Podcast appearances and mentions of adam toporek

Ever wondered how artificial intelligence could reshape the way we work? Join us for an exciting conversation as Jeannie Walters answers a question from former Crack the Customer Code podcast partner and current friend Adam Toporek about the transformative power of AI on the employee experience. Gain insights into how AI can boost efficiency, sharpen decision-making, and foster personalized skill development. You'll hear stories about the good, the bad, and the ugly, as we navigate the potential for role displacement and the crucial need for leaders to focus on reskilling and upskilling their teams.We'll also dive into the ethical maze of AI integration, especially its impact on remote work environments. From concerns about surveillance and privacy to the irreplaceable value of human empathy in customer and employee interactions, listen in as we discuss strategies to support employees who may feel anxious about AI and automation, and how to create moments that make them feel truly valued. Packed with practical tips and forward-thinking strategies, this episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of work.Resources Mentioned:Experience Investigators Website -- experienceinvestigators.comWatch the video version of this episode on YouTube -- youtube.com/@jeanniewaltersWant to ask a question? Visit askjeannie.vip to leave Jeannie a voicemail! (And don't forget to follow Jeannie on LinkedIn! www.linkedin.com/in/jeanniewalters/)

Uncover the secrets of building extraordinary customer relationships in this episode with Adam Toporek, a mastermind in customer experience. In this episode, Lauren delves into Adam's unique insights on leveraging emotional connections and innovative strategies to elevate customer service. Discover how the blend of technology and empathy can transform customer interactions, and why empowering your team is crucial for success.Adam, with his deep entrepreneurial background, also touches on the evolving role of AI in customer experience and shares practical tips from his book 'Be Your Customer's Hero'. Tune in for an episode filled with actionable advice and transformative ideas, perfect for any business looking to improve their customer engagement.If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to rate our show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe Now: https://www.youtube.com/@ExpertsofExperience?sub_confirmation=1 Imagine running your business with a trusted advisor who has your success top of mind. That's what it's like when you have a Salesforce Success Plan. With the right plan, Salesforce is with you through every stage of your journey — from onboarding, to realizing business outcomes, to driving efficient growth.Learn more about what's possible on the Salesforce success plan website: http://sfdc.co/SalesforceCustomerSuccess (00:00) Introduction to Adam Toporek(01:11) Adam's Background and Approach to CX(02:25) Emerging Trends in Customer Experience(04:22) The Role of Emotion in Customer Service(07:56) Identifying and Tracking Moments of Truth in CX(10:50) Insights from Adam's Book "Be Your Customer's Hero"(14:13) Solving the Employee Experience Puzzle(17:14) Defining and Implementing Employee Empowerment(23:19) Real-world Examples of Effective Empowerment(27:34) AI's Impact on Customer Experience(31:39) The Balance Between AI and Human Interaction(35:31) Innovations in Measuring Customer Experience(39:48) Final Advice and Takeaways from Adam Toporek

In this Retain: The Customer Retention Podcast episode, Lauren DeSouza speaks with Adam Toporek, Customer Service Expert at CTS Service Solutions. Together they delve into how to become the customer's hero; how to respond to negative and positive emotions of the customer, and unpacking if technology is a hassle for customers or not.

In this insightful episode, hosts Jake and Gino sit down with Adam Toporek, a customer service expert, author, and consultant. Adam shares fascinating stories from his childhood, painting a picture of his journey to becoming a customer service expert. Drawing on his book, "Be Your Customer's Hero," Adam provides valuable insights on managing the customer experience and underlines the crucial role of effective customer service in boosting profits. Connect with Adam through his website or LinkedIn and Instagram (@AdamToporukCX) to continue the conversation. Don't miss this chance to learn from a pro about improving your customer service and consequently, your profits. We're here to help create multifamily entrepreneurs... Here's how: Brand New? Start Here: https://jakeandgino.mykajabi.com/free-wheelbarrowprofits Want To Get Into Multifamily Real Estate Or Scale Your Current Portfolio Faster? Apply to join our PREMIER MULTIFAMILY INVESTING COMMUNITY & MENTORSHIP PROGRAM. (*Note: Our community is not for beginner investors)

In this week's episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Adam Toporek, author of Be Your Customer's Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines.Adam's an internationally-recognized customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and customer service trainer who helps organizations transform their relationships with their customers through better strategy, training, and communication. He's the founder of Customers That Stick®, and the former co-host of the Crack the Customer Code podcast.Some of the topics we discuss include:It doesn't take grand, superhero actions to become your customer's heroThe need for focusing on peak emotions in the customer experienceConsistently focusing on positive “brand deposits” buys you goodwill with your customersThe service “triggers” that can set your customer offGet the biggest return on your customer experience efforts by identifying and removing your customer's biggest hasslesWhy you should regularly assess your policies and procedures and cut the ones that hinder your employeesHow curating and sharing success stories is one of the best ways to train employeesEmpowering your employees can deliver hassle-free experiencesAdam's 3S process for employees to follow when resolving customer issuesRESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:Adam's siteAdam's book - Be Your Customer's HeroSIMPLE brand episode 38 with Lisa Bodell - we talk about killing stupid rules and policies

Promoting CX Excellence Through Strategic Leadership  On this week's episode of the Digitally Irresistible Podcast, we welcome Adam Toporek. Adam is a third-generation entrepreneur, consultant, and highly sought-after CX keynote speaker. Recognized as one of the top thought leaders in customer experience, Adam is a strategic analyst and consultant with appearances on top media outlets such as “Forbes,” “Entrepreneur,” “AMA,” and more. His innovative strategies guide brands to adapt their CX leadership to drive quality customer service in the digital age. On this episode, we discuss Adam's 3E Leadership Framework that equips CX leaders to guide high-performing customer service teams[GN1]  to maximize positive CX outcomes that optimize digital and human customer interactions.  A Customer-Centric Culture is Key for Employee Engagement and Customer Satisfaction Customer experience is in Adam's blood. His grandfather, father, and mother were all business owners who raised him with a customer-centric focus before it became a catchphrase. His family background taught him the importance of customer experience from a young age.  As a teenager packing boxes in his family's warehouse, Adam remembers “just throwing stuff” in the boxes. His father guided him to realize that the customer's first impression of the order began when they opened the box. He taught Adam how to pack the box neatly and ultimately set the foundation for a customer-centric focus that would direct the course of Adam's career. Adam went on to earn his MBA and develop his own entrepreneurial experience with a customer experience mindset. His expertise led him to recognize the need for brands to develop CX leadership strategies to improve customer service. Adam is now a trusted CX expert, keynote speaker, consultant, and author helping brands cultivate high-performing customer teams through improved education and increased engagement. His book, "Be Your Customer's Hero,"[GN2]  serves as a playbook for customer service success. The 3E Leadership Framework Equips Customer Service Teams for CX Success Amid all the attention given to digital CX strategies, Adam advises CX leaders to recognize the importance of their teams. The digital transformation of customer service is crucial, but brands are still run first and foremost by human beings. Quality customer service teams are more important now than ever before in ensuring positive CX. For customer service teams to succeed, leadership must support them in strategic ways. Adam has developed a three-part framework for leadership that focuses on key areas of frontline employee support that simultaneously improves the employee experience[GN3]  as well as the customer experience. With this 3E Leadership Framework, Adam outlines a strategic path for leaders to model and equip their employees with a customer-centric focus, resulting in increased employee engagement and improved customer retention. 1.   Embody CX leaders must embody a customer-centric culture for their teams. Many brands talk the talk with missions and values that focus on the customer. More importantly, their leaders must walk the talk to ensure the CX culture they espouse aligns with their actual organizational priorities, actions, and practices. Team meetings, quarterly reviews, and most of all, incentives will always communicate a brand's true priorities to employees regardless of the messaging. For employees to embody a customer-centric culture, incentives must be grounded in CX practices and not just sales. Ensuring that the messaging aligns with the culture is an ongoing process. When leadership embodies this in both messaging and culture, employees know that they need to adopt the same customer-centric focus. 2.   Educate Once frontline employees integrate a customer-centric approach, leadership must educate them in how to implement it. Training in operational and technical skills is a necessary starting point. Leadership must also educate their customer service teams in the “soft skills” at the heart of customer service-client interactions. Frontline employees need to feel equipped to handle difficult situations while still prioritizing positive outcomes. When customer concerns become too complex for digital tools to handle, a team's ability to efficiently handle “human moments” makes all the difference in ensuring a positive customer experience. Increased confidence in this area will boost employee engagement and improve the quality and efficiency of the customer service provided. Adam says the key is to accommodate rather than resist difficult customer interactions. In his book “Be Your Customer's Hero,” Adam describes a technique called “Let Customers Punch Themselves Out” as a de-escalation strategy. Though it sounds counterintuitive, this technique encourages a positive outcome by allowing a frustrated customer to express themselves without interference or excuses from the customer service agent. This lets the customer feel heard and makes it more likely that they will re-engage and allow a customer service agent to enact the best solution in that moment. 3. Empower Employees must be empowered with the tools necessary to efficiently and effectively resolve customer concerns. The digital transformation of customer service has led customers to expect hassle-free resolutions to their issues in real time. If a customer is referred to human support after a digital channel couldn't resolve their issue, it's imperative that the human agent solve the issue without additional steps for the customer. When frontline employees are empowered to resolve issues without delays, both they and the customers win. Employee empowerment is a win-win-win scenario: customers win by avoiding hassles; employees win by having the tools to resolve the situation; and management wins by avoiding costly and prolonged customer service concerns. While leaders may feel that empowering employees can be risky, Adam advises that the risk is worth the reward. As long as the empowerment is appropriate for the context, the additional latitude to prevent hassles such as extra steps or delays is necessary for meeting customer expectations. Leaders who prioritize CX will find that empowering their teams is a necessary step for providing excellent customer service.  Culture Work Is the Way Forward for CX Success in the Hybrid Digital-Human World of Customer Service  The current state of customer service is a hybrid digital-human experience. Though the human element may be declining, this only increases the importance of human customer interaction. When a digital interaction can't meet customer needs, human support must provide satisfactory service. As a result, customer service is increasingly becoming a highly skilled profession. Brands must be willing to invest in their team's success. Each step of the 3E Leadership Framework establishes the foundation for the next. When leadership embodies a customer-centric culture, employees follow suit. Leaders can educate their teams with the service skills needed to resolve complex customer interactions. This team empowerment ensures that employees have the latitude to provide hassle-free, real-time solutions. Leaders who recognize and embrace the importance of a customer-centric culture will find that investing in their teams is a savvy way forward for providing positive CX that will create smiles for leadership, employees, and customers alike. What Adam Does for Fun An artist at heart, Adam enjoys writing fiction and playing music in his free time.  To learn more about Adam, visit him on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and his website at a customersthatstick.com. Watch the video here. Read the blog post here. 

