Just watched a Mark Levin interview of Dr. Epstein, a psychology professor, talking about the political bias inherent in Google searches.
Apparently, Google leans politically leftward, so any searches you do for conservative or mainstream candidates might be altered, or directed to leftward leaning candidates.
We haven’t noticed this, but we’ve not done any political searches for anyone recently.
Also, Bing does not have any such political bias, so be aware.
Regardless of whether you think there’s going to be a recession, and the news media are doing their best, at least in the USA, to talk businesses into thinking recession.
So, we are going to give you some tips for coping, other than selling your business and repairing to Monte Carlo, Belize or the Caymans.
Well, the media is all in a lather about an impending recession. Bushwa is a socially acceptable word for bull***.
We don’t buy recession talk. We think we might be seeing a slowdown in growth, but that’s it. Our clients have not, by and large slowed a bit.
One of them said to me the other day, the only constraint on me is lack of quality people to work. If he had more, he’d grow more. He can streamline processes a bit, but not much.
Where are we going to get more folks? Maybe some more coming back into the labor force. Maybe some more from immigration. The immigrants have to have some skills, though.
If the USA were to do my border questionnaire, that might be a start in matching people with jobs. If they’re matched, buy ’em a plane ticket and find ’em a place to live, even if it is at the YMCA until they get settled.
If they have friends and family in their resettlement area, so much the better.
Have them check in with an immigration or customs officer in the area when they get there, and keep track of the immigrants. Let’s make ’em feel welcome.
It’s called ‘onboarding’ in the private sector.
Recently, I wrote a customer service blog praising serveral large companies on good or better customer service.
Then, there’s Verizon, my cell phone carrier.
Used to be that if you were late on a payment, you just called in, let them know that you were making a payment, how much it was, and maybe the check number.
No digital nonsense. I don’t think all these geniuses realize how insecure the digiital world is.
No threats to turn off your cell service.
I want them to go back to the old method, before some IT consultant probably ‘fixed’ their system.
So, it’s now longer, not customer friendly, and takes more time.
This is NOT PROGRESS!
I recently took two flights on American Airlines, and it was like a tale of two cities.
The first one started with a senior Captain for American, Captain Walzer, playing a drumstick solo on the countertop of the gate counter.
I’ve never seen this before, and it infused the whole cabin and gate crew with a nice, relaxed vibe.
This isn’t the sometimes frantic energy of Southwest Airlines, which to me just shouts: “Please like me!….I’m just a humble little startup from Dallas!” Ha.
On the return flight, it was back to staid ol American Airlines. Nothing special…..just sort of humdrum.
Everybody was businesslike and efficient, but just didn’t seem to be too inpspired.
Again, it was the people.
So, the question is: Are your people doing all they can to make your product or service stand out from everyone else. Without betraying your corporate ethos and acting silly.
Unless you have a better product, have tested and focus grouped it extensively.
Case in point: My wife and I like to eat about once a month at the local Olive Garden, which is owned by Darden Restaurants.
We nearly always order the same thing: calamare appetiser, salad, gnocci soup and breadsticks.
Last year, Darden’s new CFO tried to eliminate the breadsticks to cut costs. Major uproar from customers.
This year in the last two months, they changed the recipe for calimari. Said they focus groupped it and customer tested it. Wasn’t as crispy golden brown, and had sesame seeds in the batter. Very bizzare. We didn’t like it.
Had a long chat on the scene with Amy Lamb, the site manager, who was very forthcoming, if a little defensive. I’ll be willing to bet Olive Garden got a new Executive Chef, who made the change, and tested it in a focus group, but probably didn’t test it against the prior version. People do that when they want to rig the results.
The odd thing is that Olive Garden has a number of new items on their menu, but if their customer counts go down because of the calimari fiasco, they may not have the intended effect.
The point of all this is when you’ve got a clear winner, either don’t mess with it, or if you ‘improve’ it, do an a-b test against the prior product. Make sure you cover all your regions in which you sell, and maybe even use a third party to do the tests.
Unless you’ve got a clear winner, and it will increase sales, don’t change.
There’s been a lot of commotion about southern border security in the United States, and it seems to us that some new perspectives are needed.
Something we’ve noticed in calling around to businesses is that they’re leaving their phone numbers off their web sites.
This might be a US-only post, but we’d like to know what the situation is in other countries.
We know that it’s a pain to answer the phone at times.
But, you never know who might call. Even the robocalls.
You should think about how your customers and prospects might find you. It’s not about the big yellow book with phone numbers in it anymore.
Even direct mail is making a comeback…keep up those customer lists, write snappy headlines and relevant comments and so forth.
We even have recommended trade shows on occasion.
We still happen to like telemarketing for b2b applications, but we’re in the minority.
For b2c, all of those social media sites can work, as can your website, but make sure that it’s all customer centric. Phone numbers, emails, lists of execs, so forth.
And you have to keep track of where the customers come from!
Who said being a owner, CEO or marketing/sales person was easy?
Recently, it was reported that Larry Page and Sergei Brin, the two chief Googlers, went to the Pentagon to pitch their Artificial Intelligence services.
All well and good.
However, right after that meeting, they went to Beijing to talk to the Chinese government about the same thing. The problem comes, we think, because whatever is done for the Chinese government finds its way into the Chinese military. And, I don’t think that we want to be helping the Chinese military. It wasn’t reported if the Googlers let the US Office of Technology Transfer know of their business, or whether they actually did any business with China.
Even though the business might be good, the perception, at least from where we sit, doesn’t look good.
Which raises the question, what are the perceptions of your business among your customers?
We’ve blogged on this before, but it bears repeating.
How long has it been since you did a perception check with your customers? What do THEY think of your firm?
For some reason, maybe people, maybe training, maybe something else, our two local McDonalds have had a QC problem. And it’s usually on my wife’s order, even though I pick the orders up at drive thru. One was missing a bun, one a patty, two got cheese when no cheese ordered. In all cases, McDonalds made it right without question, but what happened to initial quality control?
They get the order right, but the problem is execution.
Do you have the same problem? When’s the last time you either kept order execution statistics or checked fulfillment correctness? Think about it; get your manufacturing and warehouse managers on the same page.
If you’re a service business or retail, what metrics do you use to make sure execution is where it should be?
Lots of companies track customer satisfaction rates, but we haven’t seen much on intermediate steps.
One of our School’s investors has also got a good story on a screwup involving an offshoring supplier, so we’ll let her tell it.
In the meantime, look over your quality control procedures and how they’re working.