From College Grad to Small Business Owner
The New York Times recently profiled a new trend in small business ownership. They identified that due to economic conditions, many recent university graduates who were unable to find work have overcome this challenge by starting their own businesses. The article highlights several success stories including one individual who, after finding himself in this situation, started the […]
Getting Good Ideas From Bad Social Media
Social media has given consumers a platform to publicly say whatever they want (a sometimes scary thought.) In 2010, Twitter users sent an astounding 25 billion Tweets. Does one of those tweets have the rare seed to fuel company innovation? Maybe. But there’s an awful lot of dreck. Starbucks and Dell offer a different and much […]
Member View: Finding the Missing Link Between Organizational Knowledge and Customer Needs
(This is a guest post by Ken Dutkiewicz, Director of Global Learning and Development at Steelcase Inc. Ken has more than 20 years of experience in the sales training and development function.) I’ve worked for Steelcase for more than three decades – much of that time in sales or sales training roles. Steelcase has always had […]
Leading Indicators – Week of February 24
Could those cell phone signals really be damaging our brains? Well – researchers aren’t sure [WSJ] YouTube is apparently in negotiations with the NBA and NHL to stream live games [Bloomberg] Coke has a new “Happiness Machine” viral video [Mashable] Belgian beer brand Leffe launches dating app [Mobile Marketing Magazine] Are mobile shopping sites driving […]
How MITRE Measures the Impact of its Internal Social Network
My Profile Page on Handshake Last week Google launched Google+, a social networking site, designed to compete—and beat—rival Facebook. Google+ aims to make “connecting with people on the web more like connecting with them in the real world.” Initial reviews have been positive. I haven’t attempted to use Google’s new toy myself, but as a 7+ year- user […]
Making Social Media Ripples with Small Business
As suppliers to small business, we are pondering creative ways to engage our prospects and clients with social media. Popular forums such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are challenging to use, especially as ECSB research has consistently demonstrated owners do not want to be marketed to in this space. But, here is the good news: While small […]
New Year’s Resolution Series: A More Valuable Survey
As promised, we’re blogging every Wednesday in January about ways customer care executives can make their organizations better. For this post, I’d like to focus on the ever-present customer survey. As an industry, we measure the customer experience pretty much every time customers even think about us, so it’s important that we are asking the right set of questions. […]
Customer Service in the News | Week of January 17
Customer Service in the News A father uses robocall to take revenge on a school district’s automated call system. [Washington Post] The Web in statistics for 2010: 21.4 billion new Web sites were created in 2010 and 35 hours of YouTube video are uploaded every minute. [Royal Pingdom] Forget online dating – contact centers serve as the new matchmakers. [1to1 Media ] Santander […]
Point/Counterpoint: Is Customer Effort Ever a Good Thing?
A CCC member recently asked me whether his organization could eliminate too much customer effort. According to this executive, a service experience is an important touchstone for customers. If you eliminate customer effort, you might also eliminate a rare personal connection between a large company and its individual customers. Our research has shown that, in […]
Are You a Nightmare to Work For?
In CEB View’s last Talent Matters post we discussed how difficult it is to work for a bad boss. But what if, instead of working for one, you are one? Of course it’s not easy being the boss. Research from CEB’s CLC Human Resources program shows that the three areas that most managers – […]
