Art Weinstein: Ten recommendations to creating a better customer experience
The size of the service sector, global competition, rising labor and technology costs and demanding customers all force companies to create excellent customer experiences. The challenge firms face today is knowing their customer’s definition of service quality and how to deliver that at a reasonable cost to create superior customer value. Customers use service encounters […]
Mark Pentecost sees growing pains as High-class problems that can’t hold a match to It Works! teamwork
Mark Pentecost knew it was time to work on the substantial growth his company, It Works!, was experiencing — and stop putting out fires all the time. The health and wellness company, whose flagship product is called the Ultimate Body Applicator, grew from $29 million in revenue in 2010, to $45 million in 2011, to […]
For successful wellness programs today, it takes incentives and support
One of the key challenges for wellness participation today is for employers to find ways to motivate behavior change. We hear far too often to “just do it.” Yet as anyone who has ever tried to lose weight, or start an exercise program knows, catchy phrases are rarely enough to get and keep healthy lifestyle […]
Three steps to avoiding lackluster hires
Neil Sedaka’s song “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do” was obviously aimed at personal relationships, but when a new hire has to be dismissed, breaking up is hard to do. No one hires a new team member with failure as the goal. In terms of real world situations, 46 percent of new hires fail in […]
Keep profits rising: Progress your business forward by using these three tips
Whether your company is large or small, staying profitable will likely depend on how prepared you are to innovate in order to advance your organization. A built-in, long-term effort to assess and monitor your technology investments involves the same time-tested tactics you use in everyday business planning. Your success will depend on how well you […]
Randall Kenneth Jones: Never underestimate the power of imagination
If there is one casualty of our increasingly frenetic business lives, it’s the decline in time devoted to simply think, listen, inspire and create. After all, can any business thrive without a healthy infusion of fresh ideas and creative thinking? In the late 1980s, friends, beach enthusiasts and retail-industry veterans Bob Emfield and Tony Margolis […]
John Marshall and AirWatch ride high atop the mobile technology wave after undergoing a timely transformation
After four years, the inability to manage change often results in the premature demise of 37 percent of information industry startups. John Marshall, co-founder of AirWatch, sees the validity of that statement, but relishes in the fact that his company isn’t a part of the statistic. It’s a modern day miracle that a small firm […]
Why you can’t treat social media like a road trip
The idea of driving aimlessly seems glamorous in movies and songs. In reality, few of us get in a car without knowing how to reach our destination. We’ve created smartphone apps, GPS devices and satellite mapping to make our trips as efficient as possible and to avoid what we know to be an inconvenient, expensive […]
Suzanne Sitherwood and The Laclede Group have the pedal to the metal concerning growth
Growing up on military bases, Suzanne Sitherwood felt right at home when she started in the oil and gas industry as a co-op college student working as a field worker for Atlanta Gas Light Co. “I was out on trucks, in the dirt, with pipes and meters and so forth,” Sitherwood says. “Growing up on […]
Five tips businesses can undertake to protect information security
Businesses that don’t consider themselves likely targets of cybercrimes should think again. Criminals view businesses as prime targets. According to a recent Internet Security Threat Report from information security firm Symantec, 31 percent of all targeted attacks are now directed at those with 250 employees or less, a threefold increase from 2011. One reason smaller […]