The CX Goalkeeper had the great opportunity to interview Adam ToporekLinkedIn Headline: Helping organizations win with experience! ► Customer Service Expert ✪ Keynote Speaker ✪ Trainer ✪ Strategic Advisor Highlights:00:00 Game Start00:50 Adam's introduction03:09 Which values drive you in life?04:24 it's never too late to win with CX07:35 how do you define defense and attack in customer service?09:38 how is it possible to prevent hassle for customers?14:02 employee empowerment19:08 3S Process and the CATER Process22:52 Employees remuneration26:13 The Future of CX28:32 Adam's book suggestion29:35 Adam's contact details30:01 Adam's Golden Nuggetand much more#cxgoalkeeper #customerexperience #podcast #leadership

It's easy to talk in broad strokes about becoming more customer-centric, or point to the big players like Apple and Amazon and say be more like that, but where is the kind of budget and resources to do what they do? My guest today is Adam Toporek. He's a customer experience colleague of mine, author, and fellow podcaster who is masterful at helping companies and their frontline workers be their customers' hero and recognize how they can do much better with what they have. You can find Adam Toporek at: https://customersthatstick.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamtoporek https://www.instagram.com/adamtoporek/ You can find David Avrin at: www.davidavrin.com www.linkedin.com/in/davidavrin www.twitter.com/DavidAvrin www.facebook.com/therealdavidavrin www.instagram.com/therealdavidavrin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How These Three Pillars of CX Drive Profits When Leadership Is Proactive About Customer Experience  This week's guest is Jeannie Walters, CEO and founder of Experience Investigators, a global customer experience consulting firm that helps companies improve loyalty and retention, employee engagement, and overall customer experience. For more than 20 years Jeannie has dedicated her work to creating meaningful moments and real results with one mission: To Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™. As the Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Experience Investigators, Jeannie has helped organizations—from small businesses to Fortune 500s—to do just that. In this episode, Jeannie explains the three pillars of good CX to create positive experiences for customers and employees alike. She details how this is possible when customer experience management is proactive instead of reactive.   Jeannie's Journey in CX  Jeannie began her career in fundraising consulting and marketing. While working in marketing, she found that many organizations thought about legal, product development, marketing, and sales but no one was truly advocating for the customer. So about 20 years ago, she and her brother decided to focus on customer experience. They successfully ran a CX firm together until 2009 when Jeannie started Experience Investigators.   She has helped hundreds of companies of all sizes and across three continents strengthen their CX strategy. In addition to being a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), Jeannie is a TEDx speaker, a founding member of CXPA, co-host of the top-rated Crack the Customer Code podcast, and a four-time LinkedIn Learning instructor whose courses have been watched by more than 200,000 online learners.   An active writer, Jeannie's work has been featured in “Forbes,” “CustomerThink,” “The Future of Customer Engagement and Commerce,” and “My Customer,” as well as in university-level textbooks. She has received numerous recognitions for her work in CX.  The Three Pillars of Good CX  Jeannie has found that leaders often view customer experience as something that's nice, purely common sense, or solely focused on measuring feedback. But customer experience that's focused only on tracking customer satisfaction through surveys doesn't actually have an impact on the customer experience itself. This way of thinking about customer experience is an afterthought when what is really needed is forethought and planning to optimize the customer experience.  All organizations have customer experiences, whether intentionally designed or not. Jeannie's three pillars provide leadership a roadmap to be proactive, not reactive about the customer experience including how the entire organization should align to execute a successful CX plan.   1. Mindset  The first pillar lays the foundation for a CX strategy. The organization's mindset determines how to cultivate a customer service culture and ensures everyone in the organization is focused on it as something that is central to their business, not something extra or limited to certain departments.   Jeannie recommends writing a customer experience mission statement that helps everyone align where they're going so they can show up for customers no matter what. The mission statement documents who you are as a brand, including what you stand for. As an example, are you “the fastest” or “the most economical”? She points out the importance of gaining internal agreement on the brand promise in the customer experience mission statement as the north star that everyone in the organization gets behind.   2. Strategy  Next, this mindset needs to be translated into an effective business strategy to ensure customer experience is done right. The strategy must define what success looks like for your customer and for your organization. This becomes the success statement for the organizational goals, what the business leaders care about, how CX can support those goals, and how to measure that success.   Watching CSAT go up and down only helps your bottom line if you connect it to the bottom line. A business strategy builds these connections by, for example, discovering that a higher CSAT results in more satisfied and happier customers that share their remarkable experiences, spend more with your brand, and refer other customers. This connected strategy can support the revenue goals of your organization through increased customer loyalty and retention.   Throughout this process, it's important to be proactive about delivering intentional, positive customer experiences that connect to the central mindset and culture. We can apply best practices such as customer journey mapping, service blueprinting, and other tools. But because we ultimately experience things from our own perspective, we must be intentional in how we develop strategies that draw on the customer service culture to deliver excellent customer support.  3. Discipline  The third and final pillar is focused on crafting the discipline to deliver on the business strategy. This can't be accomplished effectively in silos, so it is essential to build collaborative cross-functional leadership teams that understand their role in creating the customer experience.   Everyone in your organization has a role in the customer experience. Your mindset and culture lay the foundation for guiding the discipline to deliver on your business strategies. Whether collaborating internally with colleagues, working with vendors, or communicating directly with customers from the contact center, everyone in your organization has a contribution to make and their daily efforts have a direct impact on the customer experience.  The Three Pillars in Action  Removing barriers to good customer service creates a chain reaction of positivity and empowers business leaders "To Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™.” When organizations embrace these three pillars and implement a focused business strategy for customer experience, they will see measurable results.   By starting with the documented mission statement, you define how you will show up for customers no matter what. Sometimes there are tradeoffs because you can't always be the fastest and most accurate, for example. That understanding needs to be reflected in your company culture and mindset.  Then craft an execution strategy based on your organizational goals so you can measure the ROI you want to achieve. Include in your strategy details such as how each department plays a role in customer experience, how you will build your customer experience team, and how you will measure effectiveness and customer success.   Finally, turn your strategy into the discipline to work with other leaders within your organization. The coalitions you build will make powerful impacts, ranging from how you post jobs and how you hire and onboard employees, to how you deliver your products and how you collect payment.  In sum, by proactively identifying the business goals of your customer experience strategy, deciding on the execution steps necessary to achieve them, and determining how to measure your success, you can transform the customer experience into a strategic asset. By looking at a combination of experiential data (customer feedback) and operational data (customer behaviors) you can gain insights into your customer experience and modify your goals as you go, while remaining grounded in your mission for excellent CX.  Learn More About Jeannie  To learn more about Jeannie and her strategy for good CX, visit   ExperienceInvestigators.com where you can also find Year of CX customer experience resources and workbooks. Visit CrackTheCustomerCode.com to learn more about the podcast she cohosts with Adam Toporek featuring insights and innovations from business leaders.  What Jeannie Does for Fun  Jeannie enjoys spending her free time with her two teenage sons. She loves watching them do what they love, from choir concerts to soccer games. Her oldest son is heading to college in the fall and she's grateful for the time they have together.  Watch the episode video here. Read the blog post here.  

In this webinar episode, Adam Toporek, Customer Service Expert, talks about creating emotional connections with your customers.

