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Profiting from poor service is unsustainable

An article titled Some Absurd Airline Rules in the August 18, 2016 Wall Street Journal caught my attention. What stood out to me was that each of the six rules highlighted in the article increased airlines’ ancillary revenues at the expense of overall customer satisfaction. North America’s airlines charged nearly

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Stop Counting Paperclips!

Last month, I returned to one of my favorite hotels in New York City. It was my first stay since the hotel completed an extensive renovation in 2012. I’ll withhold the name of the hotel because it’s not important. What matters are the observations below – which apply to countless

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Serving is selling

I recently struck up a conversation with my insurance agent, Kevin, about the link between customer service and sales. We both agreed that the line separating these two distinct disciplines is fuzzy. Where does customer service stop and selling start? Kevin said that while his company tends to reward agents

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Customer development

In his book, Customer Centricity: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It Matters, Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, defines customer centricity as “a strategy to fundamentally align a company’s products and services with the wants and needs of its

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Nickel and diming kills the goose

Remember the Aesop’s Fable, The Goose with the Golden Eggs? A man and his wife had the good fortune to own a goose that laid a golden egg every day. Lucky though they were, they soon began to think they were not getting rich fast enough. Imagining the goose must

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Want to increase profits? It’s simple: Charge more.

I’m currently reading the book Smart Pricing by Jagmohan Raju and Z. John Zhang. Anything published by Wharton School Publishing has been thoroughly researched and applied in the real world of work—beyond the ivory tower of theory and abstraction often associated with academia. In the book’s introduction, the authors present

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