Online Community Roundup: April 3 2009
04.03.2009
For all who work with online communities, you should read these two exceptionally insightful blogposts from Rachel Happe and Spike Jones.
All Things Related to customers
Trouble Brewing For Starbucks?
01.28.2009
Starbucks is taking a rather interesting (and somewhat dangerous) approach to economic decline: they’re not automatically brewing decaf coffee after noon, though you can still get it upon request. My take? Good for Starbucks. I’ll go out on a limb here and say they did their homework on not only cost-savings but quantify just how [...]
Being Transparent Or Inviting Your Customers Into The Kitchen
01.07.2009
There’s some spirited debate brewing around the idea of transparency and its benefits to customer service. Is it best to let the customer be ‘blissfully unaware’ of the company’s processes (essentially how it works)? Or is it better to allow them into the kitchen to see how everything is cooked? I argue strongly for the [...]
Is There Room For ‘We’ In Your Elevator?
01.05.2009
Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity recently wrote a post referencing some familiar advice for crafting an effective elevator speech. The latest conventional wisdom would have us believe that the best elevator pitch is not about us, but about the other individual. The principal strategy is to set our needs to the side and focus exclusively [...]
Five Ways To Treat Employees Like Customers
07.07.2008
What if your organization applied the same degree of focus on the internal retention of employees as it does on the external retention of customers?
Every Single Person Is Responsible For Customer Experience
06.23.2008
Here’s a question that I’ve been pondering for a while and it just resurfaced lately. When management makes a person or a department responsible for customer satisfaction as their primary function, does that inadvertently absolve others of that responsibility? It was an issue I always struggled with as a membership development professional in the non-profit [...]
Being Remarkable At Work And Life
08.31.2007
By day, I’m an account manager for a technology and software company. It pays the bills, provides another level of purpose to my life, and offers one more laboratory to practice workplay philosophy. After working primarily in the non-profit sector for the past ten years, life in the corporate world has been interesting. There are [...]
In Service To Our Clients
06.12.2007
I experienced a moment of lucid learning today that’s well worth sharing. Hopefully, this will resonate with you, particularly if you work directly with customers and clients in a relationship-building capacity. I have a client who is delightful in most ways, but is rarely specific in their requests. They sort of know what they want [...]
More Ways To Cultivate Remarkable Customer Service
02.21.2007
Via David Gammel at High Context Consulting, I came across this fantastic article from Joel Spolsky called Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service. I really don’t know much about Joel’s company, Fog Creek Software, but if his article is any indication of what it would be like to be his customer, I’ll be giving his [...]
Creating You-Focused Value
01.11.2007
When you get positive feedback from your customers, which would you rather hear (or read): You are a rock star! or You are a rock star because you helped me figure out how to solve this problem that’s been a major pain in the ass for months! or I feel like a rock star because [...]
Networks
Now Reading
In the Queue:
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Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online by Robert V Kozinets
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Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler
Currently reading:
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Excellence By Design: Transforming Workplace and Work Practice by Turid H. Horgen, Michael L. Joroff, William L. Porter, Donald A. Schon
