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  • 21st Century Customer Service, Part 2 — Customer Satisfaction
    - Wednesday August 3, 2011
    By Gale Grimmenga, principal, Creative Impulse  |   www.creativeimpulseinc.com Customer service: a series of actions that enhance customer satisfaction before, during, and after the purchase. Face the fact: Customer service has become depersonalized. Even when we are connected to a human being, satisfaction becomes the purview of an insightfully written script. Or, it’s an automated experience, the satisfaction coming from the ease and speed of navigating a website and its e-commerce program—thus morphing customer service into self-service. And satisfaction once derived by receiving an answer from a knowledgeable person has segued into a virtual interchange via online avatars—the satisfaction provided by good programming and voice...

  • Kakemono's and You: Wide Format Printing
    By Jillian Rowen - Monday July 25, 2011
    As all printers know, it doesn’t matter what machines you own, how amazing your pressman is, or how knowledgeable your staff is; understanding a clients needs can make or break a final product.  Clients can be demanding: having unreasonable expectations, or they can be high maintenance: needing to have their hand held through the printing process. But even regular, low maintenance, clients who know what they want simply use a different language than printers.  Deciphering client needs is half the battle. Our shop has several large scale clients which are either based outside of the United States, or employs staff from their country of origin as they need staff to be bilingual. Often times, this will results in our client...

  • Are You Ready to Grow?
    By Debra Thompson - Friday July 22, 2011
    By Debra Thompson The world is in a state of flux and business owners are very concerned about getting back on track and seeing their business levels return to growth and profitability. It is difficult to say what is going to happen with the economy right now, but I do know one thing for sure. This is the opportune time to position your business for the future. The business owners who realize this are the ones that will definitely have a competitive advantage in the very near future. What every business owner should be focusing on right now is their infrastructure. If you don't have a strong infrastructure in place, you will not be able to grab the golden ring when the opportunity presents itself. To evaluate your infrastructure...

  • Dead Head Marketing
    By Bob Hall - Monday July 18, 2011
    Like many of you, I subscribe to a magazine from the USPS called Deliver which offers information and pointers for marketing with direct mail. Obviously, those using direct mail are also using print. In one recent issue they interviewed the author of “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.” Needless to say, this offered a great opportunity for some throwback psychedelic graphics on the cover and in the article. (These brought back some very vivid memories, but that’s another story.) In addition, it provided a couple of tidbits of real advice for direct mail marketers. Among the admonitions: Be authentic, rethink traditional assumptions, develop a network, maintain a mailing list, and mix your marketing. However, two quotes really...

  • Is Your Employee Ready to be a Manager?
    - Thursday July 14, 2011
    When a managerial position opens up, it is usually an opportunity to move a top performer into the position. No one would argue that promoting from within sends a strong message to the rest of the company about investing in people and cultivating management talent. Unfortunately, when it comes to actual qualifications, current job performance is given greater weight than the competencies required for a managerial position – most notably, management traits and/or experience. The fact that individual job performance and management are two entirely different sets of competencies too often gets ignored. Before you know it, you have someone in the position that doesn’t know the first thing about managing a group of people. Dr...

  • Customer service—an overlooked advantage for 21st century marketing
    - Wednesday July 13, 2011
    By Gale Grimmenga, Principal Creative Impulse  (www.creativeimpulseinc.com) There are so many pros to our digital information technology age—endless information at our fingertips, speed-of-light communicating, services/products available with a click, and fly-on-the-wall perspective of our daily life. But as a customer, I find myself wondering, am I being served? Customer service. We hear the words often enough, but many times frustration and not feeling served are the norm. We often don’t get the pleasure of a real person and, if we do, the person’s response is like a corporate robot reading from a prepared and tested script. We get voice-automated systems saying ‘in order to serve you better, blah, blah, blah.’ then 10...

  • Don’t Ignore the Web
    By John Giles - Friday July 8, 2011
    As printers search for new revenue, selling and supporting websites is becoming an exciting new product to sell. Websites integrate easily with printing companies since many printers are already working closely with customers to manage their message. But there are some printers who do not want to get into Web services. Printers do not have to sell Web services, but they must realize that it is important to understand the Web if they want to continue printing for a company. Printers will have to become “Web experts†because they need to help customers integrate their print collateral with the current website information, even if they don’t maintain the websites. Combining the power of the Web with print is proving to be...

  • Courtesy Matters
    By Bob Hall - Friday July 8, 2011
    I understand that July is officially Cell Phone Courtesy Month. It hasn’t come a minute too soon. Just today I was nearly run off the road by a woman who was on her cell phone, treated to one side of an expletive-laced conversation in the Lowes checkout line, and nearly bumped off the sidewalk by a businessman who was walking and texting at the same time. (I’m just glad he wasn’t chewing gum too or he would have run me over.) Cell phone rudeness is all around us, from the dolts on the plane who refuse to power off when told to do so to the parents at the park who play Angry Birds while their children run amok. My personal pet peeve with cell phone users is being dismissed and subsequently ignored when a person with...

  • You Are Only as Good as Your Worst Employee
    - Thursday July 7, 2011
    I heard this from one of the attendees during my seminar at the Mid-Winter Conference. I thought it was so appropriate. There are many shops out there that will never be as good as what the owner desires, because they continue to put up with underachievers or bad-attitude employees. Even though finding a replacement for this type of individual is a top concern for owners throughout the nation right now, these employees must be addressed. The first recommendation is to “Coach Your Underachievers.†The second recommendation is to “Get Rid of Them.†Underachievers come in every shape, size, educational background and ethnic group. The only thing they have in common is that they are not living up to the potential that...

  • Digital Industry Eco-Facts: Not the Magic Pill We Hoped For
    - Wednesday July 6, 2011
    by Gale Grimmenga, principal, Creative Impulse (www.creativeimpulseinc.com) I don’t fault the electronics industry for marketing well—it’s what business is all about, promising a cure or at least an improvement of a problem. Marketing promotes the bright side, the strengths, the good stuff. It implies delivery of something better than the other guy. Every industry turns the conversation to its favor and, at best, educates us about the new innovation’s benefits. At worst, we jump onboard the trend, help promote the promise, and stay ignorant of the truth. As a citizen of Earth, I want an eco-magic pill for our polluting woes. I want to believe the positive claims of the e-industry: Paperless is nirvana...

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