I like American Eagle Outfitters. Over the years, I’ve bought many shirts and pairs of jeans or shorts at their stores and always had a good experience with them (“good” in the sense of “not bad” and unremarkable). But a couple of months ago, I had an issue which had the potential to sour my […]
4 Ways to Get Results With Corrective Feedback
Note from Andrew: Occasionally, I’ll have some of my staff write articles or feature articles from guest consultants. This particular article is by one of the Sozo Firm team. You may notice an employee offering inadequate, unsatisfactory customer service to your customers. You fear it will eventually hurt your business. However, you also fear bringing […]
Too Busy for Good Customer Service?
Fast food restaurants’ overemphasis on efficiency might prove costly in terms of customer satisfaction. I used to just write it off as an expected side effect of a busy drive thru, but this past Sunday, when the same fast food restaurant forgot an item in my order, I began to wonder if, instead, it was […]
Efficiency doesn’t equal effectivity
What a customer thinks they want and what you can efficiently provide them may not be what is most effective. An email from a large web services provider offering “guaranteed visitors to your website” made the gears whir in my head this morning. The web hosting company offered four packages of traffic generated through Google […]
Our Core Values
This week at Sozo Firm, we’ve been putting our brains to work trying to draw up the core values of Sozo or, as Mike Michalowicz puts it, our Immutable Laws. While we’re still in the early phases (i.e. there’s a dry erase board on an easel set up in the main walkway for anyone to […]
Saving Money By Importing Raw Materials
Maintaining competivity for your company while increasing your profit margin can only be accomplished if you are constantly on the lookout for innovative ways to save money while still producing a quality product. One way a business can save a great deal of money is to purchase their raw materials internationally. However, many business owners […]
3 Tips for Handling Angry Customers
Ask any employee in any industry what the first rule of customer service is, and their answer almost unfailingly will be: “The Customer is Always Right.” We all know this simple phrase, but we also know how hard it can be to remember it when you are being ferociously confronted by a disgruntled customer, whose […]
Deoptimizing Your Web Presence
I do a lot of work with nonprofit organizations along with our commercial clients. A hurdle I’m constantly facing with the NPOs is informing them of the value of optimizing their websites. Add to that the reality that many NPOs face a regular change in staff (particularly those who manage the NPO websites), and you […]
Choosing the right corporate mission statement
It was at a recent Christian business ethics conference in Greenville, SC held by the Alliance for Excellence where I heard Karlan Tucker share his company’s mission statement. It impressed me so much that, upon returning from the conference, I emailed his company, Tucker Advisory Group, and Sarah from their office gave me this mission […]