If you want to be the go-to brand that customers buy from instead of competitors, you must make every interaction point frictionless.   Episode Highlights: *Why CX is not only for big companies *How we can ease friction *What we can do to avoid the hassle for our customers *How technology is changing our human connection with customers *How we can convince a leader to make changes *Advice for entrepreneurs Learn more about Stacy Sherman and Adam Toporek at DoingCXRight.com/podcasts

About our Guest, Jeannie WaltersJeannie Walters is the CEO/Founder of Experience Investigators™ by 360Connext, a global Customer Experience consulting firm. She has 20 years of experience helping companies improve loyalty and retention, employee engagement, and overall customer experience.Jeannie is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP,) a charter member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA,) a Professional Member of the National Speakers Association [NSA] and the NSA Illinois Chapter president, a Forbes Coaches Council Member, a C-Suite Network Advisor, a LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com instructor, and a TEDx speaker.She was named one of the Huffington Post's “Top 100 Most Social Customer Service Pros on Twitter," Tenfold's “Top 40 Customer Success Influencers,” one of “The Top 5 Women Customer Experience Influencers” by CloudCherry, and her TEDx talk about micromoments, those small and often overlooked moments in the customer journey that matter, is one of Customer Thermometer's “Best TED Talks on Customer Retention Ideas.”Since 2014, Jeannie and her co-host Adam Toporek have been attacking today's biggest Customer Experience problems on the Crack the Customer Code podcast, which is one of CallMiner's “50 Must-Listen Podcasts on Customer Experience from Industry Experts and Influencers.”Jeannie is also a very active writer and blogger, and you can find her work on Social Media Today, Retail Customer Experience, CallidusCloud CX, Customer Think, and in Pearson college textbooks.She's passionate about making the everyday interactions we all have as customers better and writes, speaks, studies and trains on customer experience issues around the world. Her mission is “To Create Fewer Ruined Days for Customers™.”Jeannie lives with her husband, two growing boys, and a somewhat spoiled dog. She spends her free time cheering at youth sports events and choir concerts and spoiling the dog.Visit Experience Investigators Crack the Customer Code PodcastVia Experience Investigators on LinkedIn Humans are emotional, messy, brilliant, irrational, and constantly evolving. And they're your customers. Our proprietary Customer Experience Investigation™ process serves mid-market and larger companies to bring back emotional feedback from customers and employees, evaluate the in and outs of the customer journey, and what your customers get ticked off about and expect from you. Customer expectations (and how to exceed them) are harder to figure Thanks for listening, commenting, liking, sharing, and adding Growing Social Now to your podcast playlist!!Cheers to your success,Barbara RozgonyiFounder, CoryWest Media, Top PR Blogger, Host of Growing Social Now, International Speaker and Inspirational Storyteller, Creative Marketing Team Coach, LinkedIn Social Selling Trainer, Avid Hiker, Natural Photographer Barbara Rozgonyi on Facebook Barbara Rozgonyi on InstagramBarbara Rozgonyi on LinkedInBarbara Rozgonyi on TikTokBarbara Rozgonyi on TwitterYouTubeGrowing Social Now wiredPRworksBarbaraRozgonyi.com

What role does emotion play when it comes to understanding customers and what they want out of businesses?This is a complicated question, but nothing too challenging for Adam Toporek and Terrence Fox on this episode of Conversation With. Stop by and try asking yourself, " Where do we find empathy in our customer journey, and how do we deliver on that going forward?"To find out more, visit these links:Website: https://www.iadvize.com/cx-series​Terrence LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrencefox/​iAdvize LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/iadv...​Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iAdvize.worl...​Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iadvize/?hl=enTwitter: https://twitter.com/iadvize​Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/iAdviZe

In this episode, a discussion with Adam Toporek - CX Thought Leader, Author, and Podcaster.Topic: Customer Experience and Small & Medium Businesses When it comes to Customer Experience, we always assume that it pertains only to larger enterprises. Well, here is Adam busting that myth and sharing his insights on how SMBs can make CX their key differentiator. Discussion Topics How can SMBs make CX their key differentiator? How can SMBs kickstart their CX strategy and vision? What are the typical challenges SMBs might face while building their CX strategy? Adam's favorite tips for SMB owners who want to build their focus on delivering an exceptional CX? Can technology play a vital role in helping SMBs deliver an optimal CX? And how can they adopt the right tools? And more.For more such episodes, follow The Thrifty Marketer Podcast at https://bit.ly/2EN15cJFor SMB Marketing tips, visit https://bit.ly/3hHaj8V Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Toporek and the Impact of Beliefs on Customer Experience

Description: On this episode, I speak with Adam Toporek. Adam is an internationally-recognized customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and customer service trainer.We chat about:- What will happen to the customer experience at Disneyland?- What is the biggest mistake leaders make in building new customer experiences?- What apps have great user and customer experiences?Adam's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamtoporek/Adam's Website: https://customersthatstick.com/Michel's Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelfalcon/Interested in having me as a keynote speaker in your company? If so, visit → http://www.michelfalcon.com/keynote/My online course: https://get.michelfalcon.com/tos/ Check out my Book 'People First Culture' → https://www.amazon.ca/People-First-Culture-Lasting-Company-Shifting/dp/1544512147/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1550677572&sr=8-1&keywords=people+first+cultureAbout Breaking it Down:Breaking it Down is a Podcast hosted by Michel Falcon, with the purpose of helping business owners, executives, CEOs and entrepreneurs to breakthrough their business and professional careers to the next level.Follow Michel Falcon:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelfalconInstagram: instagram.com/michelfalconWebsite: https://www.michelfalcon.comMusic Intro Credits: Too Cool Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

https://www.engati.com/ Engati is the world's leading no-code, multi-lingual chatbot platform. Blog link: https://blog.engati.com/ | Subscribe now. Adam Toporek, an internationally-recognized customer service expert, keynote speaker, and frontline trainer, talks to Engati on ‘Winning with Experience'. He talks about how technology and Artificial Intelligence can be leveraged to create personalized customer experiences at scale. Adam speaks about the fact that customers are irrational creatures and that businesses need to take this into consideration while creating customer journeys. Customers don't buy with logic. They buy with emotion and then try to use logic to justify their purchases. He also tells us that we should be focusing on Digital Integration rather than Digital Transformation. Transformation implies that we're going to go completely digital. Integration is more realistic in the sense that we will have humans working in collaboration with digital systems. The human element is integrated within the digital experience. Follow us on Facebook: http://s.engati.com/157 LinkedIn: http://s.engati.com/158 Twitter: http://s.engati.com/156 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getengati/

In his book, Be Your Customer’s Hero: Real World Tips and Techniques for the Service Front Lines, Adam Toporek wanted to take a conversational approach to customer service that could be digested as a reference book, aimed at front line employees. Toporek states that front line employees – those who work directly with customers, whether via phone, email, or face-to-face, tend to skew younger and don’t have time for fluff, but still want to learn to be more effective when working directly with customers. Toporek helps clarify the distinction between customer service and customer experience. Customer service is just part of the one-on-one interaction with a customer; whereas customer experience refers to the entire journey a customer has with an organization, including marketing pieces or emails from the organization. Toporek’s book aims to motivate front line employees, making them more confident in using the necessary tools and techniques to provide excellent customer service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scaling Up Services is a podcast devoted to helping founders, partners, CEOs, key executives, and managers of service-based businesses scale their companies faster and with less drama. Have each episode delivered to your inbox by subscribing here: http://www.scalingupservices.com/subscribe

Jeannie’s motto “Creating Fewer Ruined Days for Customers” has been adopted by business leaders who have benefited from her inspiring keynotes, her pioneering CX Cultural Transformation program, and her workshops and webinars. Customer Thermometer called Jeannie’s presentation on “Meaningful Micro-Interactions” one of the top five TED Talks on customer retention. Her podcast Crack the Customer Code, which she co-hosts with customer service expert Adam Toporek, has consistently garnered praise for its engaging industry insights. Jeannie has 20 years of experience helping companies improve loyalty and retention, employee engagement, and overall customer experience. Follow Worthix on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/worthix/ Follow Worthix on Twitter: @worthix Follow Mary Drumond on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marydrumond/ Follow Mary Drumond on Twitter: @drumondmary Follow Jeannie Walters on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanniewalters/ Follow Jeannie Walters on Twitter: @https://twitter.com/jeanniecw?lang=en Learn more about Jeannie Walters at: https://experienceinvestigators.com/about-jeannie-walters/

Nothing matters more than making people feel like they matter especially customers who are buying or getting your products or services. Adam Toporek, keynote speaker, workshop leader, and the author of Be Your Customer's Hero, takes us into the world of customer service. Every customer is different from the other, and being a frontline employee may be a challenging job because you must know how to interact with each of them. Adam shares how you can win at customer service by being a hero to your customer, wowing them, and making them feel that they matter. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Business Done Differently community today: findyouryellowtux.com Business Done Differently Facebook Business Done Differently Twitter Business Done Differently YouTube Do You Stand Out? Take The Yellow Tux Quiz

Adam Toporek is an internationally-recognized customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and customer service trainer who helps organizations transform their relationships with their customers through better strategy, training, and communication. He is the author of Be Your Customer's Hero, the founder of the popular Customers That Stick® blog, the co-host of the Crack the Customer Code podcast, and the creator of the virtual training course, How to Deal with Difficult Customers. Adam is regularly ranked as a top customer experience thought leader and has been cited in Entrepreneur, Forbes, AMA, and over 100 other media. Follow Worthix on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/worthix/ Follow Worthix on Twitter: @worthix Follow Adam Toporek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamtoporek/ Follow Adam Toporek on Twitter: https://twitter.com/adamtoporek Follow Mary Drumond on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/marydrumond/ Follow Mary Drumond on Twitter: @drumondmary

Automation, chatbots, AI... Customer experience (CX) has gone from a physical person adapting to your every need to now fully-fledged systems that are able to make real-time decisions. Sometimes, they can even make the decisions for you... But what defines a good customer experience today and what do you need to factor in when building a seamless customer experience offering? In this pod, we speak to Adam Toporek and Colin Shaw, two CX influencers who have all the answers. Press play...

