AchieveMax® Blog » Moment with Melanie

An Inspirational Family Project

Melanie L. Drake — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:30:16 +0000

I remember reading Harry’s article on “Gender Gap in Pay, Recognition and Rewards“ with great interest. His article pointed out inspirational women who have set examples of leadership in today’s very competitive marketplace. I found it odd that I hadn’t heard of some of these women, but then again I’ve always been more likely to be inspired by the real-life people that walk through my life—from my high school locker partner who wanted to drive race cars and did … to the employee of a client who bulldozed through the bureaucracy and made things happen.

No person, either famous or in my life, inspires me more than my grandmother, who just turned 100 years old. More than once, she has demonstrated determination and a strong work ethic just in the last five years. Needless to say, her life has been filled with moments of resilience, and it wasn’t until I set out to do a small slide show for her birthday celebration that I saw this in action.

Developing a slide show for an active woman celebrating more than 100 years was more time-consuming than planned but well worth the time. With help from family who looked through photo albums, we scanned about 100 photos and articles. Fortunately, some of the more recent photos were already in digital form.

If you’re interested in creating a slide show as a family project, here is the process:

First, I scanned the photos at 300 dpi for the family so that everyone would have a high-resolution graphic that could be printed if necessary.

Second, I set the resolution to 72 dpi for the slide show.

Third, I imported the photos into the free Microsoft Movie Maker, added transitions between photos, and added music.

Fourth, I created a CD label with the free Avery DesignPro software. I gave every family member a CD with the slide show and the higher-resolution photos.

Last, I created a DVD cover with the free Memorex exPressIt software to hold the CD.

The added benefit of the slide show was that the photos themselves inspired my grandmother to give detailed descriptions of each photo, including describing the color of her dresses in those old black and white photos. What a memory!

In the end, it was a positive project for everyone to see how different the world was in the early 1900s when photos were in black and white, computers didn’t exist, and you couldn’t travel around with your phone in your pocket.

And I thank the subject of the slide show, my grandmother, a woman who still demonstrates her determination on a daily basis. What an inspiration!

Melanie L. Drake focuses on the publishing and marketing sides of the AchieveMax® company. AchieveMax® professional, motivational speakers provide custom-designed keynote presentations, seminars, and consulting services on change management, creativity, customer service, leadership, project management, stress management, time management, teamwork, and more. For more information on AchieveMax® custom-designed seminars and keynote presentations, please call 800-886-2MAX or fill out our contact form.

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An Inspirational Family Project is a post from the AchieveMax® Blog, which includes articles on business, change, leadership, motivation, teamwork, time management, and more. Please visit our site for more information on our professional speakers, custom-designed training, and keynote presentations.

When the Employee Understands Customer Satisfaction and Service Better than the Manager

Melanie L. Drake — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:45:36 +0000

We’ve all had good customer service, and we’ve all had bad customer service. But those moments of exceptional customer service are few and far between.

Since it’s Halloween, I’m reminded of an incident a few years back. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

I was at dinner at a local restaurant toward the end of October and was greeted by my waitress, who was dressed in a beautiful Snow White costume with well-done make-up and manicured nails. No Snow White at Disney World or Disneyland could have competed with her. Everyone she served loved her costume and was thrilled to be served by Snow White. I thought it was a great idea that management asked their employees to dress up for Halloween because everyone so obviously responded positively to it.

Toward the end of the meal, instead of having Snow White return to our table, a new waitress, dressed in normal, drab waitress apparel, appeared. When asked where Snow White was, we were told that she had been sent home.

Gasp!

To this day, I wish I had said something to this by-the-book manager. Sure, Snow White didn’t show up to work in her approved uniform. Yes, she didn’t ask if she could wear a costume for Halloween. But were her customers satisfied and happy? You bet!

There’s a Japanese proverb—Deru kugi wa utareru—which means the nail that sticks out gets hammered down, and obviously that’s what happened in this case. Snow White made waves, and her manager didn’t like it.

However, how can you truly provide exceptional customer satisfaction if you don’t empower your people to make decisions and allow them to think out of the box to solve customer problems? I’ve seen a number of instances recently when so-called empowered employees were reprimanded for not doing what the manager wanted but the internal and external customers were happy with the outcome.

