We have all read about journaling and the advantages it has to help improve your life, stay focused on your tasks for the day or just help you reflex on your life.  Here is how I journal just about everyday which give me a sense of accomplishment and a charge for the day.  Yes, I have already journaled before writing this blog this morning.

1. Do not feel it’s a chore but something that will bring you happiness and and a sense of accomplishment.

2. If you only have one thing to write, great!  Do not listen to the “Experts” who say you should journal for at least 15 minutes a day, plus where did they get that research?

3. Write about anything and everything that makes you happy or gets something off your chest.  If you have a big meeting or presentation and writing about it will help bring focus to you, go for it.  If you are meeting someone special and you want to write about it, you will always have those first words about that someone special.  If you want to talk with God or any other religious figure to bring you peace, write away.

4. If you want to draw pictures in your journal with your stories, now that is way cool.  I wish I was an artist because I would definitely be adding some call drawings but my stick figures just do not look good.

So, when you find the best way for you to journal stick with it and enjoy each day.  Do not over think but just write.  I hope this helps you improve something in your life and remember always make it a great day!

Let me first start with how much I dislike hospitals. I guess I have always associated them with pain, suffering and death.  Even when my nieces and nephews were born there were complications and surgeries, so even the joy of birth was tainted for me. I had the unfortunate experience recently to be with my sister in the hospital, suffering from severe complications from her hysterectomy surgery. This was her second visit to the hospital since her surgery and the more we thought about how her doctor was treating her the more we realized that he made a mistake in her surgery and was not willing to admit to the mistake. You know, doctors are perfect and do not make mistakes.  Well, that is the reason she is in the hospital, the real lack of compassion comes from the nurseries and the techs that are working on the floor in the Women’s Surgical Center.

Now I will have to give a shout out to several of the nurses who truly did an amazing job and really love their job. I was even impressed with their compassion and how they wanted to help my sister get out of pain and out of the hospital as fast as possible. Unfortunately the rude ones far out weigh the kindness of the good ones.  When my sister would call the nurses desk the rudeness that would ooze out of the phone was horrific. They no more cared for my sister than the man on the moon. I need to ask the question, if your job is to help the people in need, why then, do you not act like you do not care for these people? Please get out of your job and away from the hospital, your poison only brings down the patients who need all the positive energy they can get to help them get better. We did everything that we could to have a positive attitude and treat the nurses with kindness and respect even though we were not receiving the same in return. I even brought in cookies for the nurses to thank them for helping with my sister.  One of the worst things that I think they did or should I say not do was refuse to give her a sponge bath, even though it is their job.  We took it upon ourselves to give her the sponge bath to help bring her some comfort.  If I had to grade the doctors, nurses and techs at Northside, I would give them a good C – for their lack of compassion.  Again, we did have some very good doctors, nurses and techs who helped us but the others clouded their goodness and what I will remember will be them and not the good ones.

My recommendation to the hospital would be to get some serious training on customer service for everyone in the hospital. There are a lot of great coaches out there in customer service that would do a phenomenal job in training the staff and would turn all their patients into Raving Fans!

As we kick off another new year have you thought about how you will be improving the customer service in your business?  Most of us think that we do not need to improve anything with our customer service and feel our teams are doing well in handling our customers.  I challenge you to pull back the kimono and really analyze your customer service departments because is really doing well ok or do you want to be doing extraordinary with your customer service?  We truly want to be building Raving Fans out of our clients and keeping them happy with our products or services.

I see businesses everyday who can improve on the smallest things from the greeting on the phone to using please and thank you when speaking with your clients.  Hire a company to do a secret shopper on your business from the phone to when they enter your business and make sure you are sitting down when you read their report. If you do not have a customer service training program for your employees in how you want them interacting with your clients, then the employee is going to resort back to how they were raised and unfortunately most people are not raised with the best manners.

I know we all want the best for our businesses but most of us focus on only our sales and marketing to bring in the new business but neglect to pay attention to our customer service in keeping the clients. Make this one of your New Years Resolutions for your business and even if you change just one thing that would be an improvement over last year and would make at least one client happy.

Good luck in 2016 with hitting your goals!

