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"That's not my job."

This article on openforum.com discusses an interesting idea when it comes to motivating your employees to provide better service to your customers. Here's the big shift in thought process:

We discovered that most of them believed, “I am a service technician and my job is to install, fix and maintain equipment.”

That's probably the job title, and that's what they were hired to do, but there's nothing in there about customer service. So there's the possibility that the technician is thinking that if the equipment gets installed, the job is done, and any additional customer service would be above and beyond the call of duty. That's not his job, he's a technician not a customer service rep.

Once they completed the process they discovered that it now made more sense to think of themselves as “Customer Satisfiers,” whose job is “to ensure that our customers are happy with our service.”

Read more here: http://www.openforum.com/articles/change-your-employees-behavioreasily?extlink=em-openf-SBdaily

SEO, from objectives to analytics.

Just a few days ago, there was a really cool conference in Washington, DC - the PRSA International Conference. 

One of the speakers, Lee Odden, gave a talk about SEO, and from the notes he wrote here, it looks like he covered all the bases.

He spoke about a few things that are often overlooked, or underemphasized, like the importance of establishing clear objectives, measuring the results afterwards, and reporting those results to the rest of the organization.

A lot of times those are the areas that clients don't really think about too much until we start to talk to them. Everybody knows that they want to be the first result when someone searches - but the key question is searches for what? The planning process is often the most important phase of the project.

Check out PRSA's website, and Lee's article.

Take your business from good to great.

As I was reading this article, I was thinking - why can't every small business be like this? Or, for that fact, every business, big or small?

Read through the 9 Traits of a Great Small Business, and ask yourself - what changes can we make (minor or major) to fit this profile better? Do you need to have more fun, take more risk, or allow your employees more freedom to be creative?

Bring boring back.

It's easy to get excited about the new, cool parts of marketing - mobile applications, interactive video, Twitter and Facebook, interesting new ways to reach out to people, that sort of thing. Excitement is good, and there's nothing inherently wrong with any of those techniques - don't get me wrong.

But it can become a problem when the fundamentals are neglected, and there's nobody there to talk to your customer when they call the 800 number - or when you're so busy developing a cool Facebook app that you start to lose track of what your customers actually want.

Cool is cool - but fundamentals are fundamental.

Read Pete Blackshaw's article, Back to Boring.

Your business needs to stand for something.

Here's some food for thought from the ADVICE column in the Financial Post - "...if you don't have values or "higher purpose" at the heart of your business, you may be losing out in the battle for the hearts and minds of customers, suppliers and employees."

As I was reading the article, TOMS Shoes came to mind as a great example of a company with the kind of higher purpose they're talking about.

Check out the article and let us know what you think.

 

Innovative Architecture

Branding Matters. Branding Works.

Good stuff today from AmEx Small Business.

Pop quiz! What is the most common, yet most easily corrected, mistake small businesses make?

A. Undercapitalization

B. Marketing myopia

C. Lack of branding

D. Failure to diversify

While all are real and unfortunately all too common, for my money and in my experience, the answer is C., Bad branding.  Read More, and if the article has you wondering about next steps, call us.

Grillovation

What is viral marketing, really?

Green Innovation