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  • Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

    Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach

  • Outliers: The Story of Success

    Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

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  • The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

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    The Time-Crunched Cyclist: Fit, Fast, and Powerful in 6 Hours a Week by Chris Carmichael, Jim Rutberg

  • Patton (Great Generals)

    Patton (Great Generals) by Alan Axelrod

  • Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

    Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

  • The Girl Who Played with Fire

    The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

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Hey Service Providers: I’m Givin’ You One Chance to do the Right Thing

Is service continuing to go downhill or am I just getting more picky?  You’d think in a problematic economy, service – just about the easiest thing to quickly improve and adapt – would be great almost everywhere one turns.   After all, it’s an easy differentiator.  I just don’t see it.  In fact, even [...]

Does Being Nice Take More Effort? Is it Worthwhile?

I think I could write an essay on the breakdown of civility in modern society based on these questions, but in this case, I ask them to question the business advantages of simply being nice.  It’s interesting that being nice to one’s customers is actually a differentiator these days.  Of course, it shouldn’t [...]

Good Customer Service is Sooooo Easy

Let me get right to the punch line . . . good customer service is so easy because customers’ expectations are so low.  It’s a relative thing.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it shouldn’t be that way, but it is and aggressive companies should be taking advantage of the fact that their customer’s have been beaten [...]

Lessons in Customer Support

A few days ago, I wrote a post titled, Caught in a Geek’s Gravitational Field.  The truly unimportant post just outlined the geeky stuff that I have been working on and the fact that the mess I have been making has gotten me into an infinite loop of debugging, fixing and re-breaking many [...]

Why Can’t I Renew Online?

I read loads of magazines every month, most of which I subscribe to.  Sure, the delivery mechanism is so . . . yesterday, but I find the experience richer and the format much easier to manage than the online version of the same information which, of course, is not even always available.

Because I have [...]

Who’s Your Daddy (er . . . Customer)?

My good friend and intrepid VC, Brad Feld, has a new, thoughtful post on knowing who your customer is titled, The Three Constituencies.  Like Brad, I find that many companies really don’t understand who their customer is.  This simple problem is HUGE and can easily retard the growth or even kill small companies and [...]