My focus in this blog post is on Vernon Hill, Founder of Metro Bank London. Funded 95% by Americans with $1.2 billion ( I am one of them)  He founded Commerce Bank in the US in 1973 (the 20,000^th  smallest bank in the US to the 18th largest bank in the US before selling in 2007. All built around customer service. No money spent on advertising. (If you had invested money at the start, your return on investment would have equaled 470 times).

Service Quality Institute President John Tschohl shares his recent customer service experiences and provides his thoughts on where they could be improved.  A major trend John sees within customer service is investing in expensive technology solutions that are designed to ease internal issues, but they come at the cost of frustrated customers.  Far too many companies “talk the talk” of being customer-focused but fail in their practice of truly looking out for the customer experience.

Among the many tools and tactics a company can use to improve the customer experience, speed is the most overlooked. That’s unfortunate because a major factor in creating a positive customer experience is speed.

This 60 Minute interview with Jeff Bezos of Amazon focused primarily on holiday shopping, particularly the annual shopping extravaganza that is Cyber Monday.  It's a huge day for Amazon -- more than 300 items will be ordered each second --and does much to reveal the company's true ambitions.  Amazon doesn't just want to reinvent the way we shop for and buy things, it wants to upend every step of the process -- including how our purchases come to us.