Touch Points

Vacation & stuff

Hi Folks, It's been a great week here in Austin catching up on things at the Wizard Academy. We had a beautiful night last night at the new Academy Campus, singing around the campfire, talking with a bunch of really interesting people. The raw land of the campus possesses an incredible energy and is going to be a very special place when it's completed in the next couple of years.

I'll be heading home on Saturday followed by a week on vacation at our cottage in the beautiful Muskoka region of Ontario. Because I don't have high speed connection at our cottage, I will be off line with Touch Points until early August. But I will be collecting more stories and experiences and will share them with you when we get back together.

Ciao for now!

Steve

Customer Experience Equity II

OOPS!

I’m travelling in Texas with David Martin of yesterday’s story about Mercer Hall Inn. Today the Holiday Inn in Austin Texas just blew any built up customer experience equity with Dave. Let me explain. We have been here for a three day course at the Wizard Academy and staying at the Holiday Inn. I stay there all the time I’m in Austin. It’s not expensive, it’s well located and totally unpretentious. Dave and I have stayed there before and felt pretty good about staying there again.

Dave wanted to call home from his room and before he did, he tried to find out what the price would be for the calls...

Customer Service Equity

“We want our guests to be surprised when they arrive at our Inn and that’s why we don’t tell them about the free parking, the free breakfast, the bottled water, the cookies and the fresh fruit free in every room that none of our competitors offer. If a potential customer is phoning and price shopping, we might be just a little higher price, but the experience the guest has at our Inn is more important than a ten dollar saving.”

David Martin is a restauranteur and innkeeper in Stratford Ontario. His little 14 room boutique Mercer Hall Inn has only come into existence in the past 3 years and already is one of the most popular hotels in Stratford,....

Can You Read This?

Jim Hayes, a friend of mine here in Stratford who has an amazing business in used office furniture sent me this. It has absolutely nothing to do with Customer Service, but it's fun.

I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg
THE PAOMNNEHAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are,
the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but
the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Handling Price Objections with a Smile

From Gord Hafecost of London, Ontario

HI Steve: I have a couple of stories of how I was cracked up by a Chinese Restaurant and a Korean Variety Store Owner. They were the best I ever saw at handling the price objection with grace and humour.

First...28 years ago when I was working at CKOX...

Cuckoo for Customers

Here's an article from Alison Overholt of Fast Company that profiles Rackspace a web-hosting company. Even in the high tech world, high touch solutions seem to be working. Let me know if you see any way of applying the concepts to your work space. I must give credit to JG Tornoe author of the Hispanic Trending Blog for alerting me to this article. Thanks JG. Steve

Here's one high-tech company where dedication to customers borders on the loony.

From: Issue 83 | June 2004, Page 86 By: Alison Overholt
Joey Parsons is wearing a straightjacket, and he's surrounded by a crowd applauding his commitment. Not to a mental institution, but to providing the best service to his company's customers. Parsons, 24, has just won the Straightjacket Award, the most coveted employee distinction at Rackspace, a San Antonio-based Web-hosting company. His colleagues voted him March's winner of the award, which recognizes the employee who best lives up to the Rackspace motto of delivering "fanatical support," a dedication to customers that's so intense it borders on the loony.

It's a far cry from....

The Marketing Zone

This article by Stuart Ayling of Marketing Nous makes the great point that if any of the touch points break down in a customer experience then you're fighting an uphill battle to keep them. Read On. Steve

The Marketing Zone concept is my visual definition of marketing. After many years of managing marketing activities and answering the question "What is marketing?" I've found this to be the best way to explain it.

The Marketing Zone comprises all the possible touch-points of your business. A touch-point represents every time your business comes into contact with someone. This could be from a sales activity, deliveries, advertising, service calls, word-of-mouth mentions and industry communications.

Managing the risk in digital customer touch-points

This article is written by Pat Fleck, President of Cooper, a consulting company out of Palo Alto California. Enjoy! Steve

Are your customers getting a helping hand or the cold shoulder?
The great thing about big American businesses is that they give us many of the stories that become the fabric of our lives. Frankly, we'd rather not endure the circumstances that result in the stories, but like train wrecks and tornados, they are entirely unforgettable and we talk about them for years. I'm talking about customer service horror stories, of course.
We all have many of them. The stories get particularly interesting when they relate to monopolies or near monopolies, otherwise known as oligopolies. Why?....

The Church of Closing the Sale

From the Persuasion Architecture blog - by Anthony Garcia

If just 'closing the sale' is the alpha and the omega of your business model, you could be needing a drug prescription really soon.

In our world of rampant connectivity, we each possess instant access to a spread of information about almost any product or service we are in the market for today. It is inevitable, the word about your company will get out..... good or bad.