About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
Corporate IT departments consider new collaborative technologies (Wikis, Weblogs, Instant Messaging) as rogue elements to be eliminated. When in fact, they are increase productivity. Ross Mayfield points to this eWeek article describing one organization’s battle with its own people. The most recent problems came to light when a network failure cut off e-mail and Web …
Continue reading “Collaborative Technologies at Work – Bottom Up Productivity”
Updating the stores to appeal to a specific customer segment is great, Best Buy goes the extra mile in this renovation and makes sales more visible to staff. Employees begin their day by reviewing the previous day’s figures, which are written on a dry-erase board and compared to the previous month. At a Westminster store …
A couple years back, Wal-Mart decided to sell toys…cheap. Toys R Us knew they couldn’t compete on price, so they decided to compete on experience – thereby increasing their margin. Experience is a more sustainable advantage than price, selection, or service. It’s much closer tied to your brand reputation than any of the other attributes. …
Sending those jobs to India would cut the costs even more, to maybe $10 an hour in wages and overhead. But JetBlue thinks the better service from home agents offsets that price advantage, notwithstanding the occasional barking dog in the background. His [David Neeleman, the discount carrier’s chief] motivation was mainly to make agents happy, …
Recently, I’ve noticed an impolite practice from some of our vendors. When you connect with a person in customer service, this is the initial exchange “Hello, I’m Steve. May I have your account number?” Rather asking me to reciprocate and introduce myself – as is a common and expected practice in our culture – they …
Yesterday the Strib announced Best Buy’s new customer personas. According to the article, $50 million is dog-eared for reformatting 100 stores to improve the shopping experience of these 5 archetypes. It seems to me that Ray, Barry, and Buzz already love shopping at Best Buy. Jill on the other hand, can’t stand the place. Perhaps …
While a number of supermarkets and discount stores offer “customer-in-training” shopping cart as their primary method of keeping children occupied while their parents shop, Wegmans – a Woodbridge, N.J. supermarket chain – goes one step further offering W Kids Childcare centers . The videos, toys, and playground equipment found at these centers is part of …
This weekend, we worked on the home renovation – continuously – tiling until we ran out of tile, tweaking the bathroom sink until it stopped leaking. There were no phones, no radios, no email, no meetings pulling us away. We were able to focus on the task at hand until it was complete….really focus. I’m …
As I mentioned in an earlier post, we spent the weekend redoing our bathroom & entryway. The biggest a-ha I can offer you: Iterate For a Snug Fit. For each piece of sub-flooring, each tile, and the new mopboard – we would: Make the measurement Cut off a hair little less than we measured Massage …
After a number of recent conversations with my good friend Chip, where he concisely and articulately restated my thoughts on entrepreneurship and quality of life, I’m directed to this section of Tom Peters’ website, where he declares – as only he can – how offshore outsourcing is not a new problem or something we should …