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 […]

Customer Engagement

Unselling – To sell more, stop selling

Today, I read the book – “Unselling – Sell less to win more” by Peter Bourke. In the book, he argues that selling does not work anymore as people get defensive whenever someone tries to sell something to them. He also goes on to argue that the alternative is to “Unsell”.  He also provides examples of situations where you can use the concept of unselling principles. All-in-all, I think that the book is an interesting read, if only to get some interesting situational ideas. I had also written a blog post about the same concept in Dec 2010 titled – […]

Customer Engagement, Strategy

Amazon’s brilliant plan to pay you crazy money for your iPad 2

Very interesting piece on how Amazon is able to capitalize on the launch of iPad 3 by offering to buy old iPads at price more than any other vendor does.