Successful Blog

Perception Is Reality

by

by
Rosemary O’Neill

Success in Life, Business, and Golf

Perception is Reality

“Our policy is clearly written on the website.”
“Did he read the product manual?”
“That’s in paragraph 3c of the contract.”

And yet he is still disgruntled. Disappointed. Upset. Irate.

When it comes to customer service, perception is reality.

You can be right all day long and lose a customer for life. Or you can let the customer be right and gain an evangelist.

This is a key differentiating factor for the human-centered organization. In the traditional business, the representative simply points to the sign that says “no refunds” and closes the window. They shield themselves in the armor of policy.

In the humanized, socialized business, the representative is empowered to acknowledge the customer’s pain, and do something to alleviate it. There is a level of recognition and trust that the interaction between customer and business is a human to human relationship. There is a level of vulnerability that is often uncomfortable for a business.

If the customer feels that she has been wronged, then she has been wronged. And the 10 friends that she tells will share in her perception. In the end, that’s all there is.

Does that mean you have to cave to every customer demand? It’s worked out pretty well for Nordstrom over the years, but you have to do your own calculus. If you choose to “armor up,” do it with the knowledge that you are making a choice about your business. In that moment, you are deciding whether that person fits your customer profile or not.

You are building the perception and the reality.

Are your organization’s representatives empowered to build an awesome reality?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Do You Have a Clue on Finding the Right Temp Worker?

by

With many businesses in a quandary these days between hiring more help and cutting back on expenses, the issue of hiring temporary workers oftentimes comes to the forefront.

Should we disperse more of the work among our full-time employees? Should we reach out to a temp agency to bring in people for a period of time? Is it better that we place our own ad looking for temp workers? These are just some of the decisions that come into play for the business man or woman trying to best organize their staff.

Over time, the expense of hiring temp workers is often cheaper than the cost of bringing on permanent employees with benefits.  In the short term, it typically proves to be cost-efficient to hire a temp.  Meantime, for jobs that figure to last six months or longer, it may pay to bring on a full-time employee.

If you find yourself debating this issue, there are a number of things to keep in mind before you pull the trigger on such a decision.

They include:

1. How long will I need the help? – First and foremost, determine how long you will need temporary help. Is it just for a few days to catch up on business? Is one of your full-time staff taking a vacation or longer leave of absence? Could the temp help possibly be part of our team for several months? Knowing the timeline goes a long way in deciding who to hire;

2. What type of temp worker do I want? – Temp workers come in all varieties, so which one will be best for your office? Is your office very conservative, meaning it is mostly all work and no play? If so, you may be looking for a little older employee who has been around for a while and can get right down to business. Then again, if your office is very laid back and even fun to work in, maybe someone a little younger who brings a lot of energy and spirit to the job. There are older workers who are fun to be around, just as there are younger workers who can roll up their sleeves and work hard for you. Knowing your office culture will help you in determining just the right fit. The last thing you want is hiring someone that will throw off the office chemistry, creating more problems than solutions;

3. Will the temp worker need a great degree of training? – One of the other important aspects to the decision is the necessary experience level of the temp worker. Are you planning on bringing them into a challenging situation where skills are of the utmost importance? If so, do you have the time to train them? If you are more in need of general office work, this issue should not really be a problem. While a temp agency should supply you with qualified workers, you do not always get what you ask for;

4. What is our pay scale for temp workers – Since just about no one works for free these days, do you know what you will pay any temps who work for you? While you are likely looking to save money in today’s economy, short-changing a temp worker could also lead to so-so results. Make sure you and the temp agency (if you are working with one) are clear on expected salary for the individual that will be filling in at your business;

5.  Finding the right temp agency – Lastly, locating the right temp agency to work with is critical. In order to improve your chances of finding the right one, take the time to find one that meets your particular needs. Review their websites to find out how long they’ve been in business, their “mission statement” and the kinds of temp employees and services they offer. The last thing you need is getting sent a few “lemons” before finding the right fit for your business.

Photo credit: excelle.monster.com

Dave Thomas has more than 20 years’ experience as a writer, covering news, sports, marketing, SEO, press releases, social media and more. You’ll find Dave at: http://www.examiner.com/news-in-san-diego/dave-thomas

When The Boss Is Away, Are Leaders Missing An Opportunity?

by

by Brian Hackerson

cooltext443809602_strategy

When the Boss Is Away

We all know the old saying, “when the cat is away, the mice will play!” In recent weeks I have been pondering this idea, as my own boss has been gone for an extended period of time. As I did that, I found myself asking the question, “am I missing a big opportunity?”

In my experience, the presence of the boss creates a level of overhead on a day-to-day basis. He/she may schedule meetings, have “drive-by” conversations, send emails, delegate items that come up. When that energy source is temporarily out of the picture, much of that overhead is subsequently temporarily relieved. So, I ask again, is there a golden opportunity available to leaders when their bosses step away for vacation?

I say, absolutely, yes!