Nothing excites me more than to blog about outstanding customer service. A group of us decided to stop in at the St. Regis in Atlanta, GA for a drink before our dinner and as we waited for my brother-in-law to park the car we picked out our table in their bar. The waiter approached our table and had a great personality and warmed up to us immediately. When my brother-in-law arrived he recommended we go outside since it was a relatively warm evening at the end of November. We picked a table by the outdoor fire and our waiter moved everything outside for us and would continue to be our server. My brother-in-law asked for the assorted nuts and our waiter told us that they changed the menu and it was no longer offered as part of the bar menu. He then proceeded to tell us that he would take our drink order and see what he could do in finding us those assorted nuts.

After bringing us our bottle of champaign our waiter returned several minutes later with the assorted nuts. He explained to us that he had to go into the dining area of the hotel to get us what we wanted. It would have been so easy for him to apologize and tell us that the bar no longer has that item on the menu and what else we would like to order. Instead, he went, as I like to say, “Above and Beyond” to make us happy and I will be a returning customer to the St. Regis in Atlanta, Georgia. His customer service act did not take him very long to complete but we were rewarded and he was rewarded with a nice tip.

The tip for the men and women who own or are working in the services industry,  always remember that you can make a positive impact on someone’s life by going “Above and Beyond” in your job. Remember you are there to serve, so why not always deliver knock out service.

Have a great holiday season!

Cheers! Matt

I was crunched for time before my international trip to St Petersburg, Russia and Helsinki, Finland to get a button sewn back onto my jacket. I decided to take my jacket and button to Kingdom Cleaners in Old Town Alexandria and see if they could help me with my dilemma. Of course this was Saturday and they are closed on Sunday and I was leaving on Monday. When I walked in they were friendly as always and asked me when I would need it back. I told him today and the situation why and he said come back before we close. I was super excited that they were going to get this done for me the same day.

When I returned right before they closed, I had my wallet out expecting to pay a big price for same day service and as he handed me my jacket he said No Charge. I at first was speechless and said please let me pay for the service and he said, no. I am still shocked that they took care of me on the same day and did not charge me for the service. Talking about keeping a client for life, I will never change cleaners as long as they are the owners.

Thank you Kingdom Cleaners for Going Above and Beyond to help one of your loyal customers!

I had to buy a new battery for my heart rate monitor and I knew CVS had a big selection of batteries. I stopped in one and was looking on the display and could not find the 2025 in any of the brands. I found a CVS employee and asked him if there were any other batteries located in the store. He told me no and that the reason that the display was empty was because the shipment had come in last night and they had not gotten around to unloading everything. He was very flustered and was stepping away from me in order not to help me anymore. I was a little shocked that he did not want to help me find the product that I wanted to buy, actually spend money in his store. He turned away money from the company that he works at, that pays his salary. Not only did I walk out of that CVS but went down the street and walked into Walgreens and found the 2025 battery and not only bought one but I bought two, since I realized they are hard to find.

The employee at CVS had a simple solution and could have told me to hold-on and he would go back and look at the shipping invoice and see if the 2025 batteries were even in that shipment and if yes, it would take him a couple of extra minutes to go through the boxes to find the batteries. I would have greatly appreciated his effort to find the item I wanted to buy and would have walked around the store and bought several other items that I needed to get while I waited. Unfortunately, he was not trained in customer service and was to flustered to continue his job of unpacking the products to get them on the shelf then to stop and help a customer who wanted to spend money. Remember the reason you have a job is because of the customers coming in and spending money and from time to time they will need help in locating the product in your store. Take a step back and listen to your customer so you can solve their problem.

I had to call Fedex today to let them know that I wanted to pick up my package at their location instead of waiting all day to get my new iPhone on Monday.  I also had to wait through one attempt at my house, which happened on Friday, in order to make any changes to the delivery location. The customer service representative answered and asked me how he could help and I told him I wanted to pick up my package at their location. He asked me for my tracking number and I told him I had the DOOR TAG number, which I gave to him.  So, instead of listening to me when I said door tag he goes into the script that pulled up associated with my package and proceeded to go into this long explanation of how I had to wait for the first delivery attempt. Of course if he would have listened to me in the beginning when I said I have the door tag number, which means there was already an attempt at my house, he would have saved himself and me the agony of him reading his boring script.  The unfortunate thing with this scene is that customer service representatives hate their jobs and act more like robots than human customer service representatives.  The training these customer service representatives needs to be so much better to make the experience better for both on the phone. I know the scripting is to help them with solving the customer service problem, issue etc on the phone but the simple act of listening would also, in most instances, cut down on the time on the phone and solve the customer’s problem and then both sides are happy that the amount of time spent on the phone was reduced.  So, for everyone reading this post, remember to listen before you speak and you will be surprised with what you hear.

