Customer Engagement

Referrals are to Dine for…

It always feels great when we get some really good service. Also, looks like the restaurant has figured out the most important criteria for a successful referral program: Simplicity (The program should be really simple to explain, understand and share with others. Thank and reward your referring customers (It seems really simple and common-sense to do this, but you will be surprised to know how many businesses fail to thank their customers who refer the business to new friends. Keep up the service levels (Once you start getting new customers, businesses thrive and a lot of them fail to keep up […]

Ideas

Give it five minutes

Today I came across a post by Jason Fried (37Signals.com) on their Signal Vs Noise blog that was an eye opener for me. You can read the post here. Do read the wonderfully written post if you work in a team and effective communication is an important skill to succeed (which covers almost all roles of the modern organization). Hope you learn as much as I’ve learned from the post.

Ideas

Why promoting your people is a bad idea

It is that time of the year, when most of the organizations are conducting their annual performance review and hand out the rewards (promotions, bonuses, share options, etc). Employee promotions play a very important part in the entire cycle. This is how, companies recognize and reward high performers. This is how people move up the ladder in organizations. Early in the 20th century, most of the labor was physical and repetitive and was individual in nature. It was in this era that rewarding individual performance was a way to improve organizational productivity. Then came an era where team work started […]

Customer Engagement

My adventures in buying a dining table and lessons for retailers

Recently, me and my wife decided that it was time to buy a dining table. My wife always wanted to buy a 6 seater wooden dining table. I wanted chairs without any cushions. We had a budget in mind (INR 20K). Now, if you have bought a dining table in Bangalore anytime in the recent past, you would know that it is near to impossible to get a dining table which met all the three conditions above. Still, we visited a lot of stores just like other married couples. After having seen what’s on offer almost in all the shops […]

Customer Engagement

What the hell is RoE?

Today, I read the blog post by David Johnson titled – “Forget About RoI, start thinking about ROE”. The title intrigued me and I read his post. Basically, he argues that it is time we started thinking about customer engagement in terms of Return on Experience rather than the traditional RoI. His idea is to find ways to “Enchant” a few customers while dealing with them, thus providing enough fodder for them to start talking about their great experience online (and offline). I think this is a great idea for any organization that serves consumers. He argues that if an organization starts […]