Commandment No. 9 – Thou Shalt Lighten the Lines

The penultimate entry on Shep Hyken’s Forbes article, The Ten Commandments of Superior Customer Service, is “Thou Shalt Lighten the Lines.” Hyken begins by observing that no one likes waiting in line. He goes on to explain “the word ‘line’ is a metaphor for making the customer wait unnecessarily for…
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Everybody’s A Critic

A scant few years ago, the only reviews a local business would get were from friends who had been there, or perhaps a newspaper if you were lucky. Nowadays, however, all your customers are critics, and they have tools like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Google Reviews to put their opinions…
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How Pen-and-Paper Can Revolutionize Your Time Management

Everything has become abstract and intangible in our increasingly digital world. Your family photo albums are just zeros and ones now. Online bill pay has done the same to your checkbook. Even your time-management tools like your reminders and calendar are in the cloud. There are benefits to this, of…
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How to Advertise with Style

A couple of months ago, two major wireless carriers in the U.S. sent out post-card style mailers to promote whatever new deals were coming out, respectively. Imagine that one of them had a lot of detail on it that clearly laid out which scenarios qualified for savings, covering everything from…
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How Your Restaurant Can Escape Bad Word-of-Mouth

Earlier this month, Nancy Friedman wrote a wonderful piece for RunningRestaurants.com titled “Excellent Restaurant Customer Service Drives Loyalty”, which describes the importance of fixing bad experiences. As she explains, customers will tell many more people about a bad experience than they will about a good one: “Word-of-mouth and social media postings, good and…
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Image Is Everything by John Brandt

Back in the early 90s, Canon Inc. ran a highly successful ad campaign featuring Andre Agassi with the tagline, “Image Is Everything.” Canon was trying to sell cameras of course, but the adage the company tapped into was playing on the importance of how people carry themselves, the image they project to…
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Positivity and Realism in Leadership

Continuing our look at Travis Bradberry’s article, “6 Things Great Leaders Do Differently”, let’s examine number four on his list of qualities that strong leaders possess: “They stay positive, but remain realistic”. Bradberry details two extremes to avoid: the overly pessimistic person who “throws his hands up” in the face of…
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Kindness In Leadership

Travis Bradberry, the contributor for Forbes.com, wrote an article last year titled, “6 Things Great Leaders Do Differently”, in which he compiles a list of qualities that strong leaders possess compared to mediocre ones. The first comparison covers kindness versus weakness, which we’ll unpack here today. As Bradberry explains, “One of…
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What Can We Learn from the Psychology of Menu Design?

Jessica Hullinger at Mental Floss posted an article last year covering various psychological tricks restaurant menus employ to ensure ease of use and profitability. Here are two tricks we’d like to highlight and expound upon that are relevant even beyond menus: The first point that Hullinger highlights is that well-designed menus limit…
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