In the end, Snow White provided excellent customer service, while the manager apparently didn’t notice how delighted his customers were; the manager was at fault himself for bad customer satisfaction, which I’m sure was not his intent.

If I had been the manager, I would have made wearing the Halloween costumes for the wait staff an annual event. Word of mouth would have increased his business, customer retention would have been high, and his customers would have been happy.

As Theodore Roosevelt said:

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do!”

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When the Employee Understands Customer Satisfaction and Service Better than the Manager is a post from the AchieveMax® Blog, which includes articles on business, change, leadership, motivation, teamwork, time management, and more. Please visit our site for more information on our professional speakers, custom-designed training, and keynote presentations.

Beginner Business Blog: Top Reader Plugins for Your WordPress Business Blog

Melanie L. Drake — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:00:19 +0000

In a previous article in this series, I discussed plugins for WordPress, which are tools to extend the functionality of WordPress, that will help you as a webmaster of a WordPress blog. This article will discuss a number of plugins to help your readers enjoy your blog and web site.

1. FeedBurner FeedSmith

The FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin makes it easy to redirect 100% of traffic for your feeds to a FeedBurner feed you have created. FeedBurner can then track all of your feed subscriber traffic and apply a variety of features you choose to improve and enhance your original WordPress feed. Some of the FeedBurner functionality includes the reader’s ability to easily e-mail articles, subscribe to the feed, and add the articles to Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Newsvine, or Netscape (Propeller). Feedburner also allows your readers to subscribe to your feed via e-mail instead of through an RSS reader.

2. Gregarious

Gregarious, a social bookmarking plugin, allows users to submit and comment on web sites. The Gregarious plugin allows for seamless integration between your WordPress blog and social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and more. It also allows your readers to e-mail your articles to a friend. If you are not using Feedburner, Gregarious is a good alternative to give your readers easy access to social bookmarking sites and e-mail functionality.

3. Include Me In That

I searched for months for a plugin like Include Me In That. Since our site is now a decade old and information is plentiful, I wanted to help our readers find similar articles of interest and to unite content from our blog on WordPress and our web site newsletter, which the blog basically replaced. This plugin allows you to include external HTML files in any post. You just add some code into the post in the position you want the file to appear. You can see this plugin in action at the end of many articles in the blog. I am also using it for the author information at the end of each article so that if I need to change something in the biographical information, I only need to do it once to change it on all pages of the blog. I did experience a few issue with Feedburner when implementing the plugin and found that simple text files or html files with minimal html coding work the best. It did take a few days to set up all the files and add the code to the pages, so if you don’t have much time, I’d suggest the following plugin.

4. If You Liked That

Before I found Include Me In That, I was using If You Liked That. At the end of each post, this plugin inserts links to a user-selectable number of other posts in the same category as the main post. This is a simple tool for you to add to help your readers find related content. Although I use Include Me In That now instead of If You Liked That, I’d recommend this plugin for its ease of use.

5. SimpleTags

The SimpleTags plugin allows you to create a list of Technorati tags at the bottom of your post by providing a comma separated list of tags between the [tags] tags. These tags help your readers find additional blog articles on the same topic as your article. If you are using Windows Live Writer, you can set your tags for various web sites such as del.icio.us, Flickr, IceRocket, Live Journal, and Technorati instead of using this plugin.

“Beginner Business Blog: Top Reader Plugins for Your WordPress Business Blog” is part three in a series of blog articles designed to help you start your own business blog.

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Beginner Business Blog: Top Reader Plugins for Your WordPress Business Blog is a post from the AchieveMax® Blog, which includes articles on business, change, leadership, motivation, teamwork, time management, and more. Please visit our site for more information on our professional speakers, custom-designed training, and keynote presentations.

Beginner Business Blog: Top Webmaster Plugins for Your WordPress Business Blog

Melanie L. Drake — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 16:00:01 +0000

After installing WordPress to your server, you’re probably ready to start blogging away. However, before you write your first article, you’ll want to look at some WordPress plugins, which are tools to extend the functionality of WordPress. Plugins allow you to customize your site based on your specific needs.

