Tag Archives: management

Thoughts

It’s about expectations

Many of us have heard this before, but it bears repeating. Customer or user satisfaction depends, in large part, upon the expectations you set, as a service or product provider. Promise something you can’t or don’t deliver, and satisfaction goes right down the drain, no matter what you did right.

A great friend of mine put this another way: under-promise, and over-deliver. It’s plain, simple, and it should be the golden rule that companies use when they think about their products and services. I don’t mean you should set your sights on mediocrity, or that you should settle for the lowest common denominator. But you should ALWAYS make sure you promise only what you can absolutely deliver, and if you do anything above and beyond the call of duty, it’s icing on the cake, and it makes the customer ecstatic in a viral sort of way.

Have you heard of Micro Center? Neither did I, till a couple of weeks ago. Their website is certainly underwhelming — at least it is at this point in time, but I have a feeling that’ll change. I got a flyer in the mail from them, inviting me to the store for a free gift. I went in and was blown away. Their store has the coolest and best floor layout I’ve ever seen! It’s clean, well-lit, beautiful, stocked to the gills with cool technology, and everyone is friendly! Did they promise any of that in their flyer? No, they just promised the free gift and mentioned the new store. They delivered on the free gift just fine, and their store atmosphere was the icing on the cake that left me ecstatic.

And guess what? They have an in-store pickup option as well. I ordered a few CF cards from their site today, and went to pick them up in the evening. But do you know what they did? They didn’t promise a 20-minute turnaround. They actually put some thought into it. Their staff is new, their store is new, their systems are probably new or re-designed, and they knew they couldn’t deliver on something like that. They said the order would be ready for pickup in a couple of days. Was I disappointed? No. I got the price I wanted on the products I wanted, and as long as they were going to make good on their promise, I didn’t care. But I thought I’d test the waters anyway, and Ligia and I got in our car and drove to the store tonight.

When we got there, the same cheery atmosphere awaited us. The people were courteous and smiled, just like the last time we visited. We went to the customer service counter, where the representative looked up our order and explained that it wasn’t ready yet. No problem, I’d expected that. I asked if I could pick up the items from the store shelves and come back to the counter. She said yes. I browsed through the store, found what I needed, brought the stuff back to the customer service counter, and the representative fulfilled the order. She fiddled a bit with the computer system since it was new, but she was courteous and helpful, and I didn’t mind waiting an extra couple of minutes. In the end, I walked out with my order fulfilled, and the kicker was this: the price was the same as on their website.

It’s about setting the right expectations, plain and simple. Do what works for you, and more importantly, do what you know you can do! Under-promise, over-deliver, and you’ll have happy customers. Even if you go just a bit beyond what you promised, it makes a huge difference!

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Thoughts

Google bought Jaiku

Around noon today, I saw Scoble’s Twitter about Google’s purchase of Jaiku, and left two comments on his blog post. Basically, I said that Jaiku’s purchase made sense, but that Google probably considered Twitter and found Jaiku to be less expensive. I use both Twitter and Jaiku myself. I tried using Jaiku as my primary microblogging service, but came back to Twitter.

The thing about Jaiku is that it has more built-in features than Twitter, no questions about that. Its built-in feed integration service doesn’t even exist at Twitter, where we have to use the third-party Twitterfeed to get similar functionality. I wrote an in-depth comparison of Twitter and Jaiku back in July, and I invite you to have a look at it (see Part 1 and Part 2 of “The value of microblogging services”).

The kicker could be even more interesting though, and I don’t know if someone else has already touched on this. We all know about Facebook’s ridiculous $15 billion valuation, right? Well, Google’s purchase of Jaiku has just burst that absolutely ridiculous bubble. Jaiku offers functionality very similar to Facebook’s, but without all the annoying hype.

I bet you the price Google paid for Jaiku was very reasonable, much like the price they paid for FeedBurner. I for one am glad Google pays sane prices for their acquisitions, unlike Microsoft. The only time I think they splurged was with YouTube, but they paid for the users there. (They obviously didn’t pay for the content, since most of it was and still is pirated from TV and movies…)

I hope Facebook’s valuation drops down to some normal amount now, something like $500-750 million. By the way, I’m not on Facebook and I don’t intend to join it any time soon. I’m also not on MySpace.

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Thoughts

Photography, take two, part two

I continued to work on replacing photos hosted with third party services. The list of modified posts is provided below. This has proven to be a huge effort. I had to locate the photos in my digital library — not all of which is keyworded yet, though I’ve got location information for all my photos — but I also chose to re-process, keyword and re-title the photos. You see, most of these photos were keyworded through bulk uploaders, for the purpose of displaying that data on third party photo sharing sites, not for my own library. Clearly that effort was wasted, but I didn’t know that back when I did it… Where applicable, I am also re-writing some of the text.

