Professional Services

Facing off with a screaming, unreasonable, irrational customer represents the ultimate test of any employee’s service skills.  It can take you to your breaking point if you’re not careful.  Staying grounded and above the fray requires you to find inner strength, and persevere beyond the initial difficulties.

Dealing with irate customers is one of the most pressure-packed experiences you will ever encounter on any job.  During every confrontation it is important to remember:

In surveys, people often say they want more money and shorter hours, but these are just hygiene factors, it stops them from being unhappy, but it doesn’t engage them. Engagement and motivation comes from having the right leaders and a good workplace culture and leaders who value their employees. Nowadays, work is so integrated into our lives that it is important to feel motivated and fulfilled. To achieve this, leaders need to create a sense of purpose and vision. A sense that what people are doing really does matter.

‘Blue-sky thinking’, ‘pinging emails’ and ‘drilling down’ have been named as some of the most annoying office phrases – according to a new poll.

Jargon clichés such as ‘running something up the flagpole’, ‘thinking outside the box’ and ‘taking something offline’, also featured prominently.

Nearly eight in ten, 79%, of office workers also confessed to using at least two examples of cringeworthy office jargon each day.

A client recently asked me: ‘Is it really necessary to know all that much about traditional values and etiquette and all that in Chinese business culture? After all, China is rapidly modernising and becoming more and more Westernised. We all do business in the same way. Soon the Chinese will be more or less like us.’

A few years ago, the ability to capture and manipulate data was an exciting possibility. Organizations often pulled information from databases, which they would then export into Excel to manipulate and analyze. Today, however, static reporting is no longer enough. Recently there has been a shift in Information Technology from traditional Business Intelligence (BI), where reports are static, to data discovery, where the reports are focused on users, and are dynamic and easy to use.

It is almost impossible to avoid the messages about the importance of innovation that dominate business magazines, web sites, and conferences. At a most recent Annual Meeting of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets, innovation joined “Big Data” and channel disruption as the three themes cited by CEOs, CMOs, and academic experts as most critical to the future success of business-to-business manufacturing firms. That emphasis is nothing new.

But what is intrapreneurship? Zahra, (Journal of Business Venturing, 1991), defined intrapreneurship as the process of creating new business within established firms to improve organisational profitability and enhance a company’s competitive position or the strategic renewal of existing business.

Corruption exists in all societies, not least in the financial markets of the West. In China, patronage systems and collectivism have inevitably encouraged corruption in one form or another, which has flourished according to the relative strength or weakness of the rule of law.

Six years ago Jan Koum and Brian Acton applied for jobs at Facebook. Both were turned down and Acton would often quip: “We’re part of the Facebook reject club.”

In a recent discussion about customer experience that had been lively and provocative, the room went silent when the topic of pricing surfaced. That was not surprising, as it’s easy to anticipate that a low point in most customer experiences involves the discussion of prices. Even ads for car dealers have focused on the ways in which they’ve taken trauma and tension out of the purchasing experience, alluding to the industry’s tradition of unpleasantness during price negotiations.