The following six plugins will help you as a webmaster to keep your site running smoothly. The next article in this series will discuss a number of plugins to help your readers enjoy your site.

1. Akismet

When I originally set up the blog, I chose to make everyone register to post a comment, thinking that alone would stop spam comments. Unfortunately, the spam comments came in immediately, and it was becoming increasingly time consuming to read through 100 spam comments a day.

I ended up adding the plugin for Akismet, which checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. Since Akismet is installed with WordPress, all you need to do is enable it and get a wordpress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under the “Comments” tab in your control panel. Akismet has found more than 30,000 blog comment spam since it was installed about six months ago. That’s an average of 5,000 spam comments a month or 167 comments a day.

2. Math Comment Spam Protection

Although Akismet separates real comments from spam comments, it still allows all comments through for you to view and then delete. As a result, I added the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin, and it has cut down on the amount of spam comments I receive to just a few a week. This plugin asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question, which helps prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot. You can see this plugin in action down by the comment field of this article.

3. Simple Trackback Validation

The Simple Trackback Validation plugin eliminates spam trackbacks by first checking if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and second by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checking if the page contains a link to your blog. Since adding this plugin and the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin, my spam level has dropped to only a few messages a day. This plugin works with Akismet so you can still look through the trackbacks before deleting them.

4. Widgets

When I first started using WordPress, it was frustrating to have to edit the code by hand in order to get the sidebar set up the way I wanted it. After I had everything set up the way I wanted it, I found the Widgets plugin, which allows you to move things (widgets) around, in and out of your sidebar. A widget is something that you might want on your sidebar, such as a category list, recent posts, recent comments, a calendar, links or search. No coding is involved, and you can drag each section to put it in the order you’d like. There is the additional functionality that you can create your own text widget with html. I was hesitant to try it since I had already spent quite a bit of time hand coding the sidebar file, but after trying it, I would strongly recommend it. (As of version 2.2 of WordPress, Widgets are automatically loaded with your WordPress installation.)

5. SEO Title Tag

The SEO Title Tag allows you to define a custom title tag for your home page, and you can put the blog title after the article title or not at all. For example, Harry’s article on leadership lessons originally had the title: AchieveMax® Blog » Leadership Lessons We MUST Pass On. It’s now customized to have the title and and blog name, in that order, for the title: Leadership Lessons We MUST Pass On » AchieveMax® Motivational Speakers Blog. You can also replace your blog name with a shorter blog nickname. Moreover, this plugin allows you to create a customized title tag for any post, static page, or category page.

6. Another WordPress Meta Plugin

Call me crazy, but I like to have complete sentences with a description of the page when I do a search. I was happy to find Another WordPress Meta Plugin, a plugin for inserting the META tags keywords and description into your posts, pages and index page. For example, with the article I wrote on wedding project management, the description is in a sentence and goes to the heart of story: Here are five tips for wedding project management. Without the META tags, the description would be: Because of this description, we often see searches for “wedding project management” in our web statistics. Having recently planned a wedding, … Of course, whether you have a META description or not, the description shown in the search results will depend on the search keyword.

“Beginner Business Blog: Top Webmaster Plugins for Your WordPress Business Blog” is part two in a series of blog articles designed to help you start your own business blog.

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Beginner Business Blog: Top Webmaster Plugins for Your WordPress Business Blog is a post from the AchieveMax® Blog, which includes articles on business, change, leadership, motivation, teamwork, time management, and more. Please visit our site for more information on our professional speakers, custom-designed training, and keynote presentations.

Beginner Business Blog: Top Five Tips for Starting Your WordPress Business Blog

Melanie L. Drake — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:30:38 +0000

When we first talked about starting a blog for the AchieveMax® web site, I had a few concerns, the primary one being that I would have to learn a new program, which—after some research—turned out to be WordPress. Having now worked with a blog in WordPress for almost a year, I admit there are a number of things I wish someone had told me about WordPress and blogging when I started.

For those of you considering starting a WordPress blog for your business (on your own server, not through WordPress.com), here are the top five tips I wish I had known before starting a WordPress blog.

