4 Tips For Reducing Unhappy Or Unimpressive Customer Experiences

Julie Starr • August 4, 2022



In life, you can’t please everyone. When it comes to how we manage our own lives, we tend to accept that as fact and try to do the best we can anyway. We please those we care about and don’t worry about the opinions of those who we may not interact with outside of a few meetings. 

Yet in business, this is not a good strategy . We cannot simply brush away the concerns, worries, or poor experiences of those who, in good faith, tried to interact with our firm. Polite disagreement is fine, such as when we politely lay out the true details of customer interaction in a spiteful review left to damage our brand after we had to deny them service, for example.

However, for the most part, a poor experience is something that we can use to better our firm and understand its operations. Even if the issue wasn’t entirely our fault, it’s good to take responsibility because that’s what can affect change and help inform our actions going forward.

Reducing the amount of unhappy or unimpressive customer experiences is a good target to aim for. If we can reduce this by 20% year on year, that’s worthwhile. Let’s consider how this may be applicable:

Empower Your Customer Support Staff

Solid customer support can turn a bad experience into a good one, or at least one where we become impressed by the level of understanding and care invested into our issue. It’s one thing if someone lets you down, but if someone makes a great and sincere effort to rectify the issue and provide a gesture of goodwill? Are you more likely to trust that individual or entity? We’d say you are.

So, empowering your customer support staff to come with administrative possibilities in rectifying issues, be that adding credit to an account, issuing refunds, getting to the bottom of an issue, and apologizing on behalf of your firm, well, even if it’s the customer’s fault, that can make the entire effort worth it. After all, a customer is much more likely to tell their friends about a bad experience with your firm rather than a good one, so this way you may be pulling the plug on potentially negative word-of-mouth marketing.

Document Everything

From providing order receipts to chat log communication transcripts after a live chat exchange is concluded, all the way up to providing the minute order, packaging, and delivery tracking information, you can be assured that firms that overcommunicate tend to eliminate confusion or worry from the process of interacting with their services.

This means that negative experiences born out of miscommunication or confusion can be effectively eliminated because with every step your business makes, it will have communicated its intent and current status. This way, a complaint that may have come can be assuaged, be that a delivery arriving two days later than expected or perhaps offering a customer a pre-order for new stock rather than thinking they’ve ordered an available item and feeling annoyed that delivery hasn’t been made. Communication, as always, is king.

Use The Best eCommerce Platforms

It’s good to use an eCommerce platform with the features most appropriate for your brand, and you can use https://www.atwix.com/magento-adobe-commerce-vs-shopify/  to better see comparisons between the major players like Adobe commerce, Shopify, and Magento.

When you can integrate a seamless, easy-to-understand, and worthwhile platform, customers find the buying process to be much easier and simpler, and all of the relevant information is communicated with clarity. Platforms like this also help your staff keep on top of their deliverables and workflow, meaning that mistakes are reduced significantly.

Customer Feedback

Unfortunately, you’re not going to be able to assuage or fix every customer issue. For some, one problem is enough for a customer to ignore your business for the rest of their lifetime. That’s just how it goes.

However, these customers are certainly going to feel motivated to express their distaste or concerns, and so leveraging that is always going to be useful. Providing worthwhile portals by which they can raise their concerns and complaints is key. A dedicated email address can work here, accepting public reviews , and of course, passing along communications sent to your support team that may be of relevance. You may also send out anonymous surveys, the completion of which offers a light discount on their next order.

From here, you can use that information to potentially avoid a bad experience for the next user.

Sustainability

While no business wants their customers to have a poor experience, when these instances occur, it’s an opportunity to welcome stakeholder input. Doing so in a transparent manner and incorporating that feedback is critical to the evolution of the business.  For instance, perhaps a customer comments on the product packaging. By inquiring as to the complaint, there may be options to explore sustainable packaging options or even sustainable delivery for the goods.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily reduce unhappy or unimpressive customer experiences going forward.

How Student-Led ‘Energy Audits’ Are Cutting School Costs (and Lighting the Way Forward)

