Customer-Complaint | Small Biz Viewpoints

Blockbuster Failure!! How Can You Avoid Similar Fate

March 3, 2013 8 Comments

Blockbuster, the ubiquitous video rental chain of the bygone era, announced recently that they will close 300 stores in U.S. and lay off 3,000 employees. This is after they have already closed hundreds of stores over the years. The latest round of closing will leave them with only 500 stores, down from 9,100 at the peak of their business. This is one of the blockbuster failures in the American business history! To be fair, they are not alone. Recent times have seen number of successful retail businesses wipe out from the landscape – Borders, Circuit City, the list goes on.

Blockbuster was one of the great success stories in how to build an empire by putting number of small rivals out of business throughout the country. Starting with a humble beginning they went on to consolidate the video rental industry to be the eight hundred pound gorilla. And yet, they were not immune to the law of natural business cycle when new competitors came along. There are important lessons to be learned from Blockbuster to ensure your small business does not meet the same fate.
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Filed Under: Management, Strategy Tagged With: Business-Model, Customer-Complaint

Customer Service Lessons from my Poor Olive Garden Experience

June 19, 2012 Leave a Comment

I am always on the lookout for lessons to be learned from my own experience as a customer. I believe small business owners can learn a lot about management and customer service by putting themselves in the shoes of customers. I was presented with such an opportunity when we visited Olive Garden restaurant in Auburn Hills, Michigan over the weekend. This was a special treat from my daughters on Father’s Day.
While I have always liked Olive Garden’s delicious food particularly the soups and salad my experience on this day left a lot to be desired from such a reputable national restaurant. Here is what happened:
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Filed Under: Customers, Management Tagged With: Communication, Customer-Complaint, Customer-Service, Restaurant

How Saying NO to Customers can Benefit your Business

April 7, 2012 10 Comments

Here is an interesting news story we came across this week – Domino’s is launching an advertising campaign in which they claimed that they will NOT allow customers to customize their artisan pizza. Customers cannot add any more toppings to the pizza recipe. Domino’s claims that they have painstakingly perfected their artisan pizza recipe over several months and they refuse to let customers mess with it.
On the face of it, this sounds a bit weird and even risky. How can you say NO to customers who are paying with their own money? They can demand whatever they want with their money. But when you think about it some more their advertising makes sense. In fact, we would argue that saying NO to customers may work brilliantly in their favor. Allow us to explain why it is necessary to say NO to customers once in a while.
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Filed Under: Customers, Marketing Tagged With: Advertising, Customer-Complaint, Customer-Service, Restaurant

Tools you can use to Uncover Customer Needs

March 21, 2012 3 Comments

Finding and serving the “right” customers is the most important step you can take to improve your sales. Many small business owners feel that the task is easier said than done. As a result, they fail to align their business with the right customer segment. Even when they do attempt to do it they either go about finding the customer needs in ad-hoc fashion or they use wrong tools to segment the customer base.
As we have noted earlier, we firmly believe that segmenting the customers based on their needs as opposed to demographics or location can improve your sales significantly. But how do you go about finding what customers really need and want?
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Filed Under: Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy Tagged With: Business-Model, Communication, Customer-Complaint, Survey

7-Step Action Plan to Deal with Negative Publicity on Social Media

March 6, 2012 4 Comments

For small business owners dealing with social media is equivalent to a relationship with a spouse or girlfriend. You cannot live without it nor can you (sometimes) live with it! Just like the other relationship, you still have to deal with the situation, whether you like it or not. Even if you do not want actively use social media for business marketing, you have to stay engaged to make sure your business image is not being tarnished, which can hurt your business.
You can overcome your social media fears with the 3-step approach we described earlier. We also showed best practices you can use to get the most out of social media. In this post we will show how you can deal with negative comments customers may post about your business on social media.
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Filed Under: Customers, Marketing, Technology Tagged With: Communication, Coupon, Customer-Complaint, How-to, Social-Media

What can Small Businesses Learn from Netflix Mistakes

January 15, 2012 4 Comments

If you have been following business news in the last few months you know that Netflix is going through rough times. Their loyal customers are cancelling accounts in droves and the stock price that was around $300 just 6 months ago is now hovering around $70, wiping out almost $10 Billion in market value. Ouch!!
So what happened? Well, everything that could go wrong did. On one hand, the business of movie rental is going through massive shift – from DVD to streaming video and the competition is increasing with large companies including Apple, Amazon and Google entering the market. On the other hand, Netflix picked wrong time to make changes to their business model and made big gaffes in communicating to their customers.
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Filed Under: Customers, Management Tagged With: Communication, Customer-Complaint

Small Business Lessons from $100,000 Salt and Pepper Shaker

July 24, 2011 3 Comments

I am reading this fascinating book “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch, who used to be a professor in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. The book is a compilation of his thoughts and experiences he delivered as a last lecture to the students after he found out that he had a terminal pancreatic cancer with only few months to live. It describes many of his experiences in life – from childhood to the end. I highly recommend this book for summer reading.
One of the interesting incidents he describes occurred during their family visit to Disney World when he was a 12 year old. In that he and his sister buy a salt and pepper shaker for $10 for their father with all of their pocket money. However, before they can give it to him he drops it on the ground and breaks it. Very disappointed, they go back to the store with little or no hope of getting a replacement. To their amazement and disbelief, however, the store employee happily gives them the replacement without any charge even though he explains that it was all his fault and Disney had nothing to do with it.
When his father hears the story he becomes a devoted fan of Disney. He continues to take not only his kids, but people from his volunteer group to Disneyland for many years, spending approximately $100,000 according to his estimate.
There are two important lessons to be learned for small business owners from this incident. First has to do with customer service and the other with employees.
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