Innovation's Important Role in Great Customer Service | Business ...

Friday, 03 August, 2012 13:15 Last Updated on Friday, 03 August, 2012 13:16 Written by Rick Conlow

How does innovation influence the customer experience your company delivers?

Innovation and customer experience don?t always happen to be topics on the same table ? one is associated with ?creativity? and the other with ?service.? So, what do the two have to do with each other?

A lot. Look at Apple. They are one of the most innovative companies in the world (year over year) and ranked one of the highest when it comes to customer service scores (as we?ve all heard many times before). And these two factors go hand in hand when exceeding customers? expectations. Innovative companies are dedicated to a newness that keeps their customers coming back for more. It?s almost as if they put a revolving door on their company ? always giving customers a reason to return for fresh, novel, revolutionary experiences. Not only does this keep customers from becoming bored, but it gives customers ample reason to take out their wallets every time they enter the store, visit the site or call the service center.

So, what are you doing to ensure your company?s culture exudes innovation that exceeds your customers? expectations? Well, first things first, do you know what your customers want? And do you have a good gauge on the industry?s trends? These two ride in tandem because great companies determine what their customers will want before their customers even know what they want. If it didn?t work this way, customers wouldn?t be so impressed when companies deliver unprecedented possibilities. Again, let?s return to our reflection on Apple. Their most radical inventions have gone far beyond the borders of anything customers have had before, needed before or known they wanted before. So, as a leader, how do you get ahead of the game, so much so that you anticipate your customers? needs and wants long before your customers even have an inkling themselves?

Well, there isn?t sufficient time or space right here to answer that question entirely; however, there is one simple suggestion I can give you to get you started: GET UNCOMFORTABLE.

You cannot even begin to break ground if you don?t break personal boundaries. This means you need to let go of what feels like the right way to make way for growth, opportunity and surprise. Comfort is the culprit that keeps results from being revolutionary. When leaders keep operating the same way they?ve always operated, they will keep producing the same outcomes they?ve always received. It?s a no brainer. Be different to give your customers a different experience that sets your business apart.

Source: http://wcwpartners.com/customers/customer-service/innovations-important-role-in-great-customer-service/

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Tips to sell health and fitness equipment on free classified sites ...

If you thought free online classifieds are meant only for job, automobile, real estate, Iklan Internet Murah Efektif Berkualitas Indonesia?and everything other than health and fitness equipment and services then you got it absolutely wrong.

?The free online classifieds are undoubtedly a challenge to the traditional advertisement mode. Especially when we talk about beauty products, health and fitness equipment, beauty parlour services, salon services ? etc the best ways to communicate to the targeted audience is online advertising and that too using free classifieds. As we all are inclined to the term ?FREE by itself but it really matters to see what is available for free. Especially when you intent to target large audience to generate business you need to ensure that you have a wide reach.
Very few of us would like to include exercise in our daily chart of duties and therefore are always on the look out for beauty products, health and fitness equipment. Most of us believe exercise is a frustrating activity. Well, it becomes even more annoying when we have to daily go to gym for exercising. It definitely would make you feel boring until you have a nice company. But you still have ways to make your exercise habit interesting by buying health and fitness equipment and have a small gym at your own home. You can always take the guidance from some beginners.
We all know that nowadays every human being is very health conscious and looking forward to keep up his charm by maintaining good health and staying fit. People visit free classified sites to look out for service providers and health and fitness equipment that can help them lose weight quickly and at the same time get some valued weight loss tips.
Some of the well visualized free classified ads attract good public response based on the type of content and images they put up on their ads. For example they say; if you have a big event coming up, say a school or college reunion, a friend?s wedding, or a bikini season coming up soon they you are bound to be seriously wondering how to lose weight rapidly. Such is the value of content when it comes to good advertisement be it on paid or free classified sites.

The health and fitness industry is growing bang all across the world and therefore, the free health and fitness equipment classifieds are quickly rising in demand.

It will be interesting to note that not only the private advertisers are putting up free classified ads online by department of health in most of the countries is also using this opportunity to the best possible.

