Zingerman’s 5 Steps to Effectively Handling Customer Complaints
Do you like handling customer complaints? Why or why not?
Building a Culture of Service
To build a culture of great service, taking time to define and teach your expectations to staff will give you more consistent results. Explore five essential components of developing and maintaining a culture of great service in your organization. Contact ZingTrain to learn about customer service seminars and workshops that share tools to enhance your […]
Getting It Right The First Time
Can you think of the last time you received an order, either one that was delivered or something you picked up yourself, only to get home and realize the order isn’t right? Something is missing, the quantity isn’t correct, a dietary restriction wasn’t adhered to, the list goes on… It’s frustrating, for sure. It ends […]
5 Ways to Deliver Better Customer Service During a Pandemic
The security of the familiar in our lives has quickly been overpowered by uncertainty and concerns around safety, rendering many of the ways we regularly do business either much more difficult or, sometimes, even prohibited altogether. Perhaps you experienced a few, if not all of these shifts: adapting work schedules to accommodate new needs at […]
What Does “Great Service” Mean in Your Business?
When you participate in a customer service training seminar at ZingTrain, you will explore how to define great service for your business. Find out why this is an essential first step in the process of improving customer service here and contact ZingTrain to find out when our next customer service training sessions will be offered. […]
One Customer at a Time
At Zingerman’s we’ve done a lot of work over the past few years to introduce effective measurements to assess the quality of our service work. We do things like mystery shopping, customer callbacks, and track complaints, order accuracy and late deliveries. All have helped us compile data that we use to guage the effectiveness of […]
Striving for Third Place
Becoming what‘s known as a “third place” is a status that every community-oriented business should want to achieve. I first heard the idea of the third place in reading Ray Oldenburg’s book, The Great Good Place, originally published in 1989. Here is the key concept: As Oldenburg explains, the “first place is the home; the […]
EVEN MORE Low-Cost Service Tips for High-Stress Times
As we all know (and as I’ve covered in the last two articles in this series: Low-Cost Service Tips in High-Stress Times, and MORE Low-Cost Service Tips), great service is about getting the big and small things right. In this third installment of basic but useful service strategies that we put into practice at Zingerman’s, […]
MORE Low-Cost Service Tips
Great service is about getting the big and small things right—and in this tough economy, keeping customers happy has even greater significance. Therefore, here is the second installment of basic but useful service strategies that we put into practice at Zingerman’s. Some of these can be implemented one at a time, starting tomorrow morning if […]
Low-Cost Service Tips for High-Stress Times
In part one of a three-part series, we learn about rules for greeting guests (and, yes, there are rules) and boosting the service skills of long-term employees. Low-Cost Customer Service Tips to Keep Customers Coming Back In light of the tough economic times, great service is an even more compelling area for focus than usual. […]
Loyal for Life
IN RECENT ISSUES, I’VE FOCUSED ON THE INFORMATION WE’VE GLEANED FROM THE ZINGERMAN’S EXPERIENCE INDICATOR (ZXI), or what others in the business world refer to as the Net Promoter Score. Part of me thinks I should switch to another topic but as the findings keep coming and continue to have a positive impact on our […]
ZXI: A New Way to Measure Service
Some time ago, I spoke at the Inc. 500 Conference in Savannah. The biggest perk was to hear the other presenters, such as former President Clinton. The presentation that had the greatest lasting impact on Zingerman’s was by Scott Cook of Intuit. Intuit makes Quickbooks, Quicken, TurboTax and other accounting software. Cook talked about the […]
