The Big Question – What’s Next For Our Business?
Growth and expansion are provocative words in business. They suggest all things good, abundant, and forward-moving – more revenue, more brand exposure, more leverage and influence. When seasons of success accumulate under your belt growth often feels like the next logical step, much like marriage after a long courtship. Yet, whether your business is big…
Getting Personal: It’s NOT Just for Valentine’s Day
Having the products and services your customers want and delivering them consistently is merely table stakes today. The real challenge is whether you get personal with customers! Let’s face it, we live in a service economy and are surrounded by service providers. Yet, oddly, we often feel that we are woefully underserved or worse –…
How to Get a Solid Return on Workplace Fun
It happens in many places and in many ways, but it is a consistent theme for employees at Zappos…they practice random acts of fun and weirdness. Maybe you were in an airport during the hectic holiday season when seven different flights participated in a Zappos-themed game of Wheel of Fortune…baggage claim style. If your luggage…
Guest post: PHENOMENAL Marketing Systems by Howard Partridge
For about a decade I have been blessed to work with and for Howard Partridge, president of Phenomenal Products. In fact, this year I will be one of the presenters of a leadership master class with Howard and: John Maxwell the category-creating leadership author of more than 60 leadership books, as well as Michel Gerber…
If You Don’t Have Passion for Your Product, Why Should Your Customer?
It’s a nice daydream, right? Feeling, or better yet, actually being ahead of the game? Sometimes trying to get on top of all your day-to-day business realities seems futile at best. At the end of the day you may feel more like a firefighter and less like a business owner or leader, managing the emergencies…
Making it Right: Turning Breakdown Experiences into Forever Customers
It happens from time to time, despite your best efforts. Your business dutifully prepares for seemingly every contingency and investigates each process fault point. Yet, once in awhile, something still manages to fall apart when trying to serve a customer. The work of researchers like Amy Smith and Ruth Bolton published in the Journal of…
How to Speed-Train Seasonal Employees
Tis the season for…seasonal employees. This time of year temporary employees swell payroll rosters, even if only for a matter of weeks. When time is of the essence (or is nonexistent), how does your business train these new recruits to be an effective extension of your brand during the boom of commerce that engulfs November…
Gummy Worms and Customer Experience Excellence!
July 15th was National Gummy Worm day and while that might not be the type of information you would expect from this blog, it turns out to have significance in our office. Specifically, National Gummy Worm day served as an opportunity to “surprise and delight” many of our clients and business partners. Additionally, it allowed…
Customer Connections by the Facts Not by Total Nonsense
While researching the book I just completed about elevating the “patient experience” in healthcare, I encountered a powerful quote about the “lemming mentality” of business leadership. In their book entitled “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense,” Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton note, “Business decisions, as many of our colleagues in business and your own…
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