I want to make sure that the content I provide here at ComeAcross is truly top tier, as much as possible. What does that mean? Well, it means I spent my entire weekend, including Monday, working on the posts listed below, and on the posts listed in part one. I still have more posts to go. I don’t mind doing this — actually, I look forward to it — but I do hope that you, the reader, appreciate the effort that goes on behind the scenes. 🙂

Also see Photography, take two, part one.

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Thoughts

Photography, take two

Over this weekend and the last several days, I’ve gone through posts that contain photographs, and replaced all of the images with ones hosted directly at ComeAcross. In the past, I’ve used photos hosted with third party photo sharing services, and I realize now that’s a folly.

If a third party service goes down, which is very likely with beta services, my photos become unavailable. Even if that service is not in beta, a simple action like closing one’s account shuts down access to all of the photos uploaded there. It’s much more practical to host the photos together with my website. That way, I am fully responsible for making sure that all of my content is accessible. If something goes down, I can take care of it. If I need to change web hosting providers, I simply transfer all of my files over to another server.

It’s not as simple to transfer one’s content with photo sharing services, no matter what they may promise. Image and meta data portability is still not 100% there, and it doesn’t help when a photo sharing service advertises their API’s availability for more than a year, yet fails to put it out for public use. It also doesn’t help when said portability is rendered useless by the amount of compression used on the uploaded originals, or the deletion of meta data embedded in the originals…

You see, everyone is ready to promise the world to you when they want to sell you on something. Quite often, that “world” is nothing more than an empty little shell. I speak in general terms here, from the things I’ve learned through my various experiences — mostly recent ones…

At any rate, I’ve still got to modify a number of posts, but I thought I’d point out the ones I’ve already worked on. They’re quite a few, and I’m happy with the results so far. Here they are:

Also see Photography, take two, part two for more updated posts.

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Thoughts

Talk about screwing up

I get digest emails from the Economist every Thursday, on politics and business. Two things caught my eye in today’s edition.

  1. Chrysler appointed Robert Nardelli as its CEO. This is the same guy that left Home Depot after employee and investor dissatisfaction with his management and personal style, with a severance package worth about $210 million. So the guy pisses off people at Home Depot left and right, is run out of the company, but gets hundreds of millions in bye-bye pay… and then Chrysler hires him? Isn’t Chrysler supposed to be in trouble as a company? What do they see in him?
  2. Trump Entertainment Resorts reported a second quarter loss that was more than double that of last year’s. So they’ve been losing money all along, just like all of the other business ventures run by Trump, and yet their share price surged when they released their earnings report?! Are the investors sane?!

I’m going to rant a bit now, because I’ve wanted to say this for a long time. Donald Trump has to be one of the most overrated businessmen ever. On the whole, his career and life are an exercise in ridicule.

Take business: for years, he’s managed to do poorly in his ventures. He’s had a few successes, but on the whole, he’s run project after project into the ground. The ones that are still standing are so heavily in debt that they should be dead by rights. Yet investors continue to sink money into his ventures in spite of all evidence to the contrary. The guy cannot run a business in the black. He’ll run them all in the red, and he’ll pay himself tens of millions while his companies wither away.

Take life: he managed to get a TV show that was a hit with the general populace — that in itself was incomprehensible. He, the clueless, poorly performing CEO, dared to dole out business advice to others, and to act as a role model for other businessmen. If Trump is a model for American business and leadership, then God help us, because we’re headed for the crapper!

Take style: the man looks like he’s got a dead cat on his head. Over the years, he’s persisted with that cockamamie hairstyle to the chagrin of decent people everywhere.

Trump seems to be rubbing it in our faces: he’s ridiculing us. He may be saying something else, but his actions say, “Look, I’m going to thumb my nose at all of you. I’ve got you all eating out of my hand even though I can’t run a business to save my life.” In spite of this, people clamor to kiss his behind and stand in line to invest in his businesses. I don’t get it.

It seems to me that greedy losers do best in modern business, and Americans on the whole love to celebrate them. The two people I mentioned in this post are just a few of the guilty parties. But then, is that any wonder when almost every CEO has ridiculous compensation packages regardless of their job performance, and when companies (especially those that deal in non-physical assets) are stupidly overvalued? I think we’re headed for the crapper, and Trump and others like him are the icing on the cake that’s going to give us the runs.

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