The sign that the end is near

Circuit City announced recently in a press release one change “to improve [it’s] financial performance”:

The company has completed a wage management initiative that will result in the separation of approximately 3,400 store Associates. The separations, which are occurring today [April 28th, 2007], focused on Associates who were paid well above the market-based salary range for [...]

Customer Service is dead

Tom Asacker delivers another thought provoking piece in his article, Customer Service is Dead!. Here is just one quote to get you started:

Customer service should now be thought of as the customer experience department, and its mandate should be to purposefully and tenaciously help the organization design the best darn customer experience possible. Customer [...]

The great business Easter egg hunt

Ah, yes. Springtime in the US– A time for baseball, time spent outdoors and of course Easter egg hunts. We can learn a lot about business by watching children during an Easter egg hunt.
Remember as a kid when participated in an Easter egg hunt? You heard the magical word “go!” and [...]

A must read

If you haven’t stopped by the Gaping Void lately, there is a must read about corporate blogging (or blogging in general). Enjoy!

When a crisis happens

Menu Foods, a Canadian pet food manufacturer, distributes dog and cat food sold under Wal-Mart, Safeway, Kroger and other store brands. Last Friday it recalled 60 million containers of wet pet food Friday after reports of kidney failure and deaths.
In an attempt to calm fears and answer frantic questions, Menu Foods has set up [...]

Must see Godin

If you have not seen the Seth Godin Video Brochure, I would highly recommend it as it contains a few Godin gems!

Guilty by recency

Unfortunately for JetBlue, another storm hit this weekend. The storm left a lot of customers stranded but it seems to have done more harm to the US Airways brand than to JetBlue. The problem for JetBlue is that this negative customer service experience hit so soon after their recent problem.
The fact is, [...]

“It usually takes longer”

My wife and I signed a contract to build a new home. After about a week of planning and dreaming, the builder came back to us and said that we could not build the house plan that we had chosen on the lot that we had chosen because the lot right next to it would [...]

Don’t be the one to end it

Julie cut my hair today. She asked me something that not many people that cut my hair ask. She asked, “Is there anything else at all that I can do for you?”
Most of my haircuts end with “there you go!” Which is fine. But asking a customer if you can do [...]

Five things you can learn about a company by its employee parking lot

I think you can tell a lot about a company by its employee parking lot. Below are five attributes of an employee parking lot and what is says about the company:

Clean – The company cares about attention to detail.
Dirty – If the parking lot is dirty but the other outside areas of the building [...]