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Customer Satisfaction vs. Loyalty October 31, 2007

Posted by jerikpotter in Customer Satisfaction, Drew McLellan, Jeffrey Gittomer, Liz Strauss, Loyalty.
4 comments


I attended a Jeffrey Gittomer sales training seminar last week. There’s no denying Jeffrey’s passion for sales and providing exceptional customer service. His main points:

1. People like to buy; they don’t like to be sold. So find out what they want, not what you think they need.
2. Customer satisfaction is a joke. If a customer is satisfied, then you’ve accomplished meeting their bare minimum requirements. We should strive to exceed expectations. We need to be measuring loyalty.
3. People have to like you. Like leads to trust. If they don’t like you as a person, they’ll seldom buy from you.

The format of the seminar didn’t leave much room for Q&A, so I have a few for you:

1. If we strive to exceed customer expectations, aren’t we stuck continually raising the bar for future satisfaction?
2. And if we do keep raising the bar, can we reach a point where we simply can’t raise the bar any further due to lack of resources or profitability?
3. How should we measure loyalty? Drew McLellan discusses some valuable tools here. And Liz Strauss discusses more here.

The Evil Twin October 24, 2007

Posted by jerikpotter in Brown Noser, Nice, fun, work/home life.
4 comments

All of this talk about “nice” and “fun” has me thinking about the dark side of both terms.

I’ve made a pledge to start being more “nice” and have “fun” whenever possible in the office. Its a daunting task when you’re surrounded by negative-nellies. These ne’er-do-wellers can suck the “nice” or “fun” out of pretty much anything. They’re of the mindset that someone being “nice” just wants something - a favor, more output, give/take responsibility, whatever. A lot of this is tied not only to the prevailing business mentality of work first, but also to a person’s upbringing. I’ve found it much easier to have fun with someone who’s personal life is steady, nice, and fun. These negative-nellies, do the opposite of bringing work home. They bring home to work! The business world full of clients and office politics is enough to focus on. We need to find a balance of work/home life to truly make “nice” and “fun” stick.

Then there’s the opposite problem. When or where does one stop being “nice” and “fun” and turn into the office brown-noser? I get a sense that some people in my office are already feeling that way about me. I speak my mind more in meetings, I joke more with management, and I’ve. . .GASP. . .sent management thank-you notes for a recent surpise bonus. Without buy-in from all members of a team, how do you pass on the “nice/fun” vibe, without coming off phony or insincere?

Embracing the Inner Mullet October 17, 2007

Posted by jerikpotter in Leslie Yerkes, fun, mullets, work.
3 comments

Leslie Yerkes’ Fun Works – Creating Places Where People Love to Work poses the question – Why aren’t we having fun at work? The majority of Americans spend more time at work than they do anywhere else. But do most of us have fun during this time? Yerkes rightly points out that we, Americans, have been indoctrinated into the belief that work and fun our mutually exclusive entities, nary the twain shall meet. We go to work to, well. . .work. We have fun after work and on weekends, oh, and the occasional vacation.

What Yerkes tries to convey is how sad ours lives are if we keep these two entities separated. You can waste years of your life in an unfulfilling and unsatisfying job simply because of this belief.

Which gets me to my point, we all need to lighten up and embrace our inner mullets ­- business up front, party in back. We can all take a lesson from these brave hair style pioneers. We don’t need to separate the two. We can have our cake (or pie) and eat it too. But we have to lighten up, unlearn what we have learned, and smile more.

Life is too short.