Archive by Author
In A Time-Poor World, Deal With Delays, Kill The Queues
The single most-cited source of frustration for customers is delays and long queues. Your company needs to take this seriously because when customers are kept waiting patience turns to frustration very quickly – and they then start looking for other things that have gone wrong. Waiting customers, in their frustration, may make a scene, exaggerating [...]
How Do You Create A Great Shopping Experience?
My little three-year-old recently wanted to be sick while shopping at a grocery store, and the store assistant quickly escorted her to the staff toilets, and waited there while he finished “just to make sure he was okay.” The employee said it was trained into them to always remain with customers until all problems are [...]
Handling The Angry Consumer …Will SANRAL Show How It’s Done?
Sky-high petrol prices, rampant food inflation and the dreaded prospect of court- enforced Gauteng road tolling are calculated to unleash a monster in time for Christmas – the Angry Consumer. Regrettably, most South African companies are ill equipped to tame the beast and do good business despite the antagonism. The analysis comes from Aki Kalliatakis, [...]
Are We Customer Driven?
One of the most common questions I am often asked is, “Aki, where do we start with our marketing efforts?” It’s a huge question, and I could probably take five days to answer it and still only scratch the surface. The simplest answer would be to cover three main steps: Find out what your customers [...]
Spring … A Blooming Waste Of Time For Most Businesses
As a new season approaches, consumer-facing businesses confront their annual opportunity to spring into action, debug their operations and spruce up their service levels. But all too often the ‘spring fling’ turns out to be a blooming waste of time because the clean-out simply does not go far enough. That’s the view of Aki Kalliatakis, [...]
Are Your Customer Relationships Also Sustainable?
The word “sustainability” has come to be used in many contexts to describe our capacity to endure in the longer term. For our world environment, it is used to define how we are able to maintain and responsibly manage our limited resources so that they remain diverse and productive over time. And, of course, you [...]
Customers Have Permanently Changed The Way In Which They Buy
Who knows when the gloomy financial crisis of the past few years will in fact improve, or get worse? But I’m willing to put my head on a block and say that your customers have permanently changed the way in which they buy – whether you deal with consumers or other businesses. In fact, one [...]
Being A Good Customer
No-one can argue with the fact that customers in today’s hectic world have more power than ever before in history. And yet, more customers feel unhappy about poor value and the way they are treated than ever before in history. How has this changed over the past couple of decades? For a start, not matter [...]
