Customer Service

Zappos pizza deliveries, Nordstrom snow chains — the customer-service folklore is great theatre, but it's terrible strategy for most businesses. Inflated expectations are expensive to meet and impossible to sustain. Here's why those legendary stories aren't actually aimed at you, and what to deliver instead.

Customer service and customer retention get talked about as if they're the same thing. They aren't — but the link between them is more interesting than most CX talks make out. Here's a real story about a wedding, a Flight Centre travel agent, and three facts that explain why great service really does keep customers.

Two companies, two service crises, two very different responses. Buffer's hack and Crazy Domains' outage are a real-world A/B test in how to do service recovery — one a masterclass, the other a cautionary tale. Here's exactly what each did, side by side, and what the difference cost them.

When MozLand's service melted down, the temptation was to spin, downplay or hide. They didn't. Their public apology is a textbook example of service recovery done in the open. Here are the six things they got right — and what to copy the next time something blows up on your watch.

Using a customer's name during a transaction sounds like a corporate-training cliché. The data says it's worth nine percentage points of customer satisfaction. Here's the research, and why such a small personal touch outperforms most expensive service investments.

Customers control the relationship now, which means every piece of communication has to earn its place — relevant to them, profitable to you. Most marketing comms fail one or both tests. Here are the four bridges you need to cross to fix that, starting with knowing what each customer is actually worth.