Yearly Archives: 2011

Merging Technical and Personal Performance to Create Stellar Customer Relationships

Creating a loyal client relationship requires great personal performance and great technical performance. Customers actually sometimes care less about what they ask for than about how they are treated. We can never achieve a high level of customer loyalty without

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles

Training Ourselves to Trust

Most people believe that trust is something people have to earn, and that such trust is granted consciously. This article challenges part of that notion. What if the reality is that we trust someone because they’ve done things that our

Tagged with: , , , ,
Posted in Articles

The Values Conversation

The values conversation is the second of three critical conversations for supervisors to have with team members and prospective hires. At ITX, we are implementing these conversations across the board, with all of our team members, in order to align

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles

Choosing the Right Words:

How Language Choice Impacts Comprehension and Results When we need to discuss a less-than-optimal situation with someone, we often struggle for the right words to effectively communicate what we need to say without causing resentment. Delivering criticism, no matter how

Tagged with: , , , ,
Posted in Articles

Workable Availability

Workable availability is about getting clear that we will be accountable for our responsibilities at all times, even when someone else is standing in for us. This includes when we are on a lunch break, out sick, on vacation or

Tagged with: , , ,
Posted in Articles

Rating Your Team Based on What Really Matters:

Values and Critical Behaviors by Ralph Dandrea, Frederick Beer, Jonathan Coupal, Sean Flaherty and Hernan Chiosso Determining a team member’s efficacy can be a daunting task. Traditionally, managers have relied upon their memories of recent events to critique performance during

Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles

Distinguishing Superheroes from Villains

Customer service is usually perceived as a necessary evil, not something we get excited about, on either side of the phone. What if we instead viewed our part of the customer service equation enthusiastically, as an opportunity rather than a

Tagged with: , ,
Posted in Articles

Introduction to Spectacular Service

A 7-Part Recipe to Move Clients from Anxiety to Joy When clients complain – in any industry, whether it’s service or product based, and whether it’s an internal client or an external client — our first instinct is to try

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Articles

Distinguishing Specified from Important

When issues arise at the workplace, it can sometimes seem like a scene right out of an Abbott and Costello bit, as one misunderstanding begets another until we and our clients are confused and unproductive. Situations like this often arise

Tagged with: , , , ,
Posted in Articles

When the Clock Starts Ticking

One of the key principles of customer service is understanding our clients’ perception of their interaction with us. It does us no good to do an incredible job if, at the end, a customer thinks we’ve failed them in some

Tagged with: , ,
Posted in Articles