Jeannie and Adam discuss how to use Customer Service Blueprinting to optimize all the working parts of your overall customer experience, and how Jeannie can train you on this amazing skill today! Fine-tune your customer experience delivery with customer service blueprinting We’ve talked a lot about customer journey mapping and other amazing tools on this show, so it’s time to talk about the next tool in your customer experience toolbox: Customer Service Blueprinting. Taking stock of your behind-the-scenes operations as they relate to the experience delivered is a powerful way to understand not only what’s happening in your customer service, but how it happens, who is accountable, and what needs to happen for the experience to run like a well-oiled machine. "Get that 3D perspective on what’s going on and how to deliver on it!” - Jeannie Walters Customer Service Blueprinting is an amazing way to make these observations and inform critical improvements, so Jeannie has decided to create a LinkedIn Learning course to show you how it’s done. The latest in Jeannie’s ongoing series of customer experience courses, Customer Service Blueprinting outlines the process in easy steps, then leaves you with templates to help you hit the ground running! What’s more, using your Service Blueprint together with Customer Journey Mapping (also a popular topic in Jeannie’s LinkedIn Learning series) adds some serious “ka-pow” for fine-tuning your overall customer experience. Want to learn more about Customer Service Blueprinting, and what to expect in Jeannie’s courses? Then listen in and find out how to get started today! Don't want to wait? Sign up for Jeannie's course now! What is service blueprinting? from Customer Service Blueprinting by Jeannie Walters Related Content Experience Investigators™ by 360Connext post, How to Create the Best Customer Experience Solutions Customers That Stick® post, Adam Toporek’s 3S Customer Service Process Episode 357: Thomas Hollmann, Customer Experience Education Episode 354: Are you neglecting key moments in the customer journey? We're on C-Suite Radio! Check it out for more great podcasts   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam and Jeannie kick off 2019 with some of the best resolutions you can make to continuously improve customer experience and customer service all year long. Are you ready to kick off a customer-focused new year? We made it to 2019. Yippee! We had a long, much-needed break, but we’re so glad to be back. And what better way is there to start the new year than to make meaningful resolutions? Perhaps you’ve already made your resolutions about eating healthier and actually using that gym membership, but we’re here to talk about improving your customer experience as part of your strategy for business success. “Our resolutions are all about customer experience and customer service.” -Adam Toporek So what should you resolve to do for your customers in 2019? Adam Toporek and Jeannie Walters are two of the most recognized and respected names in customer experience and customer service, and they’re here to help you hit the ground running. Not only have they shared some of the most important resolutions you can make on behalf of your customers, but they had a lot of fun doing it! “Resolutions should be about ACTION.” -Jeannie Walters Resolutions may tend to fade over time, but we’ve got a few you need to keep top-of-mind throughout the year. Here’s to an exciting year of focusing on customers for greater business success! Related Content 360Connext® post, What You Need to Know to Reduce Customer Effort in 2019 Customers That Stick® post, The Fusion of Brand and Culture with Denise Lee Yohn Episode 214: Who Drives Customer Experience? Episode 300: Celebrating 300 Episodes (with live guitar) We're on C-Suite Radio! Check it out for more great podcasts Sponsor message Give your team the customer service training they deserve Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com, that is customerheroworkshop.com.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Toporek explains how the Peak-End Rule can make or break a customer experience in surprising ways, and how leveraging it helps you leave a more favorable impression on your customers...on purpose! Ruling customer emotions with the Peak-End Rule One thing we’ve covered a lot on this show is how to “wow” your customers. But we often forget that an overall wonderful experience can be filled with terrible moment-to-moment experiences, and vice-versa. So what are your customers really feeling after the experience you’ve invested so much in? Does all the surprise and delight you add to your customer experience add up to something your customers will really look back on favorably? It seems pretty simple, but it’s a vexing paradox even the best business leaders struggle to get a grip on! “Our memory of the experiences is not the average of how we felt throughout the experiences.” - Adam Toporek This is why business leaders need not only to understand the Peak-End Rule, but to bake it into our customer experience strategies. What do you want customers to remember you for, and are you really approaching this the right way? What are the emotional high and low points in your customer experience, and more importantly, which will customers remember you for? In our last episode, bestselling author Shaun Belding explained there’s more than one kind of “Wow” in customer experiences. So understanding the Peak-End rule goes a long way in helping you make the difference between inspiring customers to say “Wow, let’s do that again!” vs “Wow, that stunk to high heaven!”   Listen in for Adam's expert tips to take charge of these critical emotional tipping points. Related Content 360Connext® post, How to Drive Business Results With The Peak-End Rule Customers That Stick® post, Exceeding Customer Expectations Is Nice but Not Necessary Episode 344: Shaun Belding, The Journey to Wow Episode 321: Jesse Cole, Revolutionizing the Ballpark Experience We're on C-Suite Radio! Check it out for more great podcasts   Sponsor message Give your team the customer service training they deserve Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com, that is customerheroworkshop.com.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Visit ToughDecisions.net for complete show notes of each podcast episode. In this episode we interview Adam Toporek. Adam is an internationally-recognized customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and customer service trainer who helps organizations transform their relationships with customers through better strategy, training, and communication. Join us as Adam walks us through his journey in taking the leap to become the customer service expert he is today.

Visit ToughDecisions.net for complete show notes of each podcast episode. In this episode we interview Adam Toporek. Adam is an internationally-recognized customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and customer service trainer who helps organizations transform their relationships with customers through better strategy, training, and communication. Join us as Adam walks us through his journey in taking […]

Adam Toporek is an internationally-recognized customer experience expert. Adam helps organizations transform their relationships with their customers through better strategy, training, and communication. He is the author of Be Your Customer's Hero and the co-host of the Crack the Customer Code podcast. My favorite statement in this episode is when Adam said, “You’re not responsible for someone else’s emotional state.”  We all have enough to take care of in our own lives. Follow Adam as he explains his 3 S’s - Soothe the Psyche, Solve the Screw-up, Set-up the Success. A great episode and fun! You’ll discover:   How you treat customers is who you are as a person Skill set to deal with challenging situations Understanding customer emotion What is the Amygdala hijack? The difference between being and acting like The importance of depersonalization and how it effects communication The peek-end rule Interview Links & Other Resources   Mere Mortals Unite on C-Suite Radio iTunes - Subscribe, Rate and Review Listen on Podbean

Today is one awesome episode. I am in awe of our guest’s transition to being so strong and so empowered. Shari was once a skinny, weak, and clumsy kid. She’d occasionally dabble in exercise but not really get involved, until this one accidental “meeting” with kettlebells. Join me as Shari graciously shares her joys, aches, and pains in this fascinating episode. About Shari Wagner Shari Wagner founded Iron Clad Fitness in 2009 with the mission to redefine fitness by empowering people of all shapes, sizes and physical abilities to find their inner and outer strengths. Iron Clad Fitness specializes in the Russian style of kettlebell training, through online or in-person coaching programs, because it is known for producing dramatic results through precise technique. We empower people to get strong and healthy, in a realistic, sustainable way. Shari’s Top 5 StrengthsFinder Strengths Restorative Adaptability Responsibility Empathy Relator   Key Takeaways Recognize what your strengths are so that you can give yourself grace for what you’re not. Don’t judge people for the condition they’re in right off the bat. If you’re not your best you, you can’t give your best. Period. Time-Stamped Show Highlights [04:55] The kettlebell love affair I realized that, for the first time, I didn’t just look good but I felt good. [08:50] The lightbulb moment for Shari that changed her life, forever. This changed my life so much and I wanna help other people find the same. [10:17] An insight to Shari’s strength themes, what drives her and how she’s wired. Understanding your themes is not only obviously playing to your strengths but giving yourself grace. [15:27] Shari’s challenge in her business: how to keep people wanting to come, and wanting to show up, to do their worksout, so that they can become all they desire. [28:28] Podcast recommendation of the week! Selected Links for This Episode Shari’s Website Iron Clad Facebook Page Connect with Shari on Facebook Connect with Shari on Twitter Connect with Shari on LinkedIn Podcast of the Week: Crack the Customer Code with Adam Toporek and Jeannie Walters Frickin’ Awesome Resources Frickin’ Awesome Entrepreneurs Facebook Community From Frustrated to Frickin’ Awesome by Alissa Daire Nelson Daire Success Coaching website StrengthsFinder 2.0 test StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath

Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again with Chris Croner #210 In this episode we meet Dr. Chris Croner  author of the book, Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again.  In his book Chris shares his psychological research and practice in identifying the non-teachable personality traits common to top producing salespeople. Chris has  identified this problem by focusing on personality traits. He found that the most important factor for success in sales is a person’s Drive – the inner fire that ultimately determines if he or she will thrive or fail. Chris and I discuss his system for identifying salespeople with the Drive to success, helping businesses improve their sales teams while avoid underperformers. Have a Structure When You Hire It’s important to be process driven in your hiring procedure.Too often hiring managers go with their gut vs a methodical process.  The interviewer should be the one to take over the conversation. To make sure you never hire a bad salesperson again, do the following: Effective assessment – Focused on persuasion, relationship-skills, organization skills 3 non-teachable skills Chris looks for he calls Drive Need for Achievement – Win for winning sakes Competitiveness Optimism During the resume review – ask the critical questions: job description, your rank on a sales team, what got you to move on to the next position, if you could have changed 3 things in your past (magic wand) to have motivated you to stay, what would that be? Past sales metrics – how much did you sell, how did you compare with your peers Assessment Questions One way of finding the true values of a candidate is to force them to pick one attribute over another. Consider the following assessment: Rank these most like you , somewhat like you and least like you I consider myself a leader I have great relationship skills I am very organized Other questions that further identifies their character include: What kind of sacrifices have you made? When were you the most competitive? When you you the most upbeat when everyone around you lost hope? Remember candidates are on the best behavior. If you see ANYTHING wrong, this is bad. DON”T HIRE THEM! Note people from big companies have infrastructure to help them succeed. Look for sellers of a similar sized company past. Flatliners: People merely motivated by Money.  It doesn’t last like those with a Need for Achievement Looking for a Sales Job? Be prepared.  Make a list of behaviours sales managers would appreciate. Next to each item write down an example of where you’ve done that in the past. During the interview, use this list to drive the conversation. Make it clear, to your future boss, you have what it takes to knock it out of the park. How to Find Chris Croner You can easily find Chris on LinkedIn Chris’ LinkedIn Chris’ Google+ Links to Sales Drive SalesDrive’s Facebook SalesDrive’s LinkedIn SalesDrive’s Twitter SalesDrive’s Google+ SalesDrive’s Pinterest This is the free assessment link mentioned during the interview: https://salesdrive.info/free-trial-request/ How to Manage Sales Teams This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about sales management. Here are past episodes you need to listen to now! Why Commissioned-Based Sales Plans Fail to Work with Justin Clark How to Hire a Sales Rep that Hits the Ground Running #174 The Invisible Sales Organization with Mitch Russo #147 How To Be Your Customers Hero with Adam Toporek #104 Strategic Sales Skills from Sales Management Author Ken Thoreson #57 6 Simple Steps of a Sales Process: Sales 101 The post Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again with Chris Croner #210 appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