Make it a great day!

I was on vacation last week, staying at this great place for my third time and we were hanging out at the pool with some other people that unfortunately had to check out that day. The cleaning crew was busy in the morning cleaning all the rooms and the Operations Manager rushes by and drops a bomb on the people checking out that he cannot believe the mess they left in their room. They were kind of shocked that he would say something like this to them and even explained to us that they had picked up their room and put all trash in a neat pile to be picked up. To me it was no big deal, they helped the cleaning crew by making their job easier. Well it gets better, the Ops Manager not only says something again but 3 more times to them. One of them goes to the Manager of the facility to complain about how rude the Ops Manager is being to them. The Manager obviously says something to the Ops Manager because he storms over to them and confronts them head on and starts arguing with a Paying customer. I then have to go get the Manager to diffuse the situation.

So, the number 1 rule in a service business or any business is Never argue with your customer, nothing will ever good come from that argument for your business. Yes, I do believe that the customer is always right, they are paying you and you need to provide to them the level of service you are guaranteeing to them. In the scenario I described above, no matter how bad they left the room, you never argue about that with them. They could stay at your place for the next 20 years and end up spending thousands of dollars at your facility. Now all you are going to get is 8 very unsatisfied customers who each will tell between 5 to 10 people how bad they were treated and it could potential sink your business. What I would recommend to them is to have a fund that at the end of the month you take the cleaning crew out to lunch or dinner to thank them for their hard work and then you can laugh about how bad some of the rooms where left but you are showing the team you appreciate them and their hard work.

With social media these days you will always lose in arguing with a client and they will always win when they slam you on every social network. Smile and make the situation better by taking the high road and you will sleep better at night.

Make it a great day!

I was speaking to a company the other day because I was having problem with logging onto their website. I was asked by the customer service representative which browser I use. I told them that I am Mac user so that would be Safari. They then proceed to tell me that their website does not work very well with Safari and that they highly recommended that I switch to another browser. For one thing I am completely stunned that they are telling me to switch browsers. Who develops a web site that is not compatible to all browsers? Why would you be inconveniencing any customer and recommend to them to switch from the browser they use everyday. This representative only wanted to take the easy way out and get me off the line so they could take another call. Their bonus program is obviously flawed and is going for volume instead of quality of service. Please customer service departments, think about the customer and not your call volume. Maybe your call volume is so high because you are not taking the time to talk with your customers in-depth and listen to them which would probably solve future problems they might have with your service.

Make it a great day and weekend! Matt

If you are looking to provide outstanding customer service to your guests you first need to look at how you are on boarding your employees. If you are not teaching them how you want your guests to be treated then you can throw out the whole idea about outstanding customer service.

Today, I was at the grocery store and during my 20 minutes of shopping I saw two different employees ignore two different customer service issues. The first one happened because they only had two cash registers open and myself and three other customers approached them to be checked out. The one employee walked right by all the cash registers and into the office. The one cashier called out to the manager to ring the bell to bring on more cashiers and surprise, who walks out of the office but the one employee who just walked by everyone and saw us waiting. He jumps on a cash registers and takes the next customer. Wow! Is this rocket science 101? You work in a grocery store where you need to stock the shelves and check out customers. If you are not doing one you should be doing the other. Take off your blinders and be proactive!

The second episode happened at the same store with a different employee. I was headed out to the my car with my grocery bags and I see another employee bringing out trash for the dumpster. As I finished loading my car with my bags, I noticed the employee returning from his mission of throwing away the trash and he passes by not one but two empty shopping carts in the parking garage. This is always a problem with grocery stores, since most people are lazy and will not return their carts and that is an entire other blog posts. The grocery store does not have cart returns in the parking garage only one up near the entrance of the store. All the employees know that at any given time of the day there will always be empty shopping carts left in the parking garage, which are a hazard to people driving, getting out of their car or just plan walking through the garage. Keep your customer safe and grab the shopping carts and bring them back to their proper place, what is 30 seconds of your work day? Again take off the blinders, open your eyes to how you can enrich your customers experience at your store.

So, with both of these experiences at the same store within five minutes of each other proves to me that management did not properly on board these employees and I bet they do not have a very good on boarding practice at all for their employees with how to improve their customer experience. After you read this look at your on boarding and see where you have holes or nothing at all with how your employees need to be looking for ways to improve the customer experience.

Make it a great day!!!