By Julie Starr • July 14, 2025
What happens when students stop waiting for adults to fix things and start conducting their own energy audits? Money gets saved. The lights get switched off. Data gets analyzed. And a quiet revolution in sustainability begins—inside schools that once overlooked their own inefficiencies. Across the globe, student-led energy audits are proving that change doesn't always need to come from a policy shift or a major capital budget. Sometimes, it begins with a clipboard, a spreadsheet, and a group of curious minds asking: Why are the hallway lights on at noon when sunlight floods the building? The Energy Detectives These audits aren’t science fair projects. They’re rigorous investigations, often done in collaboration with facilities staff, local environmental nonprofits, or even engineering mentors. Students go from classroom to classroom measuring electricity usage, checking for phantom loads , and identifying where heat is escaping in winter or air conditioning is leaking in summer. One high school in Ontario saved over $12,000 a year after its Grade 11 physics students ran an energy audit and suggested simple changes—LED upgrades, motion sensors in bathrooms, and smarter heating schedules. They didn’t just propose ideas. They pitched them with spreadsheets, thermal images, and payback timelines. It worked. Learning That Pays Off—Literally Unlike textbook learning, these audits blend real-world math, environmental science, economics, and persuasive communication. Students aren’t just learning about sustainability. They’re doing it. And the savings add up. From dimming overlit hallways to reprogramming HVAC systems that run all weekend for empty buildings, students are surfacing blind spots that administrators often overlook. In some districts, their findings are influencing energy policy. Elsewhere, the audits have inspired school boards to hire sustainability coordinators—often alumni of the student programs themselves. There’s something poetic about a school funding new books or laptops from money saved by students who found out the vending machines didn’t need to be plugged in 24/7. Why This Matters More Than Ever With education budgets tightening and utility costs rising, every dollar saved is a dollar that can go back into classrooms. And here’s where it gets interesting from a family finance perspective, too. If you’re a parent setting aside money for post-secondary savings, every bit of school efficiency helps. Fewer energy costs might mean more programming, better STEM facilities, or even bursaries. That raises a broader point: when families save for their children’s future, they often look into RESPs (Registered Education Savings Plans). And many wonder—is a RESP deduction available on my taxes? While contributions themselves aren’t deductible, the gains grow tax-free, and students often pay little to no tax when they withdraw the funds during school. A Movement Worth Replicating These audits aren’t just an exercise in environmentalism. They’re leadership labs. Students learn how to spot inefficiencies, speak up in board meetings, and make a business case for change. They don’t just flip switches—they shift mindsets. And they carry these habits into adulthood. The result? A generation growing up not only with climate anxiety, but also with tools to tackle it.

Smart Sensors, Smarter Supply Chains: Enhancing Traceability in Food & Beverage

By Julie Starr • June 20, 2025
In today’s competitive food and beverage (F&B) landscape, traceability is no longer a compliance checkbox—it’s a differentiator. The ability to track every step of a product’s journey, from origin to shelf, is vital for regulatory accuracy and to ensure brand integrity, supply chain agility, and consumer trust. Add smart sensors to the mix: the quiet, tireless observers revolutionizing supply chain intelligence. Traceability Has a Data Problem Despite digitization across many F&B operations, most traceability systems still rely on fragmented or manual data inputs. Batch numbers, barcodes, and handwritten logs often stand between a supplier and clarity when things go wrong. This approach struggles with latency and scale. When contamination or delays occur, root cause analysis is slow, costly, and damaging. Smart sensors shift this paradigm by embedding real-time, contextual intelligence into every stage of the supply chain . Whether monitoring humidity in transit or recording fill-level precision in bottling plants, they remove the guesswork by turning physical conditions into structured, time-stamped data. From Passive Monitoring to Active Optimization Sensors used to be reactive tools, alerting operators to anomalies. But smart sensors now play a proactive role in process control. They measure, and they interpret. For example, temperature sensors embedded in cold chain logistics can dynamically adjust cooling systems or flag threshold breaches before spoilage occurs. These advancements reduce waste and loss at a systemic level. In a production facility, smart sensors integrated with PLCs can enforce recipe compliance, verify clean-in-place processes, and detect micro-stoppages in real-time. This enables operations to pivot faster and isolate inefficiencies before they cascade downstream. Trust is Built on Transparency Consumers are paying more attention to what they eat and drink. They’re looking beyond labels, expecting visibility into how ingredients are sourced, processed, and handled. Smart sensors make this level of transparency achievable —without burdening manufacturers with excessive manual oversight. By capturing metadata throughout production and distribution, these sensors create a digital footprint that’s tamper-resistant and instantly accessible. When this data is integrated with a central platform, brands can respond confidently to audits, recalls, and quality assurance challenges with a level of precision that would be impossible through legacy systems. Intelligence Without Infrastructure Overhaul One common misconception is that adding smart sensors requires a top-down reinvention of supply chain infrastructure. In reality, companies can deploy edge sensors in a modular, scalable way. Many modern solutions offer plug-and-play functionality, allowing for fast integration with existing machinery and MES systems. This is where suppliers like alps-machine.com are reshaping expectations. Rather than pushing proprietary ecosystems, they design sensor-ready equipment with interoperability in mind. This future-proofs investment and keeps businesses nimble in the face of regulatory or market shifts. Designing for Data Longevity Sensors are only as powerful as the context they capture. A smart implementation ensures the data collected can be standardized, stored securely, and accessed meaningfully across departments. This means moving beyond local dashboards toward centralized, queryable datasets that inform everything from supplier contracts to marketing claims. As AI and predictive analytics become more accessible, these data-rich environments will unlock new capabilities—such as predicting demand spikes based on real-time freshness indicators or adjusting production schedules dynamically based on in-transit sensor feedback. Final Thoughts: Smarter Isn’t Optional Traceability isn’t solved by more paperwork—it’s solved by embedded intelligence. Smart sensors don’t just help businesses know what happened; they help prevent the wrong things from happening at all. For companies in the food and beverage sector, adopting smart sensors is less about chasing innovation and more about enabling resilience, speed, and confidence in every decision.