The true measure of customer satisfaction comes from the people that make up your business. They are the authentic source, the true measure, of “Customer Satisfaction.” This is why investing in your employees can just about ensure that a good grade in the “customer satisfaction” standings will be met. Make sure that your employees are satisfied first so that they will end up doing a job that they take pride in. In effect, you want your employees to refer to your business as well as their job as “we” rather than “they.” The goal is to get your personnel to think “we” and not “me” or “them” so that reactions will be better toward the consumer. In truth, Isaac Newton’s law, “to every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction,” should be an integral part of your business to ensure that customer satisfaction is achieved.

Therefore, investing in your employees and creating programs that increases as well as maintains motivation within the company itself can, even though at times it will be difficult, make sure that your customers will be treated with the upmost respect. If you respect your employees, your employees will respect your customers in turn.

Some perspectives on building customer satisfaction and then the all-important customer loyalty include:

• Hire the best and most qualified staff that the company’s budget allows. These employees should be trained completely, and should receive ongoing training. Knowledge about existing and new products will enable customers to receive the best possible care. Every single consumer in the world doesn’t like to hear “I don’t know” when there is a problem.
• In addition, when it comes to your customers, reward your best ones accordingly. Frequent purchases of an item could possibly be offered at a discount, or a coupon, per-se, could be given to a long-standing customer for, let’s say, 10% off the next purchase of such and such item.
• Effective and exceptional customer service, which will invariably lead to satisfied as well as loyal customers, entails treating a customer’s problems as if they were your own – even if the resolution of the problem ends up costing you more money.
• Another not well-utilized aspect is that your company may even be able to “fix” problems with a competitor’s product. In this way, you will actually end up with the opportunity to switch a consumer’s allegiance to your company.

In effect, there are many ways to obtain customer satisfaction. These include treating your employees with respect, making your employees part of the “family” at large, rewarding your best customers and offer problem solving skills that your competitors may not be able to meet.

~ Written for us by our associate Gary Sorrell, Sorrell Associates, LLC. Copyright ©2012 All rights reserved

Recognizing the global demand for professionals puts you ahead of other businesses. By getting top talent on board before the competitors, your business propels forward. While other executives are still searching for professionals, you already have the best ones on board. In the next year, there are several staffing areas you should consider.

Return On Investment – Project management professionals with IT skills are essential for your organization to succeed. Modern technologies move fast and you have to keep up with the pace. Properly planning projects and overseeing their implementation are crucial to keep your company profitable and progressive. Look for a project manager with leadership abilities, a positive attitude and excellent people skills.

Protection – Letting the cat out of the bag to your competitors is inevitable unless you employ security professionals. Spam, malware and other attacks threaten your business security every day. As these potential security breaches continue, businesses and their valued clients are compromised. Hiring security professionals is a top priority as more business is conducted online rather than personally or via telephone.

Support – As technology moves forward, you will hire more IT employees and other computer-based workers. These inevitable hires will need desktop support to adequately serve your business needs. A desktop support professional with proficiency in Microsoft is worth their weight in gold. Their assistance minimizes downtime for new employees as their questions are answered immediately.

Traffic – With more IT personnel comes additional traffic. Advanced technologies such as video add to the potential complications along the way. Professional network administrators keep traffic moving with minimal problems. Computer networking engineers also plan, design and implement the latest technologies your company needs to install.

- Hire a professional with their head in the clouds. Cloud computing and virtualization are the wave of the future. Be ahead of the crowd by hiring a certified expert in virtualization to handle the latest aspects of IT for your company. An area still forgotten by many, having a virtualization professional on board puts you ahead of the rest.

Harness the power of the global market by hiring professionals in these growing areas. As the competition continues to seek talent, you will already be working with it.t

~ Written for us by our associate Gary Sorrell, Sorrell Associates, LLC. Copyright protected worldwide. All rights reserved

It is always followed up with …. “Is hiring increasing, are companies doing better and of course, how is my business?”…. I appreciate that people ask and anyone that knows me will tell you that I am always willing to give them my honest (and often long winded response).

In short, here is what I have seen. In the last nine months of 2010 hiring took a refreshingly sharp upturn. In fact, 2010 was our best year since we opened in 1999.