Most of the health and fitness related ads are related to the health and fitness equipment. There are most of the questions that arise when people see such ads showing quick weight loss is possible and safe. The weight loss is planned using methods of determined eating and exercise planning and very importantly under the guidance of a physician.
The department of health in most countries is running various health schemes to help people reduce obesity as this is posing threat to life.
The health and fitness industry is encashing upon the space and visitor traffic on free online classified sites. Most of the ads under this category are divided into Medical Services, Organic Products, Beauty products and services, fitness equipment and services, medical equipment and supplies ? etc. Posting of related images for equipment enhances the whole ad and has good chances of quick sale.
Once again it is important to check out from the free online classified site and accordingly to keep a track for how much duration the free ad will be available for viewing and then may be you will have to re-post it. All websites have their own set of standards; some of the sites allow the free ads to be displayed for 7 days, few for 10 days and other for 15 and 30 and so on. It is therefore very important to keep a track of such small things as they may look to be. Also the content needs to be properly vetted for the words or characters that are acceptable on the free online websites.

We at have a great opportunity for you to place your free classifieds for health and fitness, salon services, beauty parlour and also welcome ads from department of health from any states that can enhance their experience to buy and sell with us online

Very few people include exercise in their daily routine and hence look out for beauty products, health and fitness equipment ? etc

Source: http://projectloss.1bl.co/2012/08/03/tips-to-sell-health-and-fitness-equipment-on-free-classified-sites/

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How the elephant gets its infrasound

Blowing air through a pachyderm?s larynx offers hints to low-frequency communication

Web edition : Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

Elephants don?t purr so much as sing when they unleash low-frequency rumblings at friends and foes kilometers away.

Too low for humans to hear, the infrasonic components of elephants? calls have at times been attributed to a process similar to a cat?s contented thrum. But new measurements made by blowing air through the voice box, or larynx, of a deceased zoo elephant suggest that the mechanism is actually a (much bigger) analog to a person speaking or singing.

Cascades of fast, active muscle contraction give cats their purr. Biologists have speculated that some similar muscle twitching creates the deep throbbing of elephant infrasound. But elephants can get their rumbles going just by exhaling air through their vocal tracts, says Christian Herbst of the University of Vienna. With the new demonstration of air power, Herbst says, ?there?s no need to go into the purring hypothesis.? He and his colleagues make their case for superlow elephant song in the Aug. 3 Science.

The part of an elephant?s call audible to humans travels only about 800 meters through air, but the infrasonic tones can reach up to 10 kilometers under ideal conditions. The noise can vibrate via the ground too, theoretically going much farther.

?We really do not know that much about the specific characteristics of elephant sound production,? says Peter Wrege of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who directs a project monitoring hard-to-see forest elephants in Central Africa by listening for infrasound.

Too true, Herbst says. He?s recorded his own larynx in action by threading equipment into his mouth, but he?s not going to try that with any big mammal.

?The elephant would just close his mouth and say, ?Thank you for the snack,?? Herbst says. ?If you?re lucky.?

He and his colleagues made arrangements with a zoo to extract the larynx of an elephant within just a few hours of its death. An elephant larynx has strips of tissue lying across the airway called vocal folds, just as humans and other mammals do. As air rushes up out of the lungs, the folds separate and then touch again, creating puffs that set the whole voice mechanism into action. To visualize their vibrations, Herbst says, ?think of a flag in the wind.?

Elephants have vocal folds about eight times the size of a human?s, and greater size lowers the sound of the vibrations. If people had elephantine vocal folds, humankind might be speaking infrasound too.

The disembodied larynx in the lab could be re-creating sounds similar to an elephant?s infrasonic blast in the lowest-pitched vibration, called the fundamental frequency. But the test didn?t capture all of the complexities of a real call from a living animal with an intact head.

?Elephants have these really interesting anomalies,? says Caitlin O?Connell-Rodwell of Stanford School of Medicine?s otolaryngology department. A large cavity opens in the front of an elephant skull, with some deposits of dense fat a bit like the acoustic structures in marine mammals. So vocal folds flapping in the wind might be only the beginning of the story, she says.

