Tag Archives: Customer service

Beer

Kranz (Wreath) of Kölsch

One of the things that we pass over during Passover is beer.  The whole yeast thing makes it a no-no and frankly, I miss it.  Sure, it’s only been a few days now and I probably would not have quaffed any during this time anyway, but the thought that I couldn’t makes me want it even more so I have beer on the brain.  That seemed an appropriate theme for our Foodie Fun Friday post.

No, not beer on the brain but the stuff most of us drink and call beer.  If you go into most bars outside of most big cities you’re lucky to find much beyond the Bud/Miller/Coors family.  As my friend Mongrel likes to remind me, that stuff isn’t beer, which is supposed to have substance, flavor, and other things not generally found in mass-produced offerings.  Yet, most of us settle for what we realize, once we’ve had the real thing, is a pale (no pun intended) imitation of true brew.  Which, of course, is the business lesson.

We can’t settle for what passes for something in name only.  A customer service call which is a telephone chat with a customer but in which no assistance is given nor problems solved.  An analysis which is a regurgitation of facts and data but which doesn’t edit them into a coherent whole.  A manager who doesn’t manage people or situations.   You get the point.

Enjoy a cold one this weekend – I’ll catch up to you next week.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Thinking Aloud

Look!

The hardest thing to do is get yourself into someone else’s place. That’s true whether we’re talking about social issues or business. I’m always fascinated by how people “with” criticize the desires of people “without” because what often comes through loud and clear is a total inability to see the world through other eyes. Yeah, I might be thinking of the health care discussion, but I might also be thinking of the customer service person who just wants to get the caller off the phone or the boss who can’t understand why an employee who can’t play their bills feels resentful when the boss gets a bonus and they don’t. Continue reading

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Your Algorithm

I was reading the article in Wired on the Google algorithm. Interesting stuff even if you’re just a web searcher, and for those of us who talk about SEO from time to time, it’s fascinating.

One statement stood out:

The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,” Singhal says. “Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning

My immediate thought was that he was right about most businesses, not just that of search.   The Wired piece details the hundreds of ways Google’s formula manipulates a search to try to get precisely to the point of the user’s question.  Their algorithm is a highly refined way of doing just that.  My theory is that we all need one.

Many firms go about their business making few or no attempts to gain this kind of in-depth understanding of user wants and needs.  You can rest assured that you can count those that have an algorithm to do so based on customer input on your fingers and toes.  Yes, I’m aware of marketing dashboards and monitoring of social buzz.  Those are both great but think about Google’s formula applied to all that social content, feedback cards, surveys, and other customer interaction.  I wonder what nuances would surface?

How about you – got an algorithm?  How do you figure out what your customers, partners, and prospects want based on the information you gather?

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Leave a comment

Filed under digital media, Thinking Aloud