Everyone should spend a week (or longer) working for The Ritz-Carlton. It doesn't really matter what job--front line, back office, executive suite. You'll learn something about customer service done right. I was fortunate to spend a month many years ago working in the...
A new study of workshifting in the United States reveals big growth in the last couple of years--but the percentage of Americans who telework remains very small. The State of Telework in the U.S. focuses specifically on people who work at home at least part time but...
Technology makes it too easy for stupid people. Too cheap and easy to find you. To reach out to you. To spam you with their junk. Take this pitch that I received yesterday (illogical sentence flow and poor punctuation included): Daria, What makes an association truly...
I read a LinkedIn question the other day that asked whether companies should spend more time focused on their core business--and less, perhaps, on social media. While I don't think this is really an "either/or" question (you have to do both), I also think it's pretty...
A colleague e-mailed me the other day to warn me: Perhaps you aren't aware, or care, but when I was trying to change my privacy settings, I noticed something about you... Your [Gmail] contact listing showed all your tweet history. I went to "Dashboard" scrolled down...
So much of customer service should be easy, and yet companies screw it up every day. A new survey by Consumer Reports finds that the top three gripes of customers are the inability to reach a human on the phone, phone trees, and rude salespeople. Rounding out the top...
Bling only gets you so far. You can own a big house, but you still have to mow the lawn. You can buy expensive china, but your food still has to taste good. You can put on an Armani suit, but your product still has to wow the customer. My first experience at an Apple...
You know those days when you're hopelessly unproductive? Endurance runners talk about hitting "the wall." It's slow, it's painful, it's really annoying -- and it's unproductive. Workers have a wall too, that moment when your brain can't focus and your neurons are...
Guy Kawasaki is a born marketer. But he's also an entrepreneur who's smart, personable, answers his own mail (and his tweets too), and is at times utterly enchanting. Kawasaki came through Washington last week on his Enchantment book tour, dropping off books for...
Deborah Brody wrote a terrific blog post last week about the role of engagement. She said in part: In social media, people talk about engagement all the time. You have to “engage” with your followers. What does this really mean? Why are you engaging? The answer is...