Twenty years running a business will teach you a fair bit about customer service — but it's not everything. So we asked twelve small-business owners and customer service experts a single question: what's your personal, number-one customer service must-do? The answers are sharper, weirder and more actionable than the textbooks.
SMS keeps showing up in customer experience programs because the open rates and response times are hard to argue with. Used badly, it's an interruption. Used well, it's a convenience customers come to rely on. Here are seven concrete ways to deploy SMS that improve B2B customer experience without becoming a nuisance.
In B2B, a single misunderstood interaction can quietly end a relationship that took years to build. The fix isn't a heroic intervention — it's a steady commitment to learning what's not working. Here are four approaches that consistently improve customer interactions, drawn from years of B2B feedback data.
Roughly two-thirds of customers say they'd rather solve a problem themselves than talk to a person — but only when the self-service experience actually works. Most don't. Here's the checklist for building self-service that customers prefer, not just tolerate, across software, knowledge base, chatbots and the human safety net behind them.
275,000 HSBC customers went unpaid on a Friday before a long weekend. It's an extreme example, but your business has its own version — service failures happen, and the recovery process is what decides whether customers stay or leave. This is the long-form implementation guide: definition, business case, sources of leads, and how to make it stick.
Designing your business so customers are always 100% satisfied is a fantasy — what matters is the process that kicks in when satisfaction breaks. Here's how to design a service recovery process around negative feedback from your customer surveys, and the four steps to make it run reliably enough to drive profit.