We have seen an increase in the level of strategic hiring across almost all sectors of the multichannel industry. The bulk of our assignments have been Senior Marketing positions i.e.: SVP, VP and Director level Ecommerce / Multi-channel Marketing spots. The interesting thing is that we have also filled Creative, Merchandising, Database, Inventory and Finance positions.

We saw a strengthening in the upscale marketplace around March and this trend was followed closely by almost everyone else… including B-B!

I think Multi-channel marketing is evolving again. Those that I see as being ahead of the curve are the ones that truly understand that although ecommerce is a critical place to be you shouldn’t be ignoring all your other channels …you must be factoring in your catalog, direct mail and email marketing campaigns. You have to get them to work together seamlessly so that you don’t miss out on opportunities. The ecommerce channel is often the end to many means and we have been recruiting and placing some really talented people who are experts at getting that process to work.

We look forward to 2011 as we already have a number of new and existing assignments including: SVP Marketing, Technical Marketing Manager, VP Ecommerce, VP Sales, CFO, Controller, Ecommerce Director and Product Managers.

The question regarding the marketplace can be answered very simply…. it is getting better!

We felt that we were among the first to feel the change on the other end and hope we are the bellwether of things to come.

We thank all of you who have allowed us to help you which, of course, has helped us.

Happy New Year!

Recruiting ecommerce talent is challenging in this market for obvious reasons i.e. The opportunities for everyone from the top internet marketing strategists to SEO experts and user experience magicians are numerous. Every candidate we speak to with experience in online marketing has multiple opportunities to look at.

The not so obvious challenges involve the inner workings of the people that these folks report to. The executives that manage the ecommerce departments are smart enough to know that great recruiters are calling their talented people (and themselves) every day and are putting in safeguards to keep them. Salaries for ecommerce people are escalating quickly, bonuses are being paid in full and counter offers are being extended to everyone announcing a resignation.

That being said… the people we are working with are being refreshingly candid and open about the types of environments they want to work in (or don’t want to work in) and when opportunities for positive change are opened up to them they are willing to move.

Ward…ranting from down here in the trenches.

Posted by Bill Taylor, The Harvard Business Review

I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the challenges of talented young people frustrated with life inside big organizations—game-changers who spend much of their time questioning authority . In this post, I’d like to turn the tables and address talented young people who find themselves exercising authority: leading a project team, running a product-development group, starting a new business unit.

If you’re the new boss, how do you make sure that you don’t repeat the bad habits of the old bosses who drove you crazy? My advice is to develop solid answers to five make-or-break questions for aspiring leaders.

1. Why should great people want to work with you? The best leaders understand that the most talented performers aren’t motivated primarily by money or status. Great people want to work on exciting projects. Great people want to feel like impact players. Put simply, great people want to feel like they’re part of something greater than themselves.

Early on in their company’s history, Google’s founders made clear that they considered the talent issue a make-or-break strategic issue for the future. So they published a Top Ten list of why the world’s best researchers, software programmers, and marketers should work at the Googleplex—and never once did they mention stock options or bonuses. Reason #2: “Life is beautiful. Being part of something that matters and working on products in which you can believe is remarkably fulfilling.” Reason #9: “Boldly go where no one has gone before. There are hundreds of challenges yet to solve. Your creative ideas matter here and are worth exploring.”

What’s your version of Google’s Top Ten list? Have you set out the most compelling reasons for great people to work on your team, in your division, at your company?

2. Do you know a great person when you see one? It’s a lot easier to be the right kind of leader if you’re running a team or department filled with the right kind of people. Indeed, as I reflect on the best workplaces I’ve visited, I’ve come to appreciate how much time and energy leaders spend on who gets to be there. These workplaces may feel different, but the organizing principle is the same: When it comes to evaluating talent, character counts for as much as credentials. Do you know what makes your star performers tick—and how to find more performers who share those attributes?

3. Can you find great people who aren’t looking for you? It’s a common-sense insight that’s commonly forgotten: The most talented performers tend to be in jobs they like, working with people they enjoy, on projects that keep them challenged. So leaders who are content to fill their organizations with people actively looking for jobs risk attracting malcontents and mediocre performers. The trick is to win over so-called “passive” jobseekers. These people may be outside your company, or they may be in a different department from inside your company, but they won’t work for you unless you work hard to persuade them to join.

