How NOT to use Facebook

As a habit, I follow closely what my companies competitors do…press releases, articles, service offerings, etc. And now with Facebook its as easy as becoming a fan of all my competitors to follow exactly what they are up to.
One of the companies I follow is Adecco. Great company, tremendous amount of success. No one can [...]

I lied

A while back I wrote a post titled “Never offer a discount.” I even wrote a second post on the subject of offering discounts which you can read here. Both posts discuss the reasons that you should never offer a discount. In a nutshell, you should provide value and keep your prices firm. Don’t cheapen [...]

So you’re a service company and service is not your priority?

The management team at my company recently sat through a presentation done by Staffing Industry Analysts. They are an organization that tracks all sorts of trends within the world of staffing. It can be a little dry for those of you that don’t like numbers, charts and graphs. Their presentations don’t usually provide anything too [...]

Your customers just want to know

I had a very unfortunate experience with Ricoh customer service this week. And although Ricoh sells products and not services, there is a lesson to be learned. Your customers just want to know what’s going on.
So I needed a new part for our color printer here at work. The printer is less than a year [...]

Save your customers from themselves

There’s no better way to demonstrate a great service than by example.
A while back, I ordered flowers for the funeral of a friend’s father-in-law. The funeral was at a location that I was not familiar with so I was relying heavily on the flower shop to make sure the flowers were appropriate and delivered to [...]

The four most infuriating words

“Sorry, its our policy.”
These are probably the four most infurating words you can possibly hear from any company representative when you are trying to resolve an issue.
Basically what the person is telling you is that they really don’t care about your problem and they really don’t care about trying to find a solution. By saying [...]

Angie’s List, yelp, etc.

The explosion of user generated content on the web has created an entirely new way to market a service. Sites like Angies List and yelp allow joe or jane public to post their experience for virtually any service they have utilized. Laundromat, contractor, doctor, restaurant, dog walker, etc. If the service exists, its probably been [...]

Never offer a discount (part 2)

Some of you may be familiar with the recent study done by Stanford University on how the human brain responds to perceived expensive wine versus perceived inexpensive wine.
In a nutshell, the subjects were given wines to taste and told they ranged in price from $5 per bottle up to $90 per bottle. The catch is [...]

Learning from UPS

A while back, a fellow blogger wrote about the ability to track UPS packages and what a great feature it is (shame on me, I forgot who it was). And it is a great feature. Not only from the stand point of the customer, but for UPS as well. How many calls do [...]

The listener is in control

Imagine if you could put yourself in a situation where you know everything about what the other person is thinking and they know nothing about what you are thinking.
You can…just ask questions and listen.
Most people love to talk about themselves, their problems, their opinions and if you’re in sales, your product or service. But, you [...]