Tag Archives: customer service

If You Can’t Out-Think, Out-Care

care moreRecently I had some issues with one of the internal fans on mi laptop, which will turn 5 years old in November; so I’m not surprised one of the fans stopped working properly. The problem is the internal components no longer exist because my laptop is a late 2012 model of the HP 15 Envy. So what did I do?

If You Can’t Outsmart, You Must Outbehave

If you can't outsmart outbehave

Illustration by Christian Laborin

Follow through, follow up, being considerate and thoughtful; these are the basics of relationships and business. Across the world there is a chronic problem with all of these critical relationship and business building activities, there isn’t a day that goes by where someone is not complaining about being ignored, treated like a commodity and just not having a pleasant experience with other people.

Just a little bit better doesn’t delight customers, it puts them to sleep

Let’s be competitive on price and offer just a little bit of better service…

I heard an on the ground salesperson say that on a call last week. I later told the CEO about it and let him know what I thought about “just a little bit”. Below is an extended version of what I said to him. A quick thought is you will never hear innovators say “just a little bit”, only non-innovators say that!

Question everything to break out of habitual thinking

big pinata at Mi Pueblo Restaurant in TIjuana

Innovation comes from new ways of seeing and new ways of being. Learn to see different, learn to be different, and you will discover the different.

Though Tijuana has to come to be known as a place where you’ll find great food, I don’t think that is the case. For example, take a stroll through West Los Angeles and you are bound to find more food variety and differentiated restaurants than in Tijuana. Same goes for San Diego. Yes Tijuana has great food, but it’s not like you can’t find it anywhere else.

This weekend I had lunch at a very colorful traditional mexican food restaurant in Tijuana. The inside of the restaurant is themed as a city and it has the biggest Pinata I’ve ever seen in my life!

Innovator’s use different metrics to measure their impact

smile as an innovation metric

When I was in high school and college, I got to work both as a customer service and as technical service rep for Tracfone and Verizon. I broke a lot of rules in that time. Stupid rules like reading the script. Back then, over a decade ago, it was a common practice to read a script to the customer before digging into “the reason they are calling”. On the Tracfone account, for example, we had a specific metric we had to comply with: the dreaded “Time on Call”.