Found in: Life

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/342777/title/How_the_elephant_gets_its_infrasound

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DryCASE Waterproof Backpack Review: Moisture ain't a Thing [Video]

You want to run around like some wilderness badass. Climbing in the Rockies. Surfing in the Rockaways. Whatever. You can do it all if you've got some warm, dry gear to slip into when the adventure is over. Can this waterproof backpack make it happen? More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/JcS8Rs3qTyA/drycase-waterproof-backpack-review-moisture-aint-a-thing

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Outdoor Training ? Just Fun or does Learning actually occur ...

In the past couple of months, I have been involved in a couple of threads on different LinkedIn groups that concerned learning and team building and organizational change and defining effective approaches to intervention. One guy actually questioned whether anything NOT done outdoors could represent an effective team building environment. (Really)

He also seemed to say that neuroscience supported his personal opinion and experiences. I countered with a little disagreement plus the added reality that I earned a doctorate in behavioral neurophysiology and understood just a little bit about how the brain works and people learn. Kinda funny, actually. Yeah, I can talk the talk when it comes to the brain, physiology, psychology and learning. And I have a few experiences, too?

But his contention did stimulate me to start thinking about the indoor / outdoor paradox. There exists a blog post on some of my thoughts (Moron Outdoor Training) here and another about some of the problems with outdoor training.

In a discussion with a new friend / associate in Turkey (Murvet Gulseven), I started thinking about this issue more. She does both indoor training as well as outdoor activities and suggested these as her overall key client framing questions for training:

• Why they want to invest such time and money to this particular program?
• What do they want afterwards as a desired outcome(s)?
• What should change and how will we know when that is successful?
• Why did they think of having such a team-building training? Who wanted the program and why? What is the support for it?
• 3 things they want to see that has changed in their team after the program
• Who will attend and are there anticipated problems?
• Which trainings they have had before? What worked and what did not?
• How are they working together now? Who are their customers? What are their issues and goals?
• Where will they do the training? Does this place have an indoor training room, too? Etc..

I think that is a great framework and similar to how I approach things. And I wonder, on a point-to-point comparison basis, whether ?outdoor activities? can measure up when it comes to consistently supplying desired outcomes, consistently focusing the attention of all of the participants clearly on the desired outcomes and on the effectiveness of the environment on minimizing distractions. It just seems like there are too many extraneous variables that can get in the way of a client spending $20,000 of its monies and taking people off work in the hopes that the environment will work. (And it is why Murvet packs ?A, B, C and sometimes D? materials just in case and includes raincoats!)

Why, ?Outdoors?? I am an outdoorsy guy, liking to camp and hike and kayaking and similar. I?ve boated the Chattooga (Deliverance) maybe 100 times and also the Ocoee (Atlanta Olympic Whitewater) and also the Merced, Tuolumne, Kern, and even the Colorado river 3 different times through the Grand Canyon. In the late 70s, I did a 9-month road trip around the US with my car and my tent. There are few sports I have not tried and most I play(ed) reasonably well.

But my experiences with ?outdoor training? have never been positive ones, with issues ranging from really poor instructors who knew the exercise but who had no business experience (think ?raft guide? or ?college student?) to wild temperatures (95 to 100 degree F) to thunderstorms and actual danger of lightning, to ?too sunny? to ?rainy and windy.? And some of the exercises (most?) did not really do a great job of gaining everyone?s involvement nor did they effectively include people with physical handicaps.

I will admit that my experiences in such events are not really all that broad. And that we did do a ?high ropes? program with a skilled instructor at a great facility that was really well-done (but that was about ME and not about building teamwork).

But I also still laugh at the Firewalking done by Burger King back in 2001, with 100 marketing employees participating in this ?team building and personal growth? session and 12 getting burned and Burger King generating a great deal of publicity ? yes, even Dave Barry poked fun at them in an article of his. (you can read more here. ?(Dave Barry?s really funny article is here!)