1. Windows Live Writer

The WordPress editor is lacking to say the least. I think it is worse than the first word-processing program I used more than 20 years ago. For St. Patrick’s day, Harry wanted his “Fact-A-Day” post to be in green text. With the WordPress editor, there is no button to change the color of the text. Instead, you have to track down the code for green text in some other program. Windows Live Writer, on the other hand, allows you to change colors of text, create tables, insert tags, insert maps and do a bevy of other things. You can then save the draft locally, post the draft to WordPress, or publish the article. It’s a little cranky with registered trademarks and em-dashes when transmitting a post into WordPress, but other than that I have no complaints so far.

2. Feedburner

Although I knew about Feedburner a few months before I ever set up an account, I initially didn’t see the need for Feedburner since I already had an RSS feed as part of WordPress. However, Feedburner makes it easy to redirect 100% of traffic for your feeds to a FeedBurner feed you have created. FeedBurner can then track all of your feed subscriber traffic and usage and apply a variety of features you choose to improve and enhance your original WordPress feed. I particularly like the feature that allows people to subscribe to the RSS feed via e-mail as well as the statistics for outgoing links and incoming links. I also use the headline animator (see below) in my e-mails. Since there are so many optional features, it takes a while to dig through your choices; I am still setting up some of the features.

3. Daily Back-ups

Ever since Norton Antivirus decimated my Netscape mail a number of years ago, I’ve learned to back up my important files often, most on a daily basis. One day not too long ago, our blog disappeared. There was no way to sign in to the administrative panel, and nothing showed up on the main blog page. My web host has a link for downloading the SQL database, and believe me, without the back up, I could have lost months of work. I still have no clue what happened, but restoring the database with the back up was the only thing to fix the problem. Even with the back-up, I lost a few comments and the final version of two posts. There is also a WordPress Database Backup plug-in for those without this back-up feature on their web host.

4. FileZilla

Originally, I installed WordPress through Fantastico, which automatically installs a variety of scripts, through my web host. WordPress regularly updates its software with new additions and security updates that should be uploaded to your server. Updating WordPress via Fantastico was fine until a glitch with Fantastico caused all the em-dashes and registered trademarks to convert to gobbledygook. I have since discovered FileZilla, which is a fast FTP and SFTP client for Windows with a lot of features. I simply download the newest WordPress version, sign into my account, and upload my file. Of course, always create a back up of your SQL database and site before installing a new version of WordPress.

5. Technorati Incoming Links

Technorati searches, surfaces, and organizes blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.” It currently tracks 98 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. By joining Technorati, you can claim your blog, which then allows you to see your incoming links in your WordPress dashboard. This feature is a good resource to know who is linking to you.

While I was writing the section on Technorati, I ran across an article, Newbie Blogging – Crucial Choices and Trackbacks. This blog article is a great source for learning about trackbacks and includes links to other sources for new blog owners.

“Beginner Business Blog: Top Five Tips for Starting Your WordPress Business Blog” is part one in a series of blog articles designed to help you start your own business blog.

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Beginner Business Blog: Top Five Tips for Starting Your WordPress Business Blog is a post from the AchieveMax® Blog, which includes articles on business, change, leadership, motivation, teamwork, time management, and more. Please visit our site for more information on our professional speakers, custom-designed training, and keynote presentations.

Partnering: You’re Only as Strong as Your Weakest Link

Melanie L. Drake — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 19:45:27 +0000

Recently, I bought a new appliance at Lowe’s, primarily because it was featuring a number of rebates that drastically reduced the price compared to its competitors. The customer service was also excellent. After receiving my gift card in the mail, I was dismayed to discover that I had been shorted $25. I spent a few days upset about this shortage, thinking that I had been duped.

A week later, I e-mailed the Lowe’s rebate center through the Lowe’s web site. The return e-mail was not from Lowe’s but from Young America, which provides promotion fulfillment for companies on the web, including rebates, premiums and sweepstakes.

The e-mail from Young America said I had already received my rebate. Unfortunately, Young America was referring to a second rebate that I had indeed received. I responded with another e-mail, explaining once again which rebate I was referring to. (Don’t you hate it when they don’t really read your e-mail that does have all the details?)