Adam Toporek reveals how lack of employee empowerment creates unnecessary challenges for growing businesses and shares how you can empower your staff to deliver better experiences. Empowerment is power! When you were starting out as a business leader, what would have given you more power to succeed? What do you wish you had known then? Adam was recently asked a similar question in an interview, and it has inspired him to share some tips about employee empowerment. You see, Adam started his business in the era of “command and control,” long before employee empowerment became the buzzworthy concept it is today. But while there’s something to be said for running a tight ship, this level of control led to unnecessary friction both in the employee and customer experiences. “We’re causing bad employee AND customer experiences, and for what!?” -Adam Toporek Don’t get me wrong… Rules and processes exist for good reasons! But when customers and employees fret and squabble over trivial things for the sake of staying in compliance, businesses suffer from diminished value on both fronts. So how did Adam turn this around? Listen in to hear how Adam knew it was time for a change, and what he did to fix it. What about you? What do you wish you knew when starting out as a business leader? Adam and Jeannie would both love to hear about it.  Your input can help start some great conversations and could even be the focus of an upcoming show, so tell us now! Tweet to Adam Toporek - @adamtoporek Tweet to Jeannie Walters - @jeanniecw Email us - thecustomercode@gmail.com Related Content 360Connext® post, Are Your Employees Engaged to Tell You the Truth? Customers That Stick® post, Why Self-Confidence Matters in Customer Service Episode 39: Does Employee Empowerment Work? Episode 233: (Tip) Beware of Organizational Conformity We're on C-Suite Radio! Check it out for more great podcasts  Sponsor message Give your team the customer service training they deserve Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com, that is customerheroworkshop.com.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Toporek shares research and expert insights for discovering which retail touchpoints are most important to your customers. How to prioritize your retail touchpoints In retail, we’re told that every touchpoint matters. And although that may be true, it’s not very helpful when you need prioritize and make a difference your customers will applaud today. In that case, you need to discover which retail touchpoints matter the most. “We simply are always in triage." - Adam Toporek But that’s a tall order when you consider how all customers are different. What’s more, the most profitable of your customers may have different priorities than the majority. So, how do you look for touchpoints that bring you the most ROI? These decisions will never be easy to make, but you’ve got some help! Today, Adam has some surprising data to share about retail customers and which touchpoints they say matter most to them. As it turns out, they don’t care as much about some of the touchpoints you might rank high on the list! Some healthy food for your retail thoughts! “While every touchpoint matters, some touchpoints matter more than others.” -Adam Toporek However, Adam points out that what customers say they want may not speak for how they respond to improvements they didn’t ask for. So balancing these ingredients is tricky work! The right mix of improvements may lead to a measurable uptick in customer satisfaction, while the wrong mix could just blow up in your face. So step into Adam’s lab and discover the right concoction for your retail customers. (No safety glasses needed!) Related Content Synchronicity Financial's Retail Customer Experience report 360Connext® post, How to Create Your Punch List for Quick CX Wins Customers That Stick® post, 3 Examples of How to Easily WOW Customers Episode 305: Supporting Your Team in the Retail Apocalypse Episode 235: Customer Experience Touchpoint Tips We're on C-Suite Radio! Check it out for more great podcasts   Sponsor message Give your team the customer service training they deserve Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com, that is customerheroworkshop.com.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 Adam Toporek is an internationally-recognized customer service expert, keynote speaker, and frontline trainer who helps organizations think differently about customer service.    -Where do difficult customers come from? What makes them difficult? (This would get into customer psychology and experience.)  - What do most organizations or people do wrong when working with difficult customers?  - What are some of the best methods for handling difficult customers. (FYI. I do a lot with customer psychology in this area, so these answers would not just be the same old tired advice.)     Adam Toporek is an internationally-recognized customer service expert, keynote speaker, and frontline trainer who helps organizations get results by thinking differently about customer service. A third-generation entrepreneur with extensive experience in retail, wholesale, franchising, and small business, Adam understands the impact that customer experience can have on the bottom line.    At CTS Service Solutions, Adam puts his extensive knowledge into practice with customer experience consulting and customer service training that includes live workshops and virtual training.    As the author of Be Your Customer's Hero, the founder of the popular Customers That Stick® blog, and the co-host of the Crack the Customer Code podcast, Adam regularly shares his customer experience and customer service insights with a global audience. He has appeared in over 100 media and is regularly cited as a top customer experience thought leader. In addition to his customer experience work, Adam is an angel investor with an interest in entrepreneurs who disrupt the status quo through innovation. Adam lives in Orlando, FL with his wife Renee and his golden retriever Dalton.    Website:: http://customersthatstick.com    Facebook:: https://www.facebook.com/customersthatstick    LinkedIn:: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamtoporek      Premium binge worthy content. Up or Out with Connie is reaching over 2.5m listeners per episode. And we’re not done  yet…  We can be heard on… ·       C-Suite Network ·       iTunes ·       iHeartRadio ·       Stitcher ·       Multiple online networks, and ·       1,900 analog stations in 145 Countries. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, because you don’t want to miss any of the good stuff.   Let us know what you would like and need to hear on a future episode. We are here to mentor leaders who are ready to develop high-performance habits, achieve excellence and Be Unstoppable Together.   Register to be a guest at www.uporout.com   Book Connie to speak at your next event: UnstoppableSpeaker.LA Are you an executive looking for a mentor to help you develop High-performance Habits and achieve excellence? Give Connie a call at 570.906.4395, she just may be what you’re looking for!    Now to get your copy of the Be Unstoppable Freedom journal, simply send an email to TEAMPHEIFF@pheiffgroup.com. In the subject line include Be Unstoppable Freedom Journal.   I will send you to link where you can enter your information. I’ve ordered 2,000 books for you… my listeners. This journal retails for $97.00.  It’s yours for free, but I do ask that you help by paying for the shipping. That’s it, only pay for the shopping and I will send you and autographed copy.   It’s easy, send an email now to TEAMPHEIFF@pheiffgroup.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why Commissioned-Based Sales Plans Fail to Work with Justin Clark Justin Clark is the Director of Sales for a janitorial and packaging products distributor. Over time, Justin’s company found sales reps spending more time auditing their paychecks than selling.  They also found the commission-based sales plans failed to motivate reps to do the best for their customers. To overcome this challenge they moved their sales staff to a pure performance review based salary plan.  In this interview, Justin shares the story of how they were able to make this extraordinary change in their compensation plan. Challenges Faced Money is emotional. 100% commissioned sales people would spend as much time making sure they’re paid what they earned vs selling. Reps pushed products that brought the most money. There were SPIFs (Sales Performance Incentive Fund) for products that were not good for the customer. Wanted to promote consultative sales and stop sellers pushing products and instead finding solutions. Commission-based sales plans were holding the company back. Transition Plan Because of these challenges, Justin slowly created a transition plan to move the organization. Did not move immediately to salary compensation. Slowly moved from commission-based sales plans to salary and bonus plans Still too much focus by reps understanding the bonus Commission-based sales plan was slowly phased out Final Plan Once the final plan was finalized it was found to contain: Paid full salaries on most recent best year. Reps paid same as last best year. Money is a manager. Without commission-based sales plans you need to manage. more hands-on and ensure accountability. The final plan requires more coaching and more investigating into reasons reps are not successful. People do good work for many reasons, not just money. Results Since the plan has been in place, the results contain: People felt like they needed to hit their goal because the company was ALREADY paying them. Everyone is now on the same team with the exact same goals. Raises are  based on performance review. Some employees didn’t like the plan and found they are not a good fit for the company. Some reps have left the company, others asked to leave. It’s been a 10 year process. Transition Advice Now that they’ve reached success, Justin has some clear advice for others interested in changing their compensation plan: Management team needs to look at staff, consider how they will manage them and if they are OK if people leave. Answer this: is it worth getting everyone surrounded around the same purpose. It probably is! How To Connect With Justin Clark Commission-based sales plans no longer exist in Justin Clark’s sales department. Connect with Justin on LinkedIn and learn further details.   How to Manage Sales Teams How to Hire a Sales Rep that Hits the Ground Running #174 The Invisible Sales Organization with Mitch Russo #147 How To Be Your Customers Hero with Adam Toporek #104 Strategic Sales Skills from Sales Management Author Ken Thoreson #57 6 Simple Steps of a Sales Process: Sales 101 The post Why Commissioned-Based Sales Plans Fail to Work with Justin Clark appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

