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At the end of the day, customer choice is essential. And we don't make products that compete with Apple, nor make products that compete with Google. Our customers come in both iOS and Android flavors, and I hope our customers can still buy the products they want to purchase wherever they want to purchase them.
When the kids were young, they just wanted to be around us. We were units of comfort and support. As they get older, we work the turnstile, helping the exasperated customer pass whatever temporary obstacle is keeping them from their next exciting thing. Now we're the ones who just like having them in the room.
Companies and their brands need to reach out and speak directly to consumers, to honor their values, and to form meaningful relationships with them. They must become architects of community, consistently demonstrating the values that their customer community expects in exchange for their loyalty and purchases.
Americans hate their cable companies - for bumbling installers, on-again-off-again transmissions, peculiar channel selections, and indifferent customer service. The only thing cable subscribers hate more than the cable company is not being able to get what it delivers: multichannel selection and good reception.
Your typical business just measures the metrics that have to do with the profitability of the business one way or another. But you can have metrics that measure employee happiness and the morale. You can also do direct customer surveys; you can track it over time. You can do supplier satisfaction scores as well.
I'm making a case against how money managers are handling customers' money. The objective of the customer is not being met if the fund managers are diversifying their assets into hundreds of businesses. If they do this, they are typically performing close to the indexes. But that's not the way wealth is created.
In fact, I believe the first companies that make an effort to develop an authentic, transparent, and meaningful social contract with their fans and customers will turn out to be the ones that are the most successful in the future. While brands that refuse to make the effort will lose stature and customer loyalty.
Branding is not merely about differentiating products; it is about striking emotional chords with consumers. It is about cultivating identity, attachment, and trust to inspire customer loyalty. Chinese brands score low on attributes such as 'sophisticated,' 'desirable,' 'innovative,' 'friendly,' and 'trustworthy.'
We must permeate the stores with creativity and offer service when and to the degree the customer wants it. Of course, it means offering all the omni bells and whistles they want, like in-store pickup, same-day delivery, and mobile point of sale, and all of this must be done every hour of every day the store is open.
We undertook a huge internal transformation to sharpen our customer focus, step up innovation, improve productivity to ensure competitiveness, change our culture, and simplify our ways of working so that our size and scale became a competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic hangover after years of diversification.
I like to think of my customer and make sure that season after season she is getting what she wants. Ultimately, I suppose I have an image of myself. That is the person I am designing for - a woman who loves and appreciates fashion and luxury, and somebody who wants to feel empowered with the best version of themselves.
Many people have said we just need to add more products. Look at Oracle, look at SAP. Add ERP and inventory or compensation. Add all this stuff. What we realized is we're the customer company. We're the front office solution, and our customers would be really upset if we just added a whole bunch of stuff and lost focus.
The motivation to start the infrastructure business was to have at least one business that gives you annuity income. Others are services businesses that don't give you annuity income. If you keep the customer happy, you make money. But in a household, if there are five people, keeping all of them happy is also difficult.
The fundamental issue is: In the world of the Internet, is there a place for a packager of services? Does the customer want to go surf the Net and go to every one of 50,000 Web sites? Or will people pay a reasonable amount for somebody to go out and preselect and package what they want? My guess is they will both coexist.
Exxon have done a very good job for us. Their difficulty and frustration has also been that as a customer we get very limited dyno time. But they were able to come up with a fuel that made the C-spec work, and we've managed to get that in the car and run that successfully, when the works team haven't been able to do that.
At a macro level, it's balancing the needs of consumers, advertisers and content owners. And if you talk to any one of those three customer sets in isolation, often times you won't delight the other two. So the hurdle we faced with Hulu Plus was, how can we thread this needle in a way that delights all three customer sets?
The key for us is to have assets that are easy for people to get to and they want to use. So Go90 right out of the gate will have certain things that are exclusive to Verizon, but you can download it if you're a Sprint customer or T-Mobile customer, and they're doing that. Things like the AwesomenessTV - exclusive content.
The customer wants what the customer wants - when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it. And if you want to build a big business, and you want to be meaningful to a big, broad group of customers, you need to think about how you're going to meet them in the various places where they might expect to see you.
It turns out that CVS is one of about 40 merchants in a consortium that formed in 2011 to develop their own mobile-phone-based payment system. The consortium, called the Merchant Customer Exchange, or MCX, is in large part all about eliminating, or at least reducing, the fees banks charge retailers for swiping credit cards.
In Japan, the attention to detail in customer service is an experience that is unlike anywhere else. It's really quite special. I think everyone who's interested in fashion would do well to take a trip to learn about presentation and the way the merchandise is handed to you. These are skills that no one really thinks about.
The OnCue platform and team will help Verizon bring next-generation video services to audiences who increasingly expect to view content when, where, and how they want it. Verizon already has extensive video content relationships, fixed and wireless delivery networks, and customer relationships in both the home and on mobile.