4. Are you great at teaching great people how your team or company works and wins? Even the most highly focused specialists (software programmers, graphic designers, marketing wizards) are at their best when they appreciate how the whole business operates. That’s partly a matter of sharing financial statements: Can every person learn how to think like a businessperson? But it’s mainly a matter of shared understanding: Can smart people work on making everyone else in the organization smarter about the business?

5. Are you as tough on yourself as you are on your people? There’s no question that talented and ambitious young people have high expectations—for themselves, for their team or company, for their colleagues. Which is why they can be so tough on their leaders.

The ultimate challenge for a new boss who is determined not to be the same as the old boss is to demonstrate those same lofty expectations—for their behavior as leaders. One of my favorite HR gurus, Professor John Sullivan of San Francisco State University, says it best: “Stars don’t work for idiots.”

So here’s hoping that your team or department is filled with stars—and that they never think of you as an idiot.

It’s a Fact! It is not what happens to us in life that determines our happiness so much as the way we react to what happens.

One person on having lost his job may decide that he now has the opportunity to have a new work experience, to explore new possibilities and to find freedom at work.

Another may, under the same circumstances, decide to jump off a twenty storey building and end it all. Given the same situation, one man rejoices while the other commits suicide! One man sees disaster and the other opportunity!

Weird?

This may be a simple example, but the fact remains that we, and only we, decide how we react in life.

Being happy is a choice. But it’s not always easy.

As Andrew Matthews in his brilliant book ‘Being Happy’ states – ‘Being Happy can be one of the greatest challenges that we face and can sometimes take all the determination, persistence and self-discipline we can muster.

Being happy can be hard work sometimes. It is like maintaining a nice home – you’ve got to hang on to your treasures and throw out the rubbish. Being happy requires looking for good things. One person sees the beautiful view and the other sees the dirty window. You choose what you see and you choose what you think.’

If we’re unhappy, it’s because life is not as we want it. Life is not matching our expectations of how it ‘ought’ to be. We want the future, not the now. We don’t want what is, we want what isn’t. Too much of this and you go crazy.

Life is not perfect. Life is about being exhilarated, frustrated, sometimes achieving and sometimes missing out. So long as we say “I’ll be happy when…” we’re deluding ourselves.

Happiness is a decision. Many people live as if some day they’ll arrive at “happiness” like one arrives at a bus stop. They figure that someday everything will fall into place, they will take a deep breath and say, “Here I am at last…happy!” Hence their life story is one of “I’ll be happy when…”

Each one of us has a decision to make. Are we prepared to daily remind ourselves that we have only a limited time to make the most of what we’ve got, or will we while away the present, hoping for a better future?

The world is not perfect. The degree of our unhappiness is the distance between the way things are and the way we ‘think’ they ‘ought’ to be.

Well guess what? Like it or not – things ALREADY are!

So let’s just have preferences for the way things might be and then DECIDE that if our preferences are not met, we will be happy anyway!

As the Indian guru one told a pupil who was in desperate search of contentment, “I will give you the secret. If you want to be happy – BE HAPPY!”

Now there’s a thought…

Not the discipline but the term. Everything these days is “Multi-Channel”.

As a person that started recruiting “Direct Marketers” in 1989 (I was 27 at the time) I grew up with the term “Direct Marketing”. I have watched, with a bit of amazement, at the speed with which the term “Direct Marketing” is being displaced by “Multi-Channel Marketing”.

What happened?

It has been a natural and steady progression. I remember when the landscape was full of standalone Catalog and Direct Mail companies? I watched as the brick and mortar retailers’ added catalogs to their marketing mix (remember the battles of who would get credit for a sale). I watched as the internet took hold and everyone started building pretty websites. I watched companies integrate ecommerce into their mix. I watched as everyone started to get it…. and started applying direct marketing disciplines to ecommerce! They create tests; capture data… analyze it, study it and create targeted marketing plans based on the behavior observed!

Now catalog, retail and ecommerce all work together to attract customers and then they share the data they gather from all channels and create new tests and new marketing plans and so on and so on.

As customers we are happy and loyal because the messages we get are tailored to us as individuals… and we like feeling special.

But now we don’t have “Direct Marketing” any more…. it is all “Multi-Channel”.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing it’s just a sort of a… sad thing.