-
Four Secrets to Successful Business Marketing Strategy
1. Test the market early and often. Before you invest too much in a product or service, you need to find out if people actually want it. Seems obvious, but it’s amazing how often businesses skip this step. I was waiting at a traffic light the other day and I saw this yellow sign about a foot…
-
Four Reasons Why Annual Performance Reviews Fail and What To Do About It
Teague Hopkins on my advisory board flagged this Washington Post story about Accenture throwing out most of its current process for doing annual performance reviews (APRs) and rankings for employees. With 330,000 employees, Accenture figured that since the process wasn’t actually improving performance and it was costing huge amounts of time and money, it was time…
-
Nine Things You Don’t Want to Hear from Customer Service
Our guest blogger this week is Teresa Tidwell * The trending definition of “Customer Service” is “figure it out yourself” or “customer self-service.” You may get your problem solved if you are lucky and persistent enough to gather the information you need from the maze of reps. Then, maybe you can piece together the solution…
-
The Power of Experiencing What Your Customers Are Experiencing
Do you know what your customers are experiencing when they use your product or service? If you had the same experience they were having, you could be knowledgeable, empathetic, and encouraging – you could be really helpful! Our kitchen faucet was about seven years old and the bracket under the counter had rusted out so the…
-
Five Reasons Your Company Is Addicted to Reorganization and How to Survive the Next One
Some companies seem to be in a constant state of reorganization. It’s almost an addiction. If you want to survive reorganizations, you need to be a bridge not a box. More on this in a minute, but first, it helps to understand why companies reorganize so often? 1. Modern enterprises tend to describe themselves in…
-
Is Your Market Going to be Uberfied or AirBnB’d? Disruptive Innovations Coming Your Way
Uber is a “private car for hire” service which uses a mobile app to handle the whole engagement and payment transaction including rating both drivers and riders. It has the taxi industry trying to set up roadblocks. AirBnB matches up people who want to rent out their apartments (trailers, rooms, etc.) with people looking for…
-
When Your Service Breaks, Take the Opportunity to Enhance Your Customers’ Satisfaction
One of the odd things about customer satisfaction is that customers actually become more satisfied with a service when they have a positive interaction with the service provider when the service breaks. Maybe we just expect everything to break eventually and it gives us more confidence if we know we can get it fixed. I have…