Companies are replacing the old adage “the customer is always right” with “the customer is right, as long as it does not cost the company money or extra effort.” Customers are facing new policies that hamper, frustrate, and limit a customer’s ability and determination to process a complaint, request additional assistance, validate a warranty or…

I use a lot of free online services every day, along with a few applications I downloaded from the web. There are a few that I really can’t get any work done without: all my email goes to Gmail, I use Scribefire to write each of my blog posts and I’m constantly using…

Is there anyone out there who has at one time or another received bad service at a restaurant? Hotel? Airline? Bank? What about having had a bad run-in with a taxi driver, travel agent, contractor, insurance adjustor or doctor? Oh, come on, who hasn’t, except maybe someone who lives out on a mountaintop? Wouldn’t it be…

There are lots of services out there that will do things on your behalf. You can drop your clothes off at the laundromat to get them washed and folded for you. You can purchase your groceries online and have them delivered to the house. You can pay people to mow your lawn and rake the…

After you get over your initial surprise that these people actually do exist, there is something very cool about watching someone who has never been in a Starbucks before, come in to one for the very first time. It is easy to pick them out, for they are the only ones who walk in front of…

You want an easy hack? Whenever you’re dealing with someone, especially in the service industry, use their name. When meeting your server at the restaurant, remember his name, and when you ask for things, say it back. “James, may I get another glass of water with lemon?” “Ramesh, this is the best aloo mutter I…

Early yesterday morning, I used the time I had waiting for an inter-island flight to purge old documents from the hard drive of my laptop. I came across a lesson plan I had done with my retail team a few years back on customer service, detailing what we noticed to be the six basic needs…

Many times you need an email address to register an account online but you don’t want to get spammed – What should you do? There are services called Disposable Email Services, which they provide you a temporary email address for register accounts. The emails will be forwarded to your real address. This way you do…

There is a cool service called Package Alert Service. Once you input the tracking number (UPS or Fedex) and your email address, Package Alert will send you notification by email whenever if there are any changes on the status. This ia probably a pretty good way to track things because you wouldn’t want to pull…

Gchart is a Google Map powered application which can help you find out the current time around the world. I usually use Time and Date, but Gchart is pretty useful when I need to find the current time on the area quickly. All I need is to load up the site, click on the…

Through most of my corporate work career I’ve been associated with the “hospitality industry:” hotels and resorts and all the amenities they are made of, e.g. restaurants, retail and recreational outlets and the like. The hospitality industry is a labor-intensive one, where the majority of employees do come face-to-face with the customer. Within it, nearly…

Yahoo! has just released a service called Trip Planner. This is a pretty fantastic time-saving tool to plan your trip, online. Here is an example. Pick things to do, hotel to stay, restaurants to dine. Every location have a map reference. You can then print the information off and use it as a…

Management covers a lot of ground. Managing with Aloha covers nineteen universal business values, and thus that number, nineteen, is just the beginning when it comes to the different topics people will ask me to speak on. Still, preferences fall along certain lines at any given time, and there are runaway winners when it comes…

Our reader, Omar has sent me a new regarding a task management that launched today. It is called Remember The Milk. Yes it is another online todo list services, but it is pretty soild on the features. Here is how Omar describes the service: It’s an online to-do list management system with an innovative tabbed interface for…

Martin over TipMonkies has introduced a list of disposable email address services. What is it? It is a temporary email account you can setup to receive email – it maybe best to register web services. Some of them are permanent, but some of them will remove your temporary email account after few hours (such as…