Nothing …

I waited a few more weeks and then decided to contact Lowe’s customer service directly. I received an immediate response that my message was being sent to the manager of the rebate center. A few days later, I finally received another e-mail saying that my $25 gift card was on its way.

Despite the excellent customer service at the Lowe’s store itself, I ended up feeling cheated by Lowe’s until I realized the glitch was with the partnership with Young America. If I hadn’t pursued the missing $25 gift card amount, I might have stopped shopping at Lowe’s. It’s the little things that make a difference. (Home Depot, by the way, is closer.)

The Young America web site says that “Customer fulfillment is what happens when marketing programs are executed so well and so consistently, with so much value added at every opportunity, that the entire customer experience is elevated and the relationship with your brand is deepened.” Considering that Young America did not respond to my second e-mail, my experience was dismissed not “elevated,” and Lowe’s brand was diminished not “deepened.”

If you partner with other vendors or outsource your services, are your partners living up to your customers’ expectations? I’ve reviewed our past experiences with vendors we use, and I have to admit there is at least one that I sincerely question our using in the future because the product was not up to our standard for our customers and cost us time to fix. Is it time to review your vendors or outsourced services before your customers make negative assumptions about your business?

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Partnering: You’re Only as Strong as Your Weakest Link is a post from the AchieveMax® Blog, which includes articles on business, change, leadership, motivation, teamwork, time management, and more. Please visit our site for more information on our professional speakers, custom-designed training, and keynote presentations.

Five Tips for Wedding Project Management

Melanie L. Drake — Thu, 17 May 2007 18:40:05 +0000

In the description for our custom-designed, on-site project management seminar, we mention that everyone, at some point, manages a project, whether it’s a wedding, a student project, or a home-improvement project. Because of this description, we often see searches for “wedding project management” in our web statistics.

Having recently planned a wedding, I’d like to share five tips that may be of benefit to those just starting to plan their wedding day.

Buy a round-ring binder and a set of at least eight tabs. You can find these at OfficeDepot, OfficeMax, or Staples. Although I used a one-inch binder, I would strongly recommend at least a two-inch binder. (The bigger the wedding, the bigger the binder should be.) Even though I would have preferred keeping everything on the computer, the notebook was a necessity as I gathered paperwork from each potential vendor. You will be carrying this binder around everywhere, including your wedding day. (Believe me, I ended up needing it because the caterer misplaced our food order, and the maid of honor had to call to see why the food hadn’t been delivered to the reception hall when we arrived. We did call the day before the wedding to make sure that everything was set, and they somehow lost the order during those 24 hours.)
My favorite online wedding resource is the Wedding Channel. It includes a well-defined, online check list that shows you what should be completed by a certain time in your project management time line. It also includes a guest list manager, which helps you keep track of who is attending and the gifts you have received. The site also has a budget calculator, which helps you stay within your budget. Moreover, if you’re interested, you can receive information from local wedding-related vendors; I actually did not find any of my vendors in this way since most of the “local” vendors were at least an hour away from where we wanted to have the wedding.
The Knot is also an excellent resource when planning your wedding. I preferred the Wedding Channel overall, but this site also has the online check list, the guest list manager, a budget calculator, and a wedding web page. (The pop-up ads are annoying at The Knot, and I was also annoyed that they continued to market to me with newlywed information after my wedding.)
I would highly recommend reading Bridal Bargains if you are on a limited budget. There is also a web site for Bridal Bargains. My original plans for my wedding gown were scrapped when I read this book, and I ended up buying a beautiful yet inexpensive wedding gown that received rave reviews from those attending the wedding.
DIY Bride (Do-It-Yourself Bride) is another excellent resource. It contains a download section, which I found particularly useful because of yet another checklist that I downloaded to keep in my notebook as well as a template for the web site we used for our wedding information.

The most surprising thing I learned from planning a wedding is that the vendors expect that the bride is the one in charge. At the chapel, the bride was always listed as the contact person and not the groom. Also, I know very little about photography while my husband does, and yet the photographer’s assistant continued to call me with questions.

