SELF IMPROVEMENT AND MOTIVATION

When it comes to management training or leadership training for your staff, one area is of vital importance. Customer service may seem straightforward but in actual fact the skills needed here are not ones that should be ignored. Good customer service will keep people coming back. Bad customer service will ensure they never come back and probably spread the word around like wildfire. Exemplary customer service will get return business more often, bring in new business constantly, and get the best result from existing customers. Take customer service seriously and ensure those on the front line are properly trained and that good systems are in place. If you are involved in customer service here are 10 ways to do better and improve sales, and customer loyalty: First Impressions Count This cannot be emphasized enough. As the saying goes you only get one chance to make a first impression and that impression can last a long time with people. That's not to say you can't improve a bad...

Attitude – When it comes to good customer service, your attitude is everything. If you enter into a task with positivity it will show in your work. When you give a job your all, your clients notice. They don't mind paying a good rate for good work and they'll also be happy to refer you to others. If you're lackluster in your approach, you go through the motions or just don't do a very good job, that will be noticed as well. When you freelance, you get what you give. A good attitude makes all the difference.   Best - Even on your worst day, always give your best. It's not your client's fault you were up all night. It's not your client's fault you took a job you consider boring. Your client hired you because he felt you were the best for the job, if you can't give him your all, you shouldn't have taken the job in the first place.   Communication – The most important rule of any relationship, whether it's business or personal, is communicatio...

Time management is the central skill of success. Your ability to manage your time, to focus and channel your energies on your highest value tasks, will determine your rewards and your level of accomplishment in life more than any other factor.   Success Leaves Tracks When I began searching for the secrets of success many years ago, I discovered an interesting principle: success leaves tracks. A wise man who had studied success for more than 50 years concluded that the greatest success principle of all was, "learn from the experts."   Learn From the Experts If you want to be a big success in any area, find out what other successful people in that area are doing, and do the same things, until you get the same results. When I studied the interviews, speeches, biographies and autobiographies of successful men and women, I found that they all had one quality in common. They were all described as being "extremely well organized." They used their time very, very well. They...

How to get support for your ideas more easily than ever before.   Many years ago a retiring executive gave me an old pamphlet he had carried throughout his career. It was entitled, "Take Time Out for Mental Digestion."   He told me that this little pamphlet had been one of the most helpful things he had ever read in his business life. At the time I spoke to him he was the president of a corporation with more than 10,000 employees.   The message of this pamphlet was simple. It said that people always resist new ideas and new courses of action, even if the ideas are good for them. However, if they have an opportunity to think about them for a few days, very often they will come around to the new way of thinking with both agreement and enthusiasm.   The pamphlet said that an individual needs about 72 hours to absorb a new idea. Effective executives are those who present their ideas in very casual way, rather than as a decision or a fact engraved in stone. They present their thou...

Preparation is the mark of a professional. Preparation is also the mark of a successful person in any field. As you move upward in any occupation, you will find that the top people spend far more time in preparation than the average person does. The top 10 percent in any field are always more thoroughly prepared in every detail than those who struggle for a living in the same occupation.   Guard Against the Worst   For me, as a professional speaker and seminar leader, the worst thing that could happen would be for my luggage to be lost and for me to arrive without the clothes and seminar materials that I need for my speaking engagement. To guard against this situation, I carry all my essentials on board with me, never out of my sight. Because of this habit of advance planning, I have never had an insurmountable problem because of baggage delays or losses. On the way to your destination, in the achievement of your most important goal, continually ask yourself, "What are the worst p...

The most important single role of parenting is to love and nurture your children and to build in them feelings of high self-esteem and self-confidence. If you raise your children feeling terrific about themselves, if you bring them up full of eagerness to go out and take on the world, then you have fulfilled your responsibility in the highest possible sense.   Why Parents Don't Love Enough There are two major reasons for the failure by parents to love their children enough. First, the parents do not love themselves. Parents with low self-esteem have great difficulty giving more love to their children than they feel for themselves. The second reason that parents don't love their children enough is they often have the mistaken notion that their children exist to fulfill their expectations.   Children are Not Property The starting point of raising super kids is to realize that your children are not your property. Your children belong to themselves. They are a gift to you from high...

Know the Right People One of the greatest forms of financial leverage is contacts. Knowing the right people and being known by them can open doors for you that can save you years of hard work. The quality and quantity of your contacts and your relationships will have more to do with your success than perhaps any other factor.   Here are three things you can do to expand your list of contacts. First, make a list of the 25 people you feel it would be most useful for you to get to know. Develop a strategy to get to meet everyone of them over the next 12 months. Then make a list of 25 more.   List the people in charge of the major corporations that would be useful for you to know. List the mayor, list the congressmen, list the senator. List the important people that it would be helpful for you to know and then make a plan to meet them.   Network at Every Opportunity Second is for you to network at every opportunity. Join business and trade associations. Attend meetings. Get involved. Volun...

Perception Is Everything There are four "Ps" that will enhance your ability to persuade others in both your work and personal life. They are power, positioning, performance, and politeness. And they are all based on perception.   Develop Personal Power The first "P" is power. The more power and influence that a person perceives that you have, whether real or not, the more likely it is that that person will be persuaded by you to do the things you want them to do. For example, if you appear to be a senior executive, or a wealthy person, people will be much more likely to help you and serve you than they would be if you were perceived to be a lower level employee.   Shape Their Thinking About You The second "P" is positioning. This refers to the way that other people think about you and talk about you when you are not there. Your positioning in the mind and heart of other people largely determines how open they are to being influenced by you.   In everything...

A hierarchy (Greek: hierarchia ( ἱ εραρχία), from hierarches, "leader of sacred rites") is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another and with only one "neighbor" above and below each level. These classifications are made with regard to rank, importance, seniority, power status, or authority. A hierarchy of power is called a power structure. Abstractly, a hierarchy is simply an ordered set or an acyclic graph. A hierarchy can link entities either directly or indirectly, and either vertically or horizontally. The only direct links in a hierarchy, in so far as they are hierarchical, are to one's immediate superior or to one of one's subordinates, although a system that is largely hierarchical can also incorporate alternative hierarchies. Indirect hierarchical links can extend "vertically" upwards or...