Why Nobody Gives a S*%T About Your Sales Goals with Mike Dannenfeldt #190 Highly effective companies collect and measure sales goals. These goals drive performance and results. Mike Dannefeldt and I talk about process management, goal setting and how to manage sales staff. The challenge is to meet and exceed the goals. Yet success is dependent on buy-in and communication. Why Sales Goals Not Met Nobody cares about company goals if the vision has not been communicated. Goals by themselves do not motivate. They they must have  meaning and value to all in the organization. Leaders must be transparent about strategic goals to ensure employees understand and buy-in (communicate and collaborate). Too often transparency is non-existent. Tools Drive the Process or Process Drive the Tools? We talked at length about the distinction between process and tools. Paper processes are rarely followed. The data collected must benefit all parties. Especially true if employees are responsible for data input Establishing regular metric review meeting drives performance growth and results Take Action Advice Establishing regular metric review meetings to communicate vision and drive performance with results. Mike gave us advice on how to set this up: Set up recurring weekly meetings All departments attend Everyone contributes and reports on progress, at least two goals Include sales goals and product/service goals Place something up on the screen so all can see. A dashboard with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Memorable Quotes Sales Goals quotes shared during the episode: Goal without a plan is just a wish Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face – Mike Tyson How To Find Mike Dannenfeldt You can find Mike on LinkedIn  Mike on Twitter @zecutiv. Go to zecutiv.com    You can get a 20%  off if you use the  Promo code “salesbabble”  How to Manage Sales Teams How to Hire a Sales Rep that Hits the Ground Running #174 The Invisible Sales Organization with Mitch Russo #147 How To Be Your Customers Hero with Adam Toporek #104 Strategic Sales Skills from Sales Management Author Ken Thoreson #57 6 Simple Steps of a Sales Process: Sales 101   Sales Goals to Manage There are two goals to focus on: Nudges – an interaction with a suspect that advances the sale by a prospect responding Appointments – the suspect becomes a true prospect when they agree to meet. Sellers should focus on maximizing nudges. They will lead to appointments. Managers should assume  opportunities with appointments have a high likelihood to close. All should focus on the true nudges. Support our Sponsor Bluehost Sales babble is brought to you by Bluehost. Take your idea and start your business online. Sales Babblers can start for only $3.95/month FREE Domain Free Site Builders 1-Click WordPress Install 24×7 support Special intro offer and 30-day money-back guarantee Powering over 2 million websites worldwide The post Why Nobody Gives a S*%T About Your Sales Goals with Mike Dannenfeldt #190 appeared first on Sales Babble Sales Podcast | Sales Training | Sales Consulting |Sales Coaching.

Nearly every company wants to better understand their customers so they can find ways to improve the customer service and build brand loyalty. But actually finding the answers and putting them into practice are two different things. Transforming customer service isn't a quick solution, but it can lead to fantastic results when done correctly.             Customer service experts Jeannie Walters and Adam Toporek consult with numerous companies each year on how to improve their customer service. Their vast experience has taught them that improving customer service is never a one-step solution. Although each organization can follow the same steps, the journey to a quality customer service is personalized for each company.             In order to truly make a change, the company has to identify what it wants to achieve. Everyone knows that customer service experience is good, but few companies actually know how it relates to their goals and strategies. One of the first steps companies need to take when redefining customer service experiences is to realize the business outcomes they want to achieve so they can connect specific aspects of the customer service experience to those goals. For example, if a company wants to build its referrals by a certain amount, it needsf to focus on creating brand loyal customers who return and are eager to refer the company to their friends. That goal could tie into the post-sale aspects of customer service experience and following up to make sure each customer is satisfied.             With goals in mind, brands need to understand what their current customer service experience is really like. Many companies think they have an idea of what customers experience and how they feel, but surveys can be deceiving. After all, the results a company gets are completely dependent on the questions it asks and can often paint a skewed picture. To accurately understand the customer journey, brands need to put themselves in their customers' shoes. Jeannie notes that when she works with an organization, she completes a full customer service experience investigation, including observing how employees interact with customers, walking through the digital experience multiple times, and looking for holes in the experience that could affect customers. Getting immersed in the customer service at a human level can often provide more accurate feedback than looking at surveys.             With an idea of the current situation, companies can then consider their ideal customer service—how would things look if everything went smoothly? That goal can help guide the next steps to take to make the dream a reality.             Of course, perfect customer service can't be created overnight and takes constant tweaking and evolution. Both Jeannie and Adam believe one of the most important parts of creating lasting change in customer service is to have leaders who understand the importance of customer service and who are on board with change. If leaders invested, even the grandest ideas can't take root to create a lasting change.             Customer service involves many different aspects, but one of the key features is understanding the customer and what they want out of the journey. Being strategic and working through the steps to transform customer service experience can lead to positive and lasting change.

Training provides a base for shared meaning, to prepare employees, and give them a foundation to look for ways to improve both themselves and their process. And support. Support that the metrics we use match the expectations we have for interacting with customers. The more perspective we can give our customer service teams the more customer centric their mindset. Jess Dewell talks with Adam Toporek, an internationally-recognized customer service expert, about customer service and what we can actually control.

Adam shares his thoughts on the importance of 1-to-1 experiences as we hand parts of the experience over to technology. 1-to-1 or 1-to-none? Customers interact with your brand on many channels at countless touchpoints, whether there’s a human on the other end of the experience or not. And with the power of technology to help deliver these experiences, it’s easy to get caught up in experience design and optimizations. “…the idea of #CustomerService is still as relevant and important as ever.” -Adam Toporek This is especially true for experiences that are mostly or fully automated, like purchases made on Amazon. What happens when customers seek the help of a live person? Who is stepping in, and are they helping or harming the experience? “…an excellent product or service can almost never compensate for an unpleasant service rep.” -Adam Toporek 1-to-one interactions are still the experiences customers remember, talk about, and come back to. Where are the humans behind the experiences you deliver? Adam explains why investing in them is still a priority. Listen in! Related Content 360Connext® post, Why Customer Service Technology Can’t Replace Humans Customers That Stick® post, Omnichannel Customer Service with the Human Touch Episode 234: Tips for Customer Service Bots Episode 202: Customer Service Tech We're on C-Suite Radio! Check it out for more great podcasts Sponsor message Give your team the customer service training they deserve Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com, that is customerheroworkshop.com.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

G's Power Hour with HOST Gretchen DS - Customer Service Expert CUSTOMER SERVICE MR. ADAM TOPOREK, CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERT CTS SERVICE SOLUTIONS - CUSTOMERS THAT STICK CTS Service Solutions: Customer Service Training and Workshops

Adam shares tips and best practices for understanding and providing great customer service through a focus on internal customer service. Internal customer service matters. A lot. Be they co-workers, vendors or partners, others are depending on you to execute their own responsibilities. Do you know who your internal customers are? Have you ever considered the importance of delivering great customer service? Just because they are not buying your product or service doesn’t mean you shouldn’t practice good customer service skills with internal customers. Poor internal service can breed frustration within your organization, and that frustration will ripple out to your external customers. "Good internal customer service is an important component of good external customer service, " says Adam Toporek. “Poor internal service is a poison to any organization!” If you want to provide consistently excellent customer service, then it’s important to turn some of your focus inward. Make sure those internal transactions are as smooth and pleasant as those you deliver to paying customers. What are some great ways to do this?  In this episode, Adam is sharing expert tips you can use today! Related Content Customers That Stick® post, What Is an Internal Customer? Episode Episode 007: Communicating Internally, Stan Phelps, and The Audience Experience Episode 180: John DiJulius, The Customer Service Revolution We're on C-Suite Radio! Check it out for more great podcasts Sponsor message: Give your team the customer service training they deserve Want to bring game-changing customer service training to your team? CTS Service Solutions offers a half-day in-person workshop designed to motivate and educate your customer-facing team members. Using energy, excitement, and interaction, our workshop helps frontline teams embrace a customer-centric outlook, then — using the principles from our book Be Your Customer’s Hero — gives them the skills and confidence they need to handle any service interaction. Don’t leave your frontline team hanging… Give them the training they deserve. Learn more at customerheroworkshop.com, that is customerheroworkshop.com.   Take care of yourself and take care of your customers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Toporek is a customer service expert. Not only does he do keynotes and training on customer service, but he has lived it, and grew his family's and his own businesses by delivering great customer service. He gets customer service! I met Adam last year at a National Speakers Association meeting, and we've been friends ever since. His common sense approach to customer service is refreshing for its simplicity and its honesty. I learn a ton about the right way to do customer service from reading Adam's blog, and listening to his podcast Crack the Customer Code, which is co-hosted by Jeannie Walters, one of the world's foremost experts on customer experience. In this interview, we crack some customer codes, break down customer service, and share stories of great and not so great customer service. More about Adam They keep giving Adam Toporek new titles: “Thought leader.” “Customer service expert.” “Customer experience influencer.” But he is really just a guy who loves customer service and who spreads his message of Hero-Class®service through engaging keynote speeches, high-energy training workshops, and informative writing. Adam’s business inclinations were demonstrated early on when, as a small child, he disappeared in a department store and was eventually found in the manager’s office playing with an adding machine. While he has since learned to do what he’s told when shopping with his mother (and his wife), he’s never lost his passion for making sure the numbers add up. Connect with Adam Toporek Buy Adam's book, Be Your Customer's Hero Listen to Adam's podcast - Crack the Customer Code Customer service articles - learn from the Customer's That Stick blog Follow Adam Toporek on Twitter

