Harvard Business Review

Should You Let Employees Break the Rules to Make Customers Happy?

Summary.   Some customer service experiences are simple and can be automated. But others, particularly those that involve challenging and complex customer needs, often require creative solutions by frontline employees. In these situations, should employees be empowered to break rules and protocols in order to come to a satisfactory conclusion? Research suggests that certain situations can benefit…

Harvard Business Review

Customer Surveys Are No Substitute for Actually Talking to Customers

Summary.   Surveys are a pain to complete and, as a result, most people don’t invest much thought in filling them in, which means the information they give is low-quality and unlikely to provide strategic insight.  Talking to customers and asking open-ended questions yields better results and in most cases your managers will not need to conduct…

How changing customer behavior should change your growth strategy

How changing customer behavior should change your growth strategy

Consumer behavior is changing dramatically all of the time… … If you don’t plan for the future today, you may find tomorrow’s too late. While the immediate response to COVID-19 seems all-consuming, we still need to think of this pandemic in phases. There’s what we must do “now” to manage business continuity, what we must…

The Outliers Inn; Leftovers, obvious problems, and frustrations

The Outliers Inn; Leftovers, obvious problems, and frustrations

Topic: Business Owners get the leftovers and – unrelated – how it sucks to get old and looking for a job. The issue has been settled.  The Outliers Inn will no longer take reservations, but rely solely on walk-ins.  From this day forth, we will rely on the eccentricity of our audience and their eclectic interests,…

The Outliers Inn; Join Antlerboy and JP in their first Three-way

The Outliers Inn; Join Antlerboy and JP in their first Three-way

Although fraught with great peril, our intrepid hosts open-up the podcast to call-ins.  What can go wrong?  Well, everything can go wrong.  But in spite of the incredible odds, our first call-in episode went rather well.  So well, in fact, that the call-in format will be our new standard format for the show. In this…