by Sam Klaidman | Nov 6, 2013 | Growth
USAA began in 1922 with 25 Army officers who offered to insure each other’s vehicles when no one else would. Their small organization has grown into a respected institution offering a full range of financial products to 9.8 million members. And their product set...
by Sam Klaidman | Nov 5, 2013 | Growth
Value-added services are a way that product companies can differentiate themselves from their competition. In the previous posts in this series, we looked at U-Haul and USAA. This post shows how an agriculture business recently made a significant acquisition to add...
by Sam Klaidman | Nov 4, 2013 | Growth
Value-added services are a way that product companies can differentiate themselves from their competition. This post shows how a heavy equipment manufacturer continuously creates value-added services and products to sustain its long growth history. John Deere has a...
by Sam Klaidman | Nov 3, 2013 | Growth
Customer retention is not the only motivation for businesses to create and commercialize value-added services. Sometimes the motivation is as simple as growing the bottom line. In this post, we look at two examples of businesses thinking outside their comfort zone to...
by Sam Klaidman | Nov 2, 2013 | Growth
Ever drive down a highway, and suddenly the “Service Engine Soon” icon on your dash lights up? If you are like me, the first thing you think is, “oh, crap,” and the next is, “hope it is not important since I’m late and in the middle...
by Sam Klaidman | Nov 1, 2013 | Growth
Renewal by Andersen This is a tale of what seems like a badly missed opportunity to me. Read on! First, let me confess that I wrote this post in two parts, about two weeks apart. I started writing when I saw this full-page ad on the left in the Boston Globe. Not...
by Sam Klaidman | Oct 7, 2013 | Customer Value Creation
Introduction to best practices Nobody wants to be in a commodity business, yet people always try to copy industry best practices. How do you expect to be different following that strategy? At best, implementing your industry’s best practices will get you in the...
by Sam Klaidman | Sep 30, 2013 | Growth
Recently, a good friend gave me a copy of Design Thinking For Strategic Innovation. I read as far as the fifth paragraph, where the author was describing the effects on business of global interconnectivity, when I came upon this sentence, “We want more, when we want...
by Sam Klaidman | Sep 23, 2013 | Customer Loyalty
How I discovered the need for an annual survey script update I reviewed a transactional survey script at a meeting with a new client. I suppressed the urge to say, “These questions are wimpy. They don’t get to the heart of what customers expect from service delivery...
by Sam Klaidman | Sep 16, 2013 | Customer Loyalty
We’ve all grown up trying to figure out the answer to the age-old question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Whether you know the answer or not (I don’t), the question has great value in thinking about how you will create positive,...
