The Baby Polar Bear Cub Has Captured the World’s Hearts and Minds

Les détenteurs d’une assurance RC auto en Belgique bénéficient depuis le 17 mars 2007 d’une couverture a concurrence de 100 millions d’euros pour les dommages matériels causés a des tiers en cas d’incendie ou d’explosion du véhicule assuré. Auparavant, cette couverture était limitée a 1,2 million d’euros.

E-Gold Goes to Court

MLM Watchdog

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Financial services provider launches youth banking account

The ghost of Enron still haunts Charles Niemeier.
More than five years after the energy trader’s collapse, Niemeier worries that the lessons of its failure are being ignored.
“What scares me the most about Enron is not what they did wrong, but what they did right,” he…

The U.S. Senate on Tuesday defeated a Republican attempt to weaken 2002’s post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley laws by making it optional for many corporations to comply with a controversial section on internal controls.

By a vote of 62-35, the Senate set aside an amendment to make…

Cox was appearing on a panel at the German Marshall Fund Brussels Forum. In other comments, he said the SEC was proving able to modify the U.S.’s Sarbanes-Oxley legislation to meet European concerns and that he expected the accounting progress to become a key part of a new…

Issue #35 of The Nettle Magazine is now available:

Articles:

• They’re Out There
• Get Google Ads Free Reviewed
• Do You Have The “Whatever It Takes” Attitude?
• Success With Integrity
• Five More Tips For a Better Business Plan

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Experience.com provides information on entry level jobs and internships.

Customer Service is one of the most important functions in any company. That is where you get the reality check on how good the products and services your company provides really are. That’s the central theme of an article in the April Newsletter from FreePint. If you don’t read the FreePint monthly newsletter, I would highly recommend it. This article is entitled, “Tough Love: Excelling at Customer Service Is Not Just One Big Happy-Clappy Hugfest“, and it’s written by Robbie Frazer of Prenax.

It’s an excellent read, but a short quote will give you one of the themes:

Customer service was all about being warm and fuzzy, peopled by friendly types who wore distressed jeans at client meetings and drank carrot juice for breakfast.

That’s the storybook idea of customer service, and it doesn’t work. Sometimes, treating your customers right hurts.

My point is that there are rock-solid reasons why a company should champion its people, really care about its customers and create a culture where customer service is central to everything. And those reasons are not all joss sticks and dungarees, but hard business motives that sometimes need very tough decisions to be made: to create this service culture where people take pride in their customer relations and generally seem to be enjoying work takes some effort.

Frazer also gets into the topic of the oh-so common tendency of trying to cut costs on customer service. That reminded me of what the old farmer said about his mule. “I was teaching my mule to live on less and less food. He’d just about learned the trick when he upped and died.”

In this Internet age, the customer is even more in control than ever. Some companies realize that and are giving better service. It’s a way of developing a competitive advantage since the majority of companies are into the cost-cutting mode. Surprisingly some of the worst at providing customer service are the telephone companies. Just think of your own experience. Having to key in your account number and then repeat it to a human agent is all too common. They should be experts in handling voice communications.

Luckily help is now available. Intelligent Voice Response (IVR) from companies like Crimsonet can handle your call as well as the best-trained customer service representative. As it happens, it’s cheaper as well but the main driver will certainly be the improved customer service that results. It’s so much better than the (un)Intelligent Voice Response that some people encounter.

Tags: IVR, customer service

New Bio-Gasoline Fits into Japanese Culture, where Green Gadgets Are Definitely In