Todd Lyden

I focused much on customer service two weeks ago and I really can't escape it. I was on a call yesterday making a large order for lunch coming up. The woman on the other end was insanely pleasant as she tried to walk me through a new menu and my inability to be more quickly decisive. She did have to put me on hold an inordinate amount of times and each time was PROFUSELY apologetic. I was prepared and thankfully not in a hurry. I can quickly imagine someone else taking conversation and turning it into a complaint (unjustified, but I can see it). Amber Naslund has a related piece back last month that I liked discussing our aptitude to taking complaints online. I agree with Amber that #FAIL is overused, but also we need to be aware that failure or BAD customer service is in the eye of the beholder. For companies, SMALL mistakes can be huge to a customer. Like I said with my example, I could easily see someone taking it out of hand and quickly getting annoyed. I knew ...

How do you tell someone that their baby, their blog - the thing they put time and energy into- just does not work somehow? Doing this for over a month now, I have been reading a lot of other folks blogs as evidenced by my prodigious sharing of links (that's a joke). I judged debate for many years and learned how to be as tactful as possible to tell people why something they thought they were doing right didn't work for me. Mind you, that was me. It was also one time and one place. Blogs are semi-permanent- almost as if they were our children. Fly away little blog post, do what you will in the world and don't get beat up too much by all those mean readers! So how do you tell someone that the design is heinous? That ads placed ALL OVER THE PLACE are beyond off-putting? Let's look at some advise. Here is some generic advice for giving criticism. The gist of this one: do not criticize in public. GREAT advice for bloggers. The reality is we probably can deal...