Archive for September, 2004
High-tech job market lost 400,000 jobs
Posted by: | CommentsThe U.S. information tech sector lost 403,300 jobs between March 2001 and this past April, and the market for tech workers remains bleak, according to a new report on CNN.com.
Are you living in a Dilbert cartoon?
Posted by: | CommentsI subscribe to the Daily Dilbert cartoons. Sometimes they are hilarious because they are so true. In the interest of cutting down the number of emails I get, I decided it was time to cancel. I clicked on the Unsubscribe link and was taken to a page asking for my email address and a password. I enter the password I normally use for this type of stuff and it doesn't work. So, I click on "Forget your password?". It says it will send me a password to the email address. For days I patiently wait. Nothing. The comics keep coming. I go to Yahoo and read my Bulk Mail folder with all the spam in it. (Believe me, it is ALL spam. Thanks, Yahoo, for normally shielding me from all of this junk.) It's not there. Back I go to the website (comics.com) and finally dig to find a page resembling "Contact Us." But when I click on the link for unsubscribing, nothing happens. So, I scroll through the gazillion items (it was an FAQ page), and I find what I'm looking for. Finally, I got an email saying they will delete me from the list. (At least they responded and took care of the situation, but the whole thing felt Dilbertesque.)
LESSON: test your links and processes with real people!
While I'm ranting, have you ever sent an email to the address on the Contact Us page of a website? Never to hear from them? A friend told me she sent several emails with no response and finally got a real live person on the phone. The lady's response to the fact that the emails were ignored? A terse response of "We're understaffed. There are only a few of us here!"
LESSON: Don't put a "Contact Us" link if you have no intention or resources to answer the email. And rudeness and hearing about your problems are never acceptable responses. Steve wrote earlier this month about customer satisfaction. You wonder how many companies lose business and never know why. "Moments of truth." It shouldn't be this hard…
Hiring Technical People
Posted by: | CommentsJohanna Rothman has published Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science Of Hiring Technical People, available at Amazon.
She writes, "Hiring knowledge workers, such as technical people, is different from hiring purely skill-based staff. Knowledge workers are not just the sum of their technical knowledge; they are the sum of their technical knowledge and the way in which they apply that knowledge to the product. The method with which they apply their knowledge is determined by how they use their technical skills for the product, how they manage their work, and how they manage their relationships with other people. Skill-based staff members have a set of skills they can apply the same way in almost all situations. Knowledge workers must adapt their knowledge to the situation."
Stats on customer dissatisfaction
Posted by: | CommentsDozens of studies conducted by government, universities, and industries have proven that customer satisfaction is critical. A customer whose complaint has been resolved will actually create much more revenue than the resolution cost. A satisfied customer will return to buy more, and he or she will refer more new customers. Three key findings regarding customer complaints
- The average customer with an unresolved complaint will tell nine to ten people; 13% tell more than 20 people.
- Up to 70% of complainers will return to your business if their complaint is resolved. Up to 95% return if the problem is resolved quickly.
- For every one complaint received, the average company has 26 unhappy customers it never hears from; six of these customers have problems that are considered "serious" problems.
[Source: Technical Assistance Research Programs Institute]
The Wal-Martization of E-Commerce
Posted by: Steve Johnson on September 29, 2004 | Comments (0)Now all you need is a good idea to make some good money. You can start right away by getting a dot-com domain name registration for a year for much less than US$1 a month, and get a sparkling Web site for under $5 per month. For an additional $3 a month, get an encryption capability on the same site so you can offer secure online credit card transactions. Cha-ching. Plus e-mail and many other things thrown in for free. In principal you will have almost the same basic e-commerce tools as any other large-size corporation. All that power and those business tools for under $10 per month.