What To Do When You've Blown ItWritten by Lisa Packer
It’s bound to happen sooner or later – yes, even to you and your business. Sometime or other, you will make a blunder that upsets a customer. It may be an employee mistake (honest or intentional), it could be a defective product, it could even be an unreasonable expectation on part of your customer. The cause really isn’t important.What is important is that you have an angry customer on your hands. What, you ask, does this have to do with marketing advice? Everything. Because it costs you eight times as much to get a new customer as it does to keep an old one. Because your angry customer isn’t going to stop at avoiding your business – she’s going to tell everyone she knows just how sorry you are. Because if you have been getting a steady stream of new customers (at eight times cost, remember) but your overall numbers aren’t growing as fast, you are losing money. Bigtime. Here’s an example: Jane is a regular customer of Joe’s Bargain Dry Cleaning. Once a week she brings her entire business wardrobe in for cleaning. Since her entire business wardrobe isn’t that big, she spends about fifty bucks every time. This week, a stain on her favorite blouse isn’t removed, and Jane calls in to complain when she gets home. The employee Jane speaks to claims to be sorry (though she doesn’t sound like it) and says that not all stains can be removed by dry cleaning process. She will, however, give Jane a coupon for a free one-item dry clean. Well, Jane wanted to wear her favorite blouse tonight for her big date with Jim. Now she can’t. Since she lives right around corner, she asks if she can bring blouse back now and have stain treated. She is told that Joe’s does not accept same-day orders after 10 a.m. Jane hangs up totally disappointed. Forced to wear a less-flattering blouse on her date, she is somewhat lacking in self-confidence (it’s hard to feel good about yourself when you think you look bad) and her date does not go well. She vows never to darken door of Joe’s again. And she doesn’t.
| | How I Joined the Outsourcing RevolutionWritten by Nader Ghali
Mention “outsourcing” to a programmer and you may as well be uttering profanity. The word suggests all evils that have befallen Information Technology sector since Internet bubble burst a few years ago. We’ve been endlessly regaled with tragic tales of American companies who have closed up shop for many of their I.T. positions, only to “offshore” those same jobs to programmers overseas working for less pay than their American counterparts. A brain drain is taking place in once highly secure computer programming profession.Rather than cursing darkness, however, I found myself recently lighting a candle (or making problem worse, depending on your perspective). You see, just over six months ago, I joined outsourcing revolution. I am therefore writing this article partly as a confession, my own personal “mea culpa” of complicity. No, I haven’t put myself up on auction block to work for Indian rupees. What I did was stumble upon several “reverse auction” web sites for outsourcing talent. If you haven’t heard of them, they go by name of Elance.com (the largest site to date) or Guru.com. Both of these sites give companies an opportunity to outsource their projects to freelance workers like programmers, graphic artists and writers. Freelancers from all over world compete for open bid requests, offering to do these contract jobs for a fixed price. I happened upon a site called Rentacoder. Unlike two sites mentioned above, Rentacoder didn’t require a subscription fee. Their take was a straightforward commission out of each project cost. Within minutes I posted my resume and profile. Then I had a choice to make. Which projects to bid on? In addition to programming projects, they also listed writing jobs as well. I decided to bid on some of writing jobs first, just to see how it went, and because I had always wanted to do some freelance writing on side. Within my first week, I won a bid to write a document on Policies and Procedures. I completed that assignment, got paid, and then won another bid—a series of articles on stock market investing. Very soon I was addicted. I kept doing more writing…a technical white paper…web site content…economics articles…sales letters…a chapter in a novel…on and on. My payments were electronically transferred to my bank account, in New Economy style.
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