Firewalking?can be a legitimate (but pretty costly) experience (http://www.skepdic.com/firewalk.html). But does it really impact teams and company results?

One who suffered injury was Burger King?s vice president of product marketing. But, hey, she had no regrets, for she was filled with the corporate rapture. Walking across searing coals, she exclaimed, ?Made you feel a sense of empowerment and that you can accomplish anything? (with only a few?casualties?and hospital and ambulance bills). (And I wonder how she is doing these days?)

So, my basic position simply asks, ?Why?? Why do something the might work when there are known alternatives that DO work and that can link to specific desired and measurable corporate desired outcomes?

Care to discuss?

And you are certainly welcome to come kayaking with us ? but we will not charge you for it and we will not define it as a team building activity. It is just a fun way to get outdoors and away from most people and to float without any real goals and agendas in mind?

Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.
Connect with?Scott on Google+?- you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com

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Source: http://performancemanagementcompanyblog.com/2012/08/01/outdoor-training-just-fun-or-does-learning-actually-occur/

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French parliament votes in sexual harassment law

PARIS (AP) ? France's parliament on Tuesday approved legislation that makes sexual harassment a crime, addressing problems many say have existed for decades in the country.

The new law sets three levels of harassment, with the most serious ? in cases where the harasser has authority over the victim, the victim is younger than 15 years old, or multiple people carry out the harassment ? punishable by up to three years in prison.

The National Assembly passed the law after the Senate voted earlier in the day. Its passage comes more than two months after a court struck down the previous statute, saying it was too vague and failed to protect women.

The legislation covers offenses in universities, the housing market and job interviews. Single acts of sexual blackmail will be considered sexual harassment, whereas previously only repeated acts were.

In the United States, sexual harassment is a civil offense usually punishable by fines.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-07-31-France-Sexual%20Harassment/id-1d1fd081288e45ea8eaab273dc8efbf4

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Microsoft relaunches Hotmail as social-friendly Outlook

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp unveiled a revamped, Facebook-friendly version of its free, online email service on Tuesday in an attempt to reverse market share losses to Google Inc's fast-growing Gmail.

The world's largest software company is renaming its Hotmail service Outlook, giving it a sharp new look, social network links, and new features for handling the tide of junk and mass mail that swamps many users.

Hotmail was still the world's largest online mail service as of June, according to the latest comScore figures available, with 324 million users, or about 36 percent of the global market.

But it is losing customers to Google's Gmail, the fastest-growing rival, which now has about 31 percent of the market. Yahoo Mail is static with about 32 percent. (For a graphic showing webmail market share, click on http://link.reuters.com/ded79s)

In a bid to recapture growth, Microsoft is renaming the service Outlook, a name familiar to most corporate workers who use Microsoft's Office email application, and sprucing up the whole experience. Hotmail users will be prompted to switch over to the new service over the next few months.

Hotmail, launched in 1996, was one of the first online email services, but it has not been updated by Microsoft for eight years.

"A lot has changed in the last eight years, and we think it's time for a fresh look at email," Chris Jones, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Windows Live, said in a blog post.

The new look is clean and uncluttered, featuring lots of white space, reminiscent of Google's recent makeover of Gmail. Relatively unobtrusive advertisements appear in a column to the right of the screen when looking at folders. They do not appear when a message is open.

Users can link up with their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ accounts, to see the latest updates from friends and contacts. Online chat is available via Facebook.

Newsletters, offers, daily deals and social updates make up over 80 percent of a typical inbox, according to Microsoft's own research. To help combat that overflow, the new service automatically detects mass messages and puts them in separate folders. Users can customize the process to sort mail any way they want to.

The new mail service also allows easy use of Microsoft's Internet-based products, such as SkyDrive for storing documents, Office Web Apps for working away from a PC, and will eventually have Skype video chat built in.

Users can access the service at www.outlook.com. Microsoft said the service is currently a "preview," meaning more features will likely be added before the final version is fully launched.

(Reporting By Bill Rigby; editing by M.D. Golan and Richard Chang)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/microsoft-relaunches-hotmail-social-friendly-outlook-160231774--sector.html

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