The Leadership Opportunity

In my situation, my boss’ absence allowed me to create a very detailed execution plan for my #1 key strategy for the year (the strategy, by the way, had just been authored a few weeks prior). The extra (overhead) time I picked up allowed me to free my mind from clutter and see the plan clearly, and begin executing it. By the time he gets back, I will have been well on my way to delivering on the strategy, and the momentum will be hard to stop. The advantage here is that the energy and direction was directed my me, not the boss’ day-to-day agenda.

My advice: when the boss is away, do something important that moves the rock. Moving the rock implies activities intended to impact the bigger picture for the good, as opposed to checking off items on the everlasting to-do list. Strategic plans, personal goals, developmental planning and idea generation and examples of activities with that broader type of implication.

Remember, the opportunities only come around a few times a year, so leaders should take advantage of this down time. I think your boss will be delighted if you do.

How do move things forward when the boss is away.

Author’s Bio:
Brian Hackerson is a software engineering manager in the Corporate Research Laboratory at 3M Company in St. Paul, MN. He is responsible for driving development of new and innovative products and systems for the company. He writes about his experiences and observations at thebigplaysblog.com. You can find him on Twitter at @bhackerson.

Negative Reviews and Consumer Complaints: How Your Business Can Keep a Positive Image

by

by
Rich Gorman

cooltext443809602_strategy

How Your Business Can Keep a Positive Image

Business owners typically take a lot of pride in the goods and services they offer. Hearing a consumer offer positive feedback, then, is one of the best feelings a business owner can experience. By contrast, negative reviews and customer complaints tend to sting. They tend to hit where it hurts —- at the business owner’s own sense of pride and accomplishment.

Negative Reviews and Customer Complaints

Unfortunately, negative reviews and customer complaints don’t just hurt a business owner’s pride. They also hurt a business owner’s sales. That’s never been truer than it is today, in the Age of Google, Bing, and most importantly, perhaps Yelp.

The Trouble with Online Reviews

Yelp and consumer review sites like it have effectively become the new word of mouth. Study after study finds that consumers turn to these review sites before making big purchases, and that they trust the information they find there. What this means is that online reviews and consumer complaints can prove massively influential over consumer behavior — good news if your business’ reviews are excellent across the board, but bad news if they are not.

The trouble here is that no business owner can trust that his or her reviews will always be positive. A negative review or an online complaint can come from any number of sources, so simply ensuring that you offer excellent products and superior services is not enough. A bad review could be planted by a business rival, or even by a disgruntled ex-employee.

These reviews can be disastrous to any business. But the good news is, there are steps that you, as a business owner, can take to minimize their visibility and negate their effects.

Watch Out for Your Online Reputation

If your company has any kind of an online presence at all, then it has an online reputation. The question you need to answer is simply this: Is your online reputation a positive one or a negative one? If a consumer searches for your brand name, does that consumer find information about how wonderful your company is; or does the consumer find one-star reviews and customer complaints?

Knowing where your business stands is crucial. That’s why it’s important to search for your brand name on a regular basis. There are a couple of professional tips that will make this a little more efficient:

  1. Set up Google and Yahoo alerts, which will let you know when any new online listings appear. This will help ensure that you have up-to-date information delivered directly to your inbox.
  2. Log out of Google before you search for yourself. Google, after all, offers personalized search results. If it knows that you own the business, it may try to protect your feelings, and hide the negative stuff that’s out there. Logging out ensures that your data is more objective.

Protect Yourself from Defamation

The next step is to build a strong, defensive wall — enhancing your brand and keeping your company insulated against negative reviews. The underlying concept here is that you cannot stop bad reviews from being written, but you can keep them from being seen. If the first page of Google is filled with positive information about your brand, then the negative stuff will be relegated to page 2 or 3, where it will do little or no damage to your brand’s online reputation.

Protecting yourself starts with registering for exact-match domain names, which will rank well on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. For instance, if your company is called Braverman Industries, make sure that you’re the owner not just of bravermanindustries.com, but also .org and .net. These sites will help you fill out that first page of search results. Signing up for exact-match account names, on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest, is also helpful.

Merely registering for these accounts is not enough. You also need to be proactive in building your brand, by using these domains and social media accounts to publish positive, brand-enhancing content. The more content you’re able to publish, the better insulated you will be against the threat of damaging online reviews.

Reviews Happen

Of course, there is no way to absolutely guarantee that negative reviews and customer complaints won’t happen, or that they won’t breach your defensive wall. The question, then, is how you, as a business owner, can respond. If the review is a positive one, of course, or even if it offers genuinely constructive feedback, then it’s important to simply be nice, grateful, and prompt with your response.

And when the review is flat-out negative, to the extent of being unreasonable or even defamatory? Don’t respond at all. Any response is only going to serve to lend that review search engine traction, which means more consumers will see it and you’ll have an even tougher time suppressing it. Avoid the response, and simply double down on your efforts at brand enhancement and Google insulation.

