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"When you experience pressure anxiety—the feeling that you have to produce all the time—your emotional landscape changes for the worse. Small annoyances like picking up your dry-cleaning, for example, begin to interfere with your need to 'produce.' Going to your daughter's play becomes an intrusion. Going on vacation can increase your anxiety, because it takes you away from what you should be doing: achieving results. Important conversations with your spouse may go south because of the subtle pressure of always being 'on.' Worse, your decisions may become distorted by your need to produce. And if your focus shifts solely to winning, at any cost, you may find yourself compromising your ethics.
Pressure anxiety may seem irrational—a mediocre presentation to a client is not akin to physical death—and probably, in and of itself, will not lead to the end of a professional relationship. Similarly, your daughter being turned down from her first choice college will not end her life, although she may feel that way at the time. We often tell ourselves and our kids not to overreact to these kinds of temporary set-backs—to be rational. However, pressure anxiety makes it hard to hold that thought in mind."
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"Today, we are connected in a multitude of ways and tethered to our devices 24x7. We have technology that allows instantaneous online delivery of content, including music, books and video. That same technology allows us to generate our own content and share it with the world. We have interactive social media tools that allow us to connect with communities we didn't even know existed a decade ago. And all of this is available from a mobile device that fits in the palm of your hand. New communication techniques and technologies are emerging at a rapid pace, continuously bombarding us with messages and reminders, with no end in sight.
In a world where it's hard enough to cut through the noise to get the attention of friends and family members, it's even more difficult for businesses and other organizations to reach prospects and customers. Unfortunately, many organizations try to solve this situation by talking louder and LOUDER until they are shouting at us from across a crowded room. They add to the noise, make us tune out, and continue their way down an unsustainable path."
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"What has made customer surprise in such a scarcity? At least three culprits have robbed the glee of service. First, many organizations have been forced to apply austere expense cutting in the face of ever-diminishing profit margins; value-added amazement has gotten pricey. Second, rising customer expectations have elevated what it takes to be judged as enchanting. Customers live in a highly stimulated daily lives. Stores have become sensory theater; TV and the Internet as vibrant as Broadway after dark. To paraphrase an old song, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Zappos." There is a third reason...one subtler and far more challenging."
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"How is it that the likes of MapMyFitness or Mint end up being purchased by the likes of Under Armor or Intuit for hundreds of millions of dollars instead of being created by these same companies?
Isn't it time companies asked the same questions as these entrepreneurs, but instead of articulating this in a creative brief and being satisfied with a jingle, tagline or even real-time tweet as the output, fast tracked and super sized this expectation in the form of a disruptive technology-led solution?
Isn't it time to look towards the tens of thousands of viable startups out there for collaboration opportunities?
And if the solution doesn't already exist, why wouldn't you start it yourselves?"
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"The age of 'buy from us because we say we're awesome' is over, and has been replaced by an age of 'I'll buy from them because someone I trust says they're awesome.'
We commissioned a survey on customer service, and the results will shock you. ... 25% of customers report an instance of poor customer service in the past two months alone! Each instance is estimated at resulting in over $700 in lost sales from that customer—and then spreading the word to an estimated 700 additional people on social media!
However, the overwhelming majority of businesses think that their customer service is superior. There is a huge disconnect."
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