Customer service involves various impact points. How well your business responds to customer inquiries and complaints is a significant impact point. This article helps to illuminate just how significant.

Are you dealing with gross profit levels that simply are too low? This article explores reasons for low gross profit and possible solutions to increasing it.

Frequently shifting priorities without basis or on a whim can be a major disruption to any business. This article addresses the pitfalls and some solutions to avoiding those problematic priority shifts.

The culture inside of a business is too often ignored or mismanaged. This article sheds some light on the dangers of a bad culture and some ways to move to a better one.

Not all employees live up to the standards set for them. Some businesses tend to allow marginal employees to under perform for far too long leading to morale problems for other employees and possibly lowered performance of the business unit or business as a whole. This article provides an overview of these issues.

Differentiating your business from your competitors in the marketplace is an ongoing marketing challenge. But there is another extremely important differentiating variable that should be managed consistently and with vigor. That variable is the culture that exists within your organization.

In this article, we present several brief mini articles.

Let's face it, not everyone is cut out to be a manager. This is proven every day in virtually every organization on this planet. Think about people you have worked for. How many really were good managers? All of them? Most of them? Only a few of them? If your answer was only a few of them, it would be consistent with what is found in the vast majority of organizations.

With all the talk about customer service and responsiveness, it is interesting to note how many businesses talk a good game but just don't deliver. We can all relate experiences with businesses where an appropriate sense of urgency didn't seem to exist. One area that seems to stand out is responding to customer inquiries and complaints.

Meeting reasonable, but demanding expectations is clearly an important requirement for all employees. Some employees are quite capable of meeting such expectations while others simply are not. Prior to writing off an employee as someone who can't do the job, it is essential that the employee's direct supervisor's ability to manage be carefully evaluated. Keep in mind that a manager/supervisor is responsible for hiring, training, coaching/mentoring and directing the work of his/her direct reports.

Having a quality sales force in place is essential to the success of most businesses. As with most employees, there are always a few employees who just don't fit the position they are attempting to fill. And in some cases, people who are a good fit can fail as well depending on the circumstances. But why do sales people fail?

Customer service is a broad term generally used to define how well customers are served by the organizations they do business with. Our experience and observations indicate that there has been a deterioration of customer service levels in many businesses in recent years. This stems primarily from poor attention to detail and a lack of a customer-orientation throughout the business. Bear in mind that your business should be striving to provide nothing short of outstanding customer service.

Salespeople aren’t the only ones closing deals these days. Customer success managers’ (CSMs) roles are focused on helping customers, which in turn creates loyalty and a more successful business. Customer Success professionals can help their companies succeed even more by cross-selling and upselling. Companies put cross-selling and upselling strategies into effect to increase the sales of their existing customers.

While building a customer base, businesses sometimes move too quickly and focus on quantity rather than quality. Just as organizations experience turnover in their employee ranks, turnover occurs in the customer base as well. The extent to which both occur has a significant influence on your bottom line. There is a lot of emphasis these days on creating satisfied customers. But is having satisfied customers enough?

There is a natural tendency on the part of some people to think that what they do is more important than what others do in an organization. Some of these people are simply ego maniacs who live in a fantasy world of sorts where they are in some way superior to everyone else. We talk often about leaving the excess ego at the door when you come to work in the morning. It is difficult for these people to do that. Keep in mind that most ego maniacs are typically covering up for some form of insecurity.