Most writers and speakers about customer service are focused on simply describing it, rather than paying attention to how to create the leadership characteristics that they want companies to develop. Their work seems to manifest itself mostly in generalizations and to imply that those generalizations will always work for your organization. Beware of what seem to be shortcuts.

Customer-centered businesses are empowering their employees to make a difference while they are at work, not just after they leave. If we want to make the world a better place, part of that effort happens when we can create really great new ideas for our customers — ideas that make people more productive.

  In 1974, Art Fry was wondering how to keep the bookmarks in place in his hymnal when he remembered the adhesive Dr. Spencer Silver made. After making a few samples and distributing them to his colleagues, Fry found his sticky bookmarks being used as notes, and everyone wanted more samples.   Benefit to the […]

All of us are well aware that basic knowledge is getting more basic, because it is more easily accessible. Google and other high-performance search engines have proven that. Customer 3D™ organizations are factoring this trend into the design of their services in order to creatively grow their businesses. It’s happening at two ends of the […]

Professor Theodore (Ted) Levitt deserves the first entry in the Thinking-Like-a-Customer Ideas—Classic version. In The Marketing Imagination, 1983, Levitt asserted that people don’t buy things but, instead, buy solutions to problems. He called it a “leap from the obvious to the meaningful.” One of his memorable examples referred to Leo McGinneva’s quote about why people […]