Micah Solomon

To discuss why the retail customer experience matters, even when your customers are locked into buying from you, we need to back up a step or two: When you’re a retailer, there are two possible commercial relationships you can have with your customers.

Scenario 1:  Your customer has no actual need to buy what you’re selling (although she may buy it anyway).  Scenario 1 is your retail reality when you’re selling:

Here’s a customer service consulting secret that won’t cost you a penny, assuming you have some old luggage lying around. Give your business the rollaboard test.

It’s a simple test you can do with a single piece of rolling luggage.

Let me explain.

This morning, holiday notwithstanding, I was sitting in a Philadelphia airport club lounge watching a fellow business passenger roll in (meaning he walked in, his luggage rolled in) to stock up on Wifi and crackers, like the rest of us, before a day of travel. Well-oiled though his luggage may have been, it still made the distinctive, loud sound that every rollaboard makes on a hard surface:  rat-a-ratta-ratta-tat.

You could hear him coming from literally 30 feet away.

At least I could hear him.  The three employees behind the reception counter acted as if they had heard...

A customer service initiative — whether it’s formal and assisted by customer service consultants , informal [you do it all yourself], or anywhere in between — can reap significant rewards for a company in just about any industry. The goal, the highest level you can hope to accomplish with such an endeavor, is to learn what your customers appreciate, tolerate, and actively dislike, and to creatively redeploy your resources (including one of the key ones: attention) in  ways that help you win customer loyalty and improve your bottom-line success.

In other words, it’s all about getting your company to think like a customer.

If you want to try this on your own, start like this:

a)...

There’s a particular paradox that experts in customer service discover early on. (And by “expert in customer service” I mean to include anyone who takes to heart the day to day lessons available to us from those often delightful, often frustrating human beings we work with every day, the ones who keep us in business.  By “expert,” in other words, I mean, in all likelihood, you.)

Here’s the paradox:  The people who look like your worst customers may in fact be your best customers.

Who returns the most stuff?  The customers who buy even more stuff than they return.

Which customers find (and bitch to you about) the typos and dead links on your website? The customers who care about your website.

Which diner lets you know the butter is too hard to spread?  The one who actually cares about the meal she’s about to eat.  (And who will likely return to dine with you again and...