Author’s Bio:
Rich Gorman is a serial internet entrepreneur with an extensive background in direct marketing, affiliate marketing, and online reputation management. In addition, Rich manages the Direct Response industry’s official blog where he shares his thoughts on Direct Response Marketing. Currently, Rich leads the team at reputationchanger.com

().

How to Gain Influence and Earn Trust – 3 Things to Be First

by

Influence and Trust

cooltext443794242_influence

Two relationship words — influence and trust — can be found throughout this social business culture. Those of us who authentically enjoy the influence of high-trust relationships with a large audience are finding that to be almost a currency evidenced by the way that we are pursued.

Influence is valued because it wins attention, moves people to action, and sometimes even changes how and what people think. Trust is valued because it extends and deepens influence into a stronger bond. The power of influence and trust has become so studied, demonstrated, and valued that major corporations regularly include influencer outreach in their marketing strategic plans because a few words or a blog post from the right ones can bring thousands of potential customers to them.

How does a person gain influence and earn trust like that?

How to Gain Influence and Earn Trust – 3 Things to Be First

If you’re a person or a brand who wants to establish your own community of fiercely loyal fans, it’s natural that you’d be interested in how to gain influence and earn trust. Building a platform or making an offer as a means to attract an influence network establishes a fragile and at best. The sort of influence and trust that consistently moves people to action comes not from something that we build or offer, but who we are.

If you want to gain influence and earn trust, here are 3 things you need to be first.

  1. Be clear about your values. Be an example of your values in action. Values establish common ground. When we act from our values we attract people who share them. When we share values, it becomes easy to predict decisions you’ll make and responses you’ll have. So when you point something you believe in or recommend, we can trust that we’ll have the same experience of it.
  2. Be more than credible. Be honest. Trust is goes beyond believing to knowing. We trust people we know who are what they appear even when we’re not around. The only consistent way to live up to that is to be honest with everyone — including yourself — about your your competencies, your expectations, and your commitments. Take care not use honesty as a weapon. Trust is the hard truth spoken gently. Tell the truth with respect.
  3. Be a generous, collaborative, and open source. Bring your expertise and your beginner’s mind. Share information. Share expertise. Share your thinking — as a learner as well as a teacher. Share by introducing people who would benefit from knowing each other. Share in gratitude, without expectation of receiving back. Connecting people to good ideas and other good people with good ideas builds influence and trust. Keep your focus on valuing the people who already trust you and providing value for them. They will share you with their friends.

Take a long hard look at anyone who has a truly lasting network of influence and trust. You’ll find these three traits are attracting people to them. People who enjoy a position of influence and trust give attention, move to action, and often change how or what they think because of the people who listen to them.

Influence and trust aren’t one-way streets. No lasting grant of influence or endowment of trust will be gained or earned without an equal openness to influence and a willingness to trust. We think of influencers as teachers, but the greatest teachers never stop learning. And learning requires trust.

What have you learned about influence and trust?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Productivity and Focus: Avoid Relationship Detours in a Pay-It-Forward World

by

Relationship Detours on the Road to Success

cooltext443809602_strategy

Monday morning seems a good time to realign our focus, set new goals, dig in and get going on the week. How long does it take before something happens and you find you’ve been pulled off your path?

Avoid Relationship Detours?

A strong reason for deciding where we’re going and what we want to build, make happen, or become is that if we don’t chart out our own true path, other people will. Even after we decide on our destination — the mission and vision that will propel our business or our life — our own true nature can pull us away from that true path.

One of the coolest things about the internet is the community ethic that we’re here to help. I figure it comes from the fact that statistically we’re more alike than different.

  • We all have access to the internet.
  • We all can communicate in text
  • We all use the same tools to do that

Sometimes we even agree on what the tools can do for the world.

Productivity and Focus: Avoid Relationship Detours in a Pay-It-Forward World

Now we’ve started to move that social business ethic into the larger world. Whether we work at home, with a team, or for a company we love, contributing to the community is part of our own success. That community ethic makes it easy to reach out to new people who join us. We want to keep the culture that we’ve come to know and value. So why not show them how it works? Someone helped us when we got here. It’s a pay-it-forward world.

The downside of that can be relationship detours.

  • Are you so busy helping other folks that you’ve lost your own way?
  • Do ideas and projects that other folks propose take you away from your personal goals?
  • Do you spend more time on other folks’ success than your own?

Helping is good, but doing is necessary to get to where we want to go. You have to know where you’re going to know who to help. Time is a limited resource and focus is key to achieving our goals. So, when you choose to help, ask yourself if you’re extending the most help to people who are heading on a similar path. Then the help you give can be part of your learning, expertise, and growing skill sets.

And when folks expect you to set aside your own productivity to focus on theirs, remember that sometimes the most useful help is to show someone how to find the answers rather than to offer a hand.

Be generous with your time.
Share your expertise with abandon.
Help others achieve their goals without expecting something in return.
But know how to decline when what someone asks you will detour too far or too long off your true path.

How do you decide who gets your time and your help?

Knowing where you’re going in irresistible.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!