Reach Us Here: Doug- @DJDoug Strickland- @NiceGuyonBiz Adam- @adamtoporek   Production Assistant - Anna Nygren On Facebook: The Nice Guys Community page     Intro Doug wanted to be a reporter when he was 7 (awww) Adam wanted to be Jimmy Page (rock on!) When an individual is building a personal brand, he/she needs to utilize several media outlets Direction and Magnitude of Business By saying yes to everything, you take away energy from your core goals Ask yourself: “What do I like that's going to drive business revenue?” You're not alone, it really is hard to deliver good customer experiences More often than not, we need to think about the financial aspects first and the passion of your job second But the bigger you get, the more you can do what you love When you franchise, you do give up some control You've got to be able to handle other people's rules When you are interacting on a professional level, you need to leave your personal stuff at the door   Closing Lines Recommended Read: Be Your Customers Hero Recommended Read: "Be Your Customers Hero" Customer experience is everything You can't control everything that happens, you can only control how you react   Check out Adam's website- http://customersthatstick.com/ And his Online Course -“Master the 7 Service Triggers”  Reach Adam at http://customersthatstick.com/contact/  Amazon.com: Click before buying anything. Help support the podcast.   Doug's Stuff: Amazon #1 Best selling book Nice Guys Finish First. Business Building Bootcamp (10 Module Course)   Partner Links: Interview Valet:  Get interviewed on top podcasts and share your message. BombBomb: Take your email to the next level. Drop a BombBomb today. Acuity Scheduling: Stop wasting time going back and forth scheduling appointments   Survey: Take our short survey so The Nice Guys know what you like.   Nice Guys Links Subscribe to the Podcast Niceguysonbusiness.com   If you want to talk to Doug, call him at 410-340-6861 any Wednesday between 5:00 PM-6:30 PM EST.   If you just want to leave us feedback and not talk to anyone, call 4242 DJ DOUG (424-253-3684)   Promise Statement: To provide a learning experience that is entertaining and adds value to your life.   Don't underestimate the Power of Nice.  

Adam Toperek is an internationally recognized Customer Service Expert, Key Note Speaker, and Workshop Leader. He is the Author of “Be Your Customers’ Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines” as well as the founder of Customers that Stick Blog. When he is not speaking or delivering high energy Customer Service Key Notes or Workshops, he can be found co-hosting the “Crack the Customer Code Podcast” and writing extensively on customer experience. Adam has an MBA and a Certificate in Customer Experience; he is also a Net Promoter Certified Associate.   Questions What is your Zodiac Sign? Would you say being people oriented, outgoing and very sociable are true characteristics of your personality? Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey On a global level, do you think there has been any improvement in customer experience or do you think it is getting worse? How do you get people to develop a culture of service, a mindset where everything is in alignment with the customers in mind? Have you found that sometimes empathy is lacking in terms of the organizations’ connection with their customers and do you think it’s driven by how people are brought up so they are not able to connect with the customer when they are venting? In your book, you speak about 7 service triggers; can you share a little about that and explain what that means? Do you think it’s important for the entire organization to be exposed to emotional intelligence so that they can be better able to manage their own emotions? From a customer experience perspective, what are some considerations for entrepreneurs online to consider as it relates to customer experience and having a successful business? What are your thoughts on training and does it have a different connotation in the mind? How do you stay motivated everyday? What is the one online resource, website, tool or app you cannot live without in your business? Can you share what are some of that books that have had the biggest impact on you? What is one thing in your life right now that you are really excited about – something that you are working on to develop yourself or your people? Where can our listeners find your information? What is one quote or saying that you live by or that inspires you in times of adversity?   Highlights   Adam shared that his sign is Sagittarius which is the early part of December. One unique fact about a Sagittarius is that they are extremely out going, and they are very people oriented and very sociable. Adam stated that he was not sure of the characteristics of a Sagittarius but that he believes those are definitely true of a person who is very good at customer experience and customer service. Adam stated that he is a 3rd generation entrepreneur, so business is in his blood. His grandfather owned a main street shoe store, his father started a wholesale business in the back of his mother’s retail children’s clothing store, so he grew up around business and doing sale tags and that has always been a part of who he is. As he opened his own businesses and went further along in his career, he eventually owned his retail business and got involved in franchising, one of the things he found was that in your own business, you could be the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Plumbing Officer; you’re everything but the part he always gravitated towards was customer experience and customer interaction. And the more he interacted with his customers, he realized how important the idea of customer experience was. Over time he started talking about it and then writing about it publicly on blogs, it then developed a following, it developed into a book, then into speaking and into key notes. But what he finds fascinating is that the journey that lead him there comes from having to be face to face with customers and having to work with employees that are face to face with customers and seeing the challenges and the struggles they had to deliver good customer experiences even when they wanted to. Adam stated that globally, expectations have changed; they are different from what they use to be and customers understand what good customer service is supposed to look like and then he also thinks customers sometimes have unrealistic expectations based on viral stories of customer service and that the customer is always right. These days customer service is the biggest source of competitive advantage for almost any organization. If you are not competing on experience, and you are in a competitive industry, you are in trouble. Adam shared that to get business owners to focus on customer experience and develop their team members to translate that experience they deliver to the customers on a face to face basis, over the telephone or on social media, can only start with the numbers; there are many statistics that tends to open eyes. If you can use an organization’s own numbers that is helpful, you could use their survey data their ranking or their NPS. He stated 85% of customers are willing to pay more for a superior customer experience, your retention equals profit. There are 3 different studies that show acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5-10 times more expensive than retaining an existing one, yet most people put their time and energy into marketing instead of retention and customer experience efforts. Customer experience also affects moral and how their culture and employees feel and how they interact. Customer experience permeates the entire organization and you have to start with the numbers and the economic argument especially persons in the C-Suite, business owners or people higher up in their organization, they tend to be run by numbers. Adam shared that one of the things is that you’ve got to do is walk the talk as a leader. If you don’t have a customer centric culture, if you’re not leading from the top, if what they see from you as a leader is that customers are numbers and customers aren’t people then they are not going to treat them like people. There is nothing you can do for employees if you don’t first start doing yourself. You have to help people understand that they are dealing with human beings and that what they do matters. Adam stated that he has a chapter in his book, “Be Your Customers’ Hero” called “Everybody’s Rushed, Everybody’s Stressed”, because nowadays nobody has enough time and those are our customers, they don’t want to be hassled, they want to have easy experiences. A lot of the time employees will say this is just another retail job and this doesn’t mean anything and this doesn’t matter and the thing is to have a purpose and a mission to make them understand that purpose and mission centers around making peoples day better whether you are selling t-shirts, selling medicine or online software, whatever the services are around that, you are making a difference in peoples’ lives, you are impacting peoples’ lives. When you help them connect and if you help them understand the human on the other side of the phone, desk or email; that is one of the first steps in getting them to have a customer centric attitude and to act on it. Adam stated that there are a lot of factors at work like organizational and upbringing. He shared that one of the things he often teaches is that we are not biologically designed to be good at customer service. That is one of the reasons he focuses on training and why training is important. We have all of these things referred to as Cognitive Biases, there is negativity bias, human beings tend to look for negative information over positive information, we tend to give more weight and power to negative information instead of positive information and that makes sense, the brain’s job is to keep us alive. We have defense mechanisms, so when someone yells or screams at us, it is not natural for us to go, “Thank you for telling me sir, how can I help you better?” It is not a natural reaction, you have to train yourself to depersonalize, you have to train yourself to look at the other persons perspective not what they’re saying about you, not how you’re feeling. It is easy to empathize with somebody who is not being negative or who is not attacking you or your organization and it comes from caring and anybody that is built for caring or has been trained that the customer is important can find that empathy. It still is a trainable skill and it is still something you need to filter for because not every person should be in a customer facing role, there are some people that simply just should not have customer facing jobs but assuming that you have the right team, you have the right people on the bus, you can train empathy for easy situations but then you have to really train for them to not only empathize but depersonalize and to be able to be calm when the storm is coming and the communication skills and the techniques you need to help take that situation and move it down the road to a positive resolution. Adam stated that what is really interesting about the service triggers is that they are a preventative tool. When you talk about customer service, everybody wants to solve the problem that they already have, “How do I deal with a difficult customer? How do I this?” The service triggers are designed to create fewer problems to deal with, so the idea of the trigger is based on our psychological mechanism and we all have those triggers that could have been from when a song comes on the radio and you start to feel emotional, you look back and say that was the song your grandmother used to sing to you when you were little because that’s a trigger for you. We all have these personal triggers whether they be positive or negative and there are certain triggers throughout the population that are service triggers that are hot buttons for people in customer service situations where they tend to get really upset. Adam identified (7) triggers and not everybody has them equally and not everybody has them but when you’re looking at it at an organizational level, what you do, is try to approach it by “How could we prevent these from being pulled?” The first two triggers are “Being ignored” and “Being abandoned.” You’ve walked into a restaurant and watched the hostess walk back and forth and not even make eye contact. Being abandoned, they say they can’t handle that for you and will have the manager call you back tomorrow and what happens tomorrow? Nobody calls you, and what happens when you call them? You’ve been abandoned; you’ve been left on hold for 30 minutes. And these are triggers, so this happens at a restaurant and it’s your favorite restaurant, you might say it was a bad night, a new hostess and you’ll give them a break. But if you go in a second time and the hostess ignores you, you’re not going to wait 3 minutes, you’re going to wait 30 seconds and what happens is that we have these triggers that we carry from organization to organization cause once you’ve been sent from department to department, and wasted hours trying to get answers to your questions, you can get quick on the trigger. So if you ever experience this in your customer experience life, the customer gets an employee and they are saying “I have to send you to a different department or have my manager call you” and they say “What’s the manager’s name? What time will they call? Who do I call if I don’t hear from them?” and then they start going through a list of things. That’s a trigger, they know they have been burned before, they’ve been shuffled (another trigger), they’ve been abandoned. So what we do is look at the customer journey, we look at each touch point in the journey, particularly the major ones and say, “How could a customer feel ignored here? Are they not greeted in time? Is the phone not picked up fast enough? How could a customer feel abandoned?” And when you go through all seven (7) service triggers, if you can prevent these seven service triggers, you can revolutionize your customer experience by starting there. Adam shared that emotional intelligence has a frame work with it. It has to have the idea of being in touch with who you are and not only who you are but how you relate to customers. Adam Toporek in his book, stated that the first 3 sections are really about mindset because that’s how important it is. The first section is about the mindset of the customer service representative: how do we feel. Everybody not only needs to come to grips with themselves and their own triggers and their own cognitive biases and their own ways of approaching customers and customer experience but also how they interact with each other, with their team, all of that mixes together to kind of create the perfect culture. Those are the things you strive for in creating a culture that is mixed with empathy across and throughout the organization and by looking inside yourself. Adam shared that the first thing to do is to map your customer journey because small businesses never do that, solo entrepreneurs and consultants rarely ever sit down and say, “What is my customer’s journey?” “Where do people come in, what marketing are they seeing?” “Where are they finding me, my twitter, my blog, this podcast?” And then what happens “What expectations am I setting? What is my response time? What is the next thing that happens?” You then look at the journey and look at what you think it is now and what you want it to be, what do you want your customers to experience? What do you want your response time to be? And how often do you want to monitor your channels? How do you want to communicate with your customers? Where do you want your business to live, is it on Skype, on email? If you look at your journey and go through from beginning to end, every piece of your brand that a customer or prospective customer can touch and then you take the approach of looking at each touch point and saying, “How can I make this touch point great? How can I make sure I don’t mess it up?” Adam stated that one of the concepts he teaches is that he breaks up the touch points and pressure points because there is not enough time if you try to focus on everything, nothing is going to get done, he says we all say everything is important in customer experience and it is. You have to start with the big rocks, you look at the pressure points, what are the 3-5 big moments when you interact with the customer and it may be to close the sale, when they sign up for your programme, when they buy your speech, when they buy your product or when there is a customer service issue, look at those big pressure points first. Get those as tight and prefect and then work on as many touch points as you can. Adam stated that he agrees with the concept of development rather than training as there have been a lot of bad training and there have been a lot of training when people sit in a class for a day or a half day or 3 days and then everything went back to normal but what is particularly harmful is when you have training and you don’t have the culture to support what they learn in the training. He stated that if a company brings him in and he gets the team jazzed up and ready to help customers and they have the skills and they are feeling more confident now on how to handle difficult customers, providing them with communication tricks, helping them to work on their mindset and then they go back to a culture where there is nothing but just rules and policies and managers that are yelling about numbers and nobody seemingly cares about customers, then you wasted your money because it won’t be effective. Being customer centric and wanting to help the customers has to be in the DNA of the organization. And that resistance to training is because it is not part of the whole package, it’s just like “customer service is down, let’s get a trainer.” They are really not getting the whole suite and to fit a square peg into round hole – just will not work. When asked how he stays motivated every single day - Adam shared that he just does as he has always been doing….staying goal oriented; he looks at his goals regularly. One of the things he does is try to stay healthy and fit as it makes all the difference. He has a treadmill desk, so staying healthy helps the mechanics of the internal motivation and also he loves what he does, he trains and teaches and he has always enjoyed teaching and he likes helping people solve problems and teaching people new things. When he can teach somebody how to deal with customer service, it’s not easy but some of what they are dealing with is easy and he can help, so it is really rewarding and that’s the biggest thing to teach people and to help people make their lives better and be more successful in their jobs. One tool, website, resource or app that Adam shared he cannot live without because of all his travelling is TripIt. Trip It manages all his trips and he said it is insanely cool, so you get your email from your airline, you get your email from your hotel, just forward it to TripIt and it puts it in an itinerary with all of your codes and your confirmation numbers and the phone numbers and it puts everything in order, so it will do your flights, the hotel check in, then the flight and your hotel check out, it puts in the rental car. It also does alerts if your flights are running late, so instead of signing up with each different airline, you just send everything to TripIt and it alerts you. This app is available on App Store and Google Play Store. When asked what are some books that have had the greatest impact on him - Adam shared “How To Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie this book is about how you interact with people, how to treat people and how you communicate with people. Another book Adam shared that has had the greatest impact is called “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport and his thesis is essential. Today one of the greatest things you can do if you are in a knowledge field, is take time to do deep work, to really focus on getting rid of the noise. The author really dives deeply into the idea and shows people how they have done it and different modules for doing it, that idea of really having focus time to work on projects and to think and create great things. He stated that it is a valuable book for him because it is what he believes in intuitively. When asked what is one thing he is working on to develop himself or his people that he is really excited about - Adam shared that he is hitting a long-term goal as it is something that he always wanted to do but it never made the cut which is to create an online training because it is truly the future and it’s getting more virtual everyday and he is launching his first online customer service training course coming out the first week of September and he has a couple other concepts that he’s working on, so hopefully there will be 2 or 3 online training courses out by the end of 2016. The first one being released is based on the 7 service triggers. Link for Course Adam says listeners can find him online on any of the below links: Customers That Stick Website Adam Toporek Twitter Adam Toporek LinkedIn   Adam shared his quote that he refers to in times of adversity and challenges and really contributes to his very own success - “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”   The other is a poem called “If” by Rudyard Kipling.   Links   “Be Your Customers’ Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines” by Adam Toporek Crack the Customer Code Podcast TripIt “How To Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport Customers That Stick Website Adam Toporek Twitter Adam Toporek LinkedIn

