Joseph Michelli

Not All Customers are Jolly but Service Professionals SHOULD BE | 7 Tips for Managing Customer Complaints and Stress This Holiday Season

The holiday season may bring out the best in humanity, but holiday shopping can also bring out the worst. We’ve all seen the “Black Friday Brawls” as shoppers play tug-of-war with the last doorbuster sale item and we've heard of “Cyber Grinches” who gobble up online deals for high-demand items only to resell them when scarcity drives up the price.
No matter your business, people can become – let’s call it - frayed this time of year. So, here are a few tips I’ve shared across the years to help people work through a service challenge or customer complaint. I hope you find value in them as you seek to make this a peaceful and profitable holiday season.

Winning this Holiday Season | The Art of Selling through Human Experience Creation

The next few weeks will be “make or break” for retailers. With more shopping occurring online (particularly through mobile devices), brick and mortar retailers are looking for ways to get people to leap from their couches and into their stores.
Here are some things to consider as you build a lasting customer relationship based on positive sales experiences.

Create a Hostile Environment for the Ungrateful

I often consult with leaders who are trying to develop human-centric cultures. In the context of that work, I have shared my view that it's essential to make it easy for compassionate and caring people to stay with your business and also to make it easy for ungrateful and scarcity-minded people to find employment elsewhere. Unfortunately, I have seen many examples where talented and positive people churn because the culture does not suit them. Wouldn’t it be great if your company was actually too optimistic and positive such that it drove the miserable away?
In this Thanksgiving week (where we formally take pause to give thanks), I thought it would be worthwhile to remind ourselves of the importance of driving a year-round culture of optimism and gratitude.

The Formula for Experience Success: Artificial + Human Intelligence

Wherever you get your news, you are likely to read or hear something about the role sales-enhancing technology will play this holiday season. There's much at stake for this year’s retailers with spending projected to break a record and possibly top the 1 trillion-dollar mark.
Whether it's the way Target will be using augmented reality to help families visualize the Christmas trees they will be choosing for their homes, how Walmart will be enabling shoppers to scan the toy catalog using their mobile devices to rapidly locate items, or Best Buy’s use of push messaging to give shoppers real-time discount alerts – technology will be a shopping enabler this holiday season.

Catching What‘s Right | The Art of Service Storytelling

From my perspective, when it comes to customer experience excellence, what gets rewarded gets done and what gets talked about also gets done. After 25 years of consulting in what used to be called customer service and now is called customer experience, I have seen the power of well-designed customer experience reward and recognition programs as well as the effectiveness of leaders who tell stories of optimal customer experience delivery.
My favorite example of leadership storytelling involves David Feinberg, M.D. and the way he used stories to (in David’s words) “lead a revolution to put care back into healthcare.”

Convenience over Privacy? Paying Attention to Consumer Trends

Let me give you a sense of how far customers are willing to be tracked in the name of personalization and convenience. Granted, my example comes from Sweden, but I sense it is a harbinger of things to come on a global basis.

Inspiring Growth: Not Demanding It!

I am convinced that most people want to make the lives of those they serve better. When they fall short, those individuals often need help to develop a specific skill or the confidence to believe they will find better options if they persist. Customer experience excellence is a core competency, not an instantly attainable destination. Great leaders help develop that competency in their team members by navigating the nuances and complexities of human experience delivery.

Customer Experience Excellence Requires Shared Communication Platforms

Smartsheet (a solution provider that helps organizations streamline information sharing both internally and externally) announced their Achieve as One Alliance and I'm honored to be a founding member of that alliance along with others like Keith Grossman, President of TIME, and Nick Sinai, former US Deputy CTO and Adjunct Faculty Member at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The alliance’s charter is “to explore how organizations can bridge the gap between people and technology to drive greater organizational effectiveness and achievement.” In keeping with that objective, Smartsheet recently asked Engine Research to look at the relationship between communication flow, organizational effectiveness, and customer impact. Here are a few findings from that study...

Success is a Patient, Team Sport – Experiencing Collaboration The Airbnb Way

If you are someone who doesn’t like to wait, writing a book is not for you! This week my book, The Airbnb Way – 5 Leadership Lessons for Igniting Growth through Loyalty, Community and Belonging will be released!
Given that I’ve written nine business books, The Airbnb Way was completed rather swiftly. Several of my prior books took closer to three years from inception to publication! I share all of this to illustrate two points that relate to social trends, collaboration, and project completion.

The Never-ending Journey to Customer Experience Excellence

There are some fairly subtle and under-the-radar changes taking place for a brand about which, I have written two books (The Starbucks Experience and Leading the Starbucks Way). Let’s quickly look at five of them and what each tells us about the adaptive course Starbucks is taking toward continued customer experience excellence.