Social media is everywhere and by the looks of it, it’s certainly not going away anytime soon. This brief history of social media shows the timeline of its early beginning to present day. The evolution of the internet shows how social media is shaping the experiences of user’s lives in day to day activities. From […]
Some people think you can’t teach customer service. That may be true, but only if the person you’re trying to teach doesn’t have the right attitude or mindset to begin with. There is no doubt that some people “get” customer service, while some people don’t.
Thanks to the Internet, we can find out with a click of a button if anyone has had a bad experience with a product, a service, a small business or a local professional. A number of websites have sprouted up to provide a forum for online reviews. Some, like Angie’s List (www.angieslist.com), charge users a small fee in order to weed out bogus reviews. Most of these sites, however, including Amazon.com and Yelp.com (www.yelp.com) are free, which encourages anonymous postings. While most of these postings are valid and genuine, there’s a temptation for people with an “axe to grind” to post false reviews knowing they cannot be tracked down.
At the height of his playing career in 1958, Stan Musial at the age of 38 signed a one-year $100,000 contract. It was the highest salary in the history of the National League. Recently Albert Pujols signed a 10-year $254 Million contract. It is the second biggest contract in Major League Baseball history. At the age of 38, he will earn $25.4 Million.
So what do these two contracts tell us? Is Albert Pujols two-hundred-and-fifty times more valuable than Stan Musial? Is his batting average two-hundred-and-fifty times higher than Musial’s? How about his average number of home runs or average number of hits? Did the Cardinals under Albert win two-hundred-and-fifty times more often than under Stan? Obviously not.
If you can afford to have your brand new warehouse built from the ground up, who are you going to hire to build it?
The intelligent answer is simple: a reputable building contractor with happy clients and lots of experience, right? I mean, why on earth would you invest your hard-earned dollars to hire anyone less than a pro?
What about your office building or store? As a business owner, you know that it needs to have the right look and feel to be successful. Go ahead, go shopping or to the insurance guy or the doctor. Are the stores and offices run down with bad paint jobs and worn-out carpeting? Does the store you’re buying from have empty crates and clothes blocking the aisles? Of course not. They’re all clean and neat and professional – and most are decorated to impress the customer.
So why, then, would anyone take the opposite approach with their online business?