One thing to note is that no matter how much you plan, things do go wrong. For example, the construction on my original reception hall was delayed, which made the hall unavailable for my wedding reception; I didn’t learn of this construction until after the invitations were printed. The food, as noted earlier, was two-hours late and cold; I knew the time line so well that we just cut and then served the wedding cake. So, when things go wrong at your wedding, let them eat cake!

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Five Tips for Wedding Project Management is a post from the AchieveMax® Blog, which includes articles on business, change, leadership, motivation, teamwork, time management, and more. Please visit our site for more information on our professional speakers, custom-designed training, and keynote presentations.

A Time Management Saver: Viewing RSS Feeds in a Google Personalized Home Page

Melanie L. Drake — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 21:00:21 +0000

After setting up feeds via the My Yahoo! page to save time in monitoring specific news and blog sources, I also tested RSS feeds in a personalized Google home page, which is the equivalent of My Yahoo!

Although I primarily use My Yahoo! as a time management tool, I found that the Google personalized home page includes many additional time-saving ”gadgets,” which are small applications such as the weather, translators, and tips of the day that can easily be added to your page. If you monitor any news sources or blogs on a regular basis, adding RSS feeds and these gadgets via Google may save you time.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s a format for distributing and gathering content from sources across the Web, including newspapers, magazines, and blogs.

Setting up feeds in a personalized Google page is simple:

First, go to Personalize Home Page on Google (also known as iGoogle). It’s located in the upper right-hand corner of the main Google page.

Second, sign in to your account. If you don’t have a Google account, you can sign up for one.

Third, click on “Add stuff,” which is on the right side, next to “Select Theme.”

Fourth, click on “Add by URL,” which is next to the search box at the top of the page.

Fifth, type in the RSS feed address of the site you’d like to add. For example, to add the feed from the AchieveMax^® blog, you would type in http://www.AchieveMax.com/blog/feed/ and then click on “Add.” (If you have trouble figuring out the link for a feed, please read this explanation on RSS.)

Google also has a feed reader if you want to track many different feeds and don’t want a personalized page with convenient gadgets, such as the weather, local gas prices, maps, and traffic alerts, among many other gadgets.

If you already have a personalized Google home page and would like to add the AchieveMax^® blog feed to your page, simply click on the button below:

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A Time Management Saver: Viewing RSS Feeds in a Google Personalized Home Page is a post from the AchieveMax® Blog, which includes articles on business, change, leadership, motivation, teamwork, time management, and more. Please visit our site for more information on our professional speakers, custom-designed training, and keynote presentations.

A Real Time Management Saver: Viewing RSS Blog Feeds in My Yahoo!

Melanie L. Drake — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:40:57 +0000

Recently, I was in correspondence with a Yahoo! employee who was alerting me to a promotion related to one of my web sites. I thanked him for providing the information and said how little time I had to surf the net for information to update my web sites. He, in turn, suggested I add a news search to the My Yahoo! account or any other news reader as an RSS feed. I’m the one everyone comes to for technology information and advice, so I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that while I had heard of RSS before, I really had no clue what he was talking about.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s a format for distributing and gathering content from sources across the Web, including newspapers, magazines, and blogs.

I monitor a number of blogs and news searches on a daily basis by going to my favorite bookmarks and clicking away. It turns out there’s an easier way.

First, you must have a Yahoo! account in order to set up your My Yahoo! page to retrieve RSS feeds. You can sign up for a free account here.

Second, go to My Yahoo! and sign into your account. Yahoo! is in the process of updating the My Yahoo! design so options discussed in this article may be in different positions than listed.

Third, click on “Add Content,” which is currently under the search box at the top of the page.

Fourth, click on “Add RSS by URL,” which is to the right of the Find button.

Fifth, type in the RSS feed address of the site you’d like to add to My Yahoo! For example, to add the feed from the AchieveMax^® blog, you would type in http://www.AchieveMax.com/blog/feed and then click on “Add.” (If you have trouble figuring out the link for a feed, please read this explanation on RSS.)

Last, click on “Add to My Yahoo!”