Our customer base isn't just people saying, 'I'm an environmentalist, I'm in my Birkenstocks, I went to Woodstock.' Solar is a bipartisan technology. Republicans like solar; conservatives like solar. Over 30% of our customers are veterans. There's something very American about being able to produce power on your own rooftop.
What we know about the destination resort business is clearly established. But it's all about one thing, and one thing only. All of the razzmatazz and jazz we hear about facilities and everything else doesn't amount to a hill of beans. It's customer experience that determines the longevity and endurance of these enterprises.
The business models in enterprise have changed pretty dramatically. A huge problem with enterprise software traditionally has been usually you sell to the customer and then they adopt the technology. The great thing about 'freemium' and the new way enterprise software is being sold is you get to try it first and then buy it.
With customers' permission, fintech firms have increasingly turned to data aggregators to 'screen scrape' information from financial accounts. In such cases, data aggregators collect and store online banking logins and passwords provided by the bank's customers and use them to log directly into the customer's banking account.
The key here is that with planning, you can take advantage of opportunities, where without this planning, you may just watch them pass you by. Like knowing that a key potential customer may be at a conference and putting together a pitch just in case you run into them - or being caught by surprise with nothing coherent to say.
Think about it: if you were running a multi-million dollar company, and your database of customer information was stolen, would you want to tell your clients? No. Most companies did not until the laws required them to. It's in the best interest of organisations - when they're attacked and information is stolen - to tell nobody.
You look to Google, you see this incredible world of information, you see the advertising, but you also get Google Analytics. And Google Analytics coupled with Salesforce's sales and service and marketing means that both of our customers are going to have customer insights that they've never had before. That is really exciting.
Limos, from the beginning of time, they know who they're picking up, they usually have a credit card on file, they know where the pickup location is, and so there's essentially a prearrangement of sorts, and, of course, the limo customer knows the driver, knows the company, knows the rates. All we've done is make it more accessible.
If you understand cause and effect, it brings about a set of insights that leads you to a very different place. The knowledge will persuade you that the market isn't organized by customer category or by product category. If you understand the job that consumers need to complete, you can articulate all of the experiences in that job.
When it comes to working from home, when it comes to video conferencing, it's got to work. Anytime you want to meet someone, the quality has got to be good, very reliable. Otherwise, you've scheduled a very important meeting with a customer - oh my God, if the audio is choppy, the video doesn't work, you're not going to try it anymore.
The credit/debit card transaction system is antiquated, expensive, and inefficient. There are over nine steps to complete a transaction from the time a customer swipes their card to payment processing, settlement, and when the merchant finally gets paid. Every step along the way costs both the consumer and the vendor in additional fees.
One way Groupon hopes to gain an edge is by using software to learn about its members so it can deliver more relevant offers: my wife will get the manicure-pedicure deal, but I'll get an offer on fly-fishing lessons. The key now is execution - delivering great customer service and keeping everybody happy on both sides of the transactions.
Facebook already has a large political ad sales and operations team that manages ad accounts for large campaigns. Zuckerberg hinted that the company could follow the same 'know your customer' guidelines Wall Street banks routinely employ to combat money laundering, logging each and every candidate and super PAC that advertises on Facebook.
There is such a very large quantity of books clamouring for a buyer's attention that publishers have relied more and more on support such as blurbs as a way of getting an independent recommendation from a familiar name, much in the same way that Amazon.com will send an e-mail recommending Book A to a customer who's already purchased Book B.
At the end of the day, the differential, I believe, on the airline space has got to be about the product and the service that you provide. And again, I can't express that enough. That comes from people. It is a people business, and my primary focus is to get our 84,000-plus people back aligned, back engaged, and back focused on our customer.
As we continue to drive the benefits of integrating our enterprise skills, capabilities, and experience - what we call operating as 'One Boeing' - we will find new and better ways to engage and inspire employees, deliver innovation that drives customer success, and produce results to fuel future growth and prosperity for all our stakeholders.
At age nine, I got a paper route. Sixty-six papers had to be delivered to sixty-six families every day. I also had to collect thirty cents a week from each customer. I owed the paper twenty cents per customer per week, and got to keep the rest. When I didn't collect, the balance came out of my profit. My average income was six dollars a week.
With Bitcoin, every transaction is publicly verified, so many risks are eliminated, including chargeback fraud or 'friendly fraud.' This is when a customer purchases something online with a credit card; waits to receive the goods or service, then requests a chargeback refund. The bank then forcibly takes the funds out of the merchant's account.
Here is what the world looked like in 2000... there were no plug and play solutions for ecommerce/warehouse management and customer service that could scale... which means that we had to employ 40+ engineers. Cloud computing did not exist, which means that we had to have a server farm and several IT people to insure that the site did not go down.
In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'
There are times when I need to dig up the diagram for a type of satellite dish, for instance, but I just can't seem to phrase this need correctly. As a result, I'm inundated by advertising for satellite television and people's online customer reviews of such services when, in fact, I was only trying to figure out what a certain component is called.