Even if you don't hire customer service reps, you are a one-man support team every time you talk with your customers. Here's everything you should know about delivering awesome customer experience!

Shep Hyken speaks with fellow customer service expert, keynote speaker, and author, Adam Toporek. They discuss Adam’s new book, “Be Your Customers Hero: Real World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines.” In addition, Adam shares seven service triggers that can ruin the customer’s experience and the importance of avoiding them. So, if you want to be your customer’s hero, don’t miss this episode of Amazing Business Radio. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Too many organizational leaders are scared of employee empowerment, often coming from cultures of command and control and fear what can happen if they give up that control. However, the greatest customer experience companies empower their teams to solve issues in real-time, resulting in more satisfied customers and fewer escalated issues. Our special #WorkTrends guest Adam Toporek (https://www.amazon.com/Your-Customers-Hero-Real-World-Techniques/dp/0814449050) will speak about customer service examples from Starbucks, Ritz Carlton and his own experience as a small business owner. Come learn these tips about how to Be Your Customer's Hero (http://beyourcustomershero.com/): How smart empowerment does not mean giving a blank check or giving up all control. It is a business decision based on analyzing risks and rewards.Why empowered employees are more dedicated to their jobs and more satisfied with their work.Why employee empowerment is one of the most powerful techniques for preventing poor customer experiences from occurring or escalating. This one-hour live podcast and Twitter chat between Host Meghan M. Biro and Guest Adam Toporek on August 24 at 1pm ET is not one to be missed!

Kevin Craine host of Bizcast has Adam Toporek on the show to talk about his book and what it really means to "Be Your Customer's Hero."   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 70 - Adam Toporek discusses his book Be Your Customer's Hero and real world tips and techniques for creating superior customer experience. Adam is the founder of the Customers That Stick blog. He has been recognized by The Huffington Post as one of the "Top 100 Most Social Customer Service Pros On Twitter." Stay tuned after the interview for five action items to take advantage of the ideas and advice in this interview, and hear bonus comments from Adam. Host, Kevin Craine     Everyday-MBA.com

Adam is an internationally recognized customer service expert, keynote speaker, and workshop leader. He is the author of Be Your Customer's Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines, as well as the founder of the popular Customers That Stick® blog. Inside this FREE “First Millionaire Manifesto”, J V reveals the seven steps to seven figures and how to put more money in the bank, enjoy a richly rewarding life, and make a big difference. Subscribe in ITunes Like this Podcast? Help spread the word. Subscribing and leaving a review helps other business owners and entrepreneurs find our podcast…and make their big difference. They will thank you for it.   Watch this FREE Video to discover the Secrets to getting in your zone, achieving fast results, and building a high-profit conscious business.  Conscious Millionaire Podcast: On his free podcast, Monday through Friday, J V interviews top successful entrepreneurs and business owners who reveal their business solutions and business opportunities on topics such as: conscious business, social entrepreneurship, business online marketing, internet business solutions, internet marketing, team building and culture, goal setting, how to become a wealthy entrepreneur, and developing a high-profit business plan that will change lives and the world.

Adam is an internationally recognized customer service expert, keynote speaker, and workshop leader. He is the author of Be Your Customer's Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines, as well as the founder of the popular Customers That Stick® blog. Inside this FREE “First Millionaire Manifesto”, J V reveals the seven steps to seven figures and how to put more money in the bank, enjoy a richly rewarding life, and make a big difference. Subscribe in ITunes Like this Podcast? Help spread the word. Subscribing and leaving a review helps other business owners and entrepreneurs find our podcast…and make their big difference. They will thank you for it.   Watch this FREE Video to discover the Secrets to getting in your zone, achieving fast results, and building a high-profit conscious business.  Conscious Millionaire Podcast: On his free podcast, Monday through Friday, J V interviews top successful entrepreneurs and business owners who reveal their business solutions and business opportunities on topics such as: conscious business, social entrepreneurship, business online marketing, internet business solutions, internet marketing, team building and culture, goal setting, how to become a wealthy entrepreneur, and developing a high-profit business plan that will change lives and the world.