waiting for [...]

> When you think of a business, it is really composed of many customers and suppliers internally within the organization itself. In a manufacturing company for example, the sales department usually starts the process by getting an order from a customer. They pass this order to the Purchasing department, who sends it to the Engineering [...]

> An experiment conducted in the early 1960’s involved placing a pole with a bunch of bananas every day in the center of a monkey’s habitat.  The monkeys would climb the pole to get the bananas, because that is what monkeys do.  One day, as a monkey climbed the pole, the researcher sprayed it with [...]