All Things Related to customer service
Anyone know what it means to “delight” customers? Or what it takes to exceed their expectations? Is it even worth the effort? These are some questions raised in the latest Harvard Business Review article, Stop Trying To Delight Your Customers (or read Anne Miner’s synopsis Should you stop trying to “exceed customer expectations”?). I once [...]
The Price Of Free And Google Voice
07.15.2010
There’s an update – and positive resolution – to this saga. What’s the price of free? It’s not a trick question like “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb” but a dead serious one, particularly if you’re a small business relying on inexpensive business solutions to succeed. You might use Zoho CRM for your customer database, Evernote [...]
The Best of Gravit8 Interactivity 2009
12.31.2009
Prompted and inspired by Jay Ehret (@TheMarketingGuy), I thought I would take a look at which blogposts were the most popular in 2009 based on total pageviews. Here they are, ranked by popularity and with my own reflections:
Trouble Brewing For Starbucks?
01.28.2009
Starbucks is taking a rather interesting (and somewhat dangerous) approach to economic decline: they’re not automatically brewing decaf coffee after noon, though you can still get it upon request. My take? Good for Starbucks. I’ll go out on a limb here and say they did their homework on not only cost-savings but quantify just how [...]
Being Transparent Or Inviting Your Customers Into The Kitchen
01.07.2009
There’s some spirited debate brewing around the idea of transparency and its benefits to customer service. Is it best to let the customer be ‘blissfully unaware’ of the company’s processes (essentially how it works)? Or is it better to allow them into the kitchen to see how everything is cooked? I argue strongly for the [...]
Five Ways To Treat Employees Like Customers
07.07.2008
What if your organization applied the same degree of focus on the internal retention of employees as it does on the external retention of customers?
At Connection Cafe: Don’t Take Your Staff’s Engagement For Granted
06.25.2008
Today I published my first post for the Connection Cafe, Convio’s company blog. I’m hoping it gets some energetic and passionate comments so head over there and start a dialogue. Connection Cafe is largely written to the nonprofit audience, but if you’re from the corporate world don’t let that scare you off. I’ll be dealing [...]
Taking Care Of The People Who Matter Most
06.04.2008
I’m always excited when a book on employee engagement comes into my field of vision. It just adds more validity to the principles and practice behind the work I do to help organizations design a remarkable work experience. A fairly recent book added to my library is Sybil Stershic’s Taking Care of the People Who [...]
Would You Consider A Customer Care Strategy With Twitter?
05.01.2008
One of my new Twitter follows Chris Rash posted a tweet this morning as a question: Twitter for customer service? Now if you’re not familiar with Twitter you might have read that as “twits in customer service” and thought that’s nothing new. This pervasive public attitude (which isn’t going away) is precisely why companies need [...]
Mistakes Happen…
01.20.2008
…it’s how we deal with mistakes that count. The universe must want me to learn something important because within 30 hours, two distinct situations occurred to illustrate this point. In one instance, I was on the mistake-maker side and in the second instance I was on the receiving end of someone else’s mistake. And in [...]