Unlike adding an RSS feed to Internet Explorer, adding an RSS feed to My Yahoo! allows you to see the most recent posts from all of your favorite RSS feeds and searches on one page, which makes it easy for you to skim for the most recent content. Moreover, you can edit your preferences to show anywhere from one to 30 links from each blog. Also, you can set it to show posts from the last 24 hours, 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, 5 days, 6 days, the past week, or all posts. If you keep track of a number of web sites on a daily basis, then adding the RSS feeds to My Yahoo! will definitely save you time while still keeping you up to date on the issues that affect your life.

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A Real Time Management Saver: Viewing RSS Blog Feeds in My Yahoo! is a post from the AchieveMax® Blog, which includes articles on business, change, leadership, motivation, teamwork, time management, and more. Please visit our site for more information on our professional speakers, custom-designed training, and keynote presentations.

How Good Customer Service Could Send Your Customer to the Competitor

Melanie L. Drake — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:15:25 +0000

What if I told you that your employee gave me the best customer service … by referring me to your competitor? You’d be more than a little unhappy, wouldn’t you?

Recently, while trying to buy paint at a national retail chain, my husband and I asked an employee what we needed to do to get our paint colors mixed. No one was at the paint mixer machine, and we had to hunt down someone in the appliance area.

The kind, gray-haired employee responded, “Oh, the paint mixer is down again. It would be like a real store if they had two mixers now, wouldn’t it?”

Hmmmm … was that sarcasm? Did he actually just slam his own employer?

“Uh, yeah,” I hesitantly nodded in agreement.

“So when will the mixer be working again?” my husband asked. We were set on buying the paint at this store because out of all the stores we had visited, this store had the color samples we most liked. It just made sense to us that we would continue to visit this store as we painted rooms in our house, we would pick out the new room colors from paint chips at this store, and then we would get the paint mixed here. Although I hadn’t visited this particular store location many times, I was a long-time, loyal customer of this retailer.

“Oh, the mixer is down all the time,” the customer-service representative responded. “I don’t know when it will be working again. You probably wanted the paint right now, didn’t you? It’s the weekend after all, and you wanted to paint this weekend.”

“Of course,” we nodded.

“You know, if I were you, I would go to Home Depot. That’s where I go. They can match any color you want.”

And you know what? Home Depot, which is right across the street, has two paint mixers as well as two employees who mixed the paint up to not quite the right color but close enough.

So, why would your employee refer a customer to the competitor? Let’s look at this example a little closer.

The employee both as an internal and external customer was frustrated that the paint mixer was repeatedly down. It was apparent that many people have asked him about the paint mixer in his role as a representative at the store and that he, as a customer, had encountered the same problems. It was also obvious that he or another employee had given management feedback about the mixer not working and the need for a second mixer. Management, for whatever reason, had decided that a second mixer was not needed.

To be honest, I no longer visit this particular store. From my perspective, they lost my purchase of at least $400 in paint supplies to Home Depot. And, unfortunately, they lost my purchase of new drapes, new clothes, new cookware, and new outdoor supplies to other retailers such as Kohls and JCPenney. So, while it might appear that this retailer only lost one purchase of less than $100, it easily lost thousands of dollars worth of purchases over my lifetime. If you multiply that number by the countless other frustrated customer trying to buy paint at this store, I’m sure this retailer could have easily bought ten paint mixers.

I will admit that I can be a fiercely loyal customer, or I can go out of my way to tell everyone how lousy of an experience I’ve had. Although I am not a customer-service expert, I have learned much about what it takes for any company to have good customer service, both internally and externally, as an employee of a company that presents seminars and keynote presentations on customer service and customer satisfaction. But then again, I don’t think it takes a customer-service expert to see that the management of this store should listen to its employees and ask them for feedback on issues they see on a daily basis. In this competitive market, it’s important to see problems like this before your customers see them … and before your employees tell your customers to go to the competitor.

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How Good Customer Service Could Send Your Customer to the Competitor is a post from the AchieveMax® Blog, which includes articles on business, change, leadership, motivation, teamwork, time management, and more. Please visit our site for more information on our professional speakers, custom-designed training, and keynote presentations.