Beagle Research Group, LLC

Your Customer Service Duty

There’s good news for any manager who has grown exasperated with trying to delight customers through “over the top” service. You may be working too hard and the benefits are not forthcoming. We’ll do anything to keep customers because they tend to buy more from us and the cost of replacing them if they leave is so high. But according to a study published in Harvard Business Review, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman, vendors would be better off sticking to their service knitting instead of looking for ways to “delight” them. This is not to say that the customer experience is unimportant, just the opposite. The question is what constitutes the customer experience from the customer’s perspective.

A Beagle Research Short Poll during December shows that a large majority of Beagle Research readers believe that the economic recovery has started.  Eighty percent of those polled say they believe that a recovery has begun.  The strong showing confirms important data announced by the U.S. Labor Department.

According the Labor Department the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs in December bringing the unemployment rate down to 9.4 percent.  Jobs are traditionally a lagging indicator.

Most importantly this was not a one-time event.  October and November each showed upticks in employment and the revisions announced at the same time as the December numbers paint a story of improving jobs growth through the fourth quarter.  The revisions looked like this—October: from +172,000 jobs to +210,000; for November +71,000 from +39,000.