It won’t be immediately apparent, but this is a story about my partly successful but ultimately failed attempt at leveraging social media to obtain customer support for my home’s AT&T U-verse television service.

It won’t be immediately apparent, but this is a story about my partly successful but ultimately failed attempt at leveraging social media to obtain customer support for my home’s AT&T U-verse television service.

Taking orders is easy.  Anyone can do that.  And, you don’t need to be a salesperson to be successful at it.  The real trick to managing an order related relationship or long distance relationship with a customer is your account management skills.

“Customers long to be engaged.  They have a desire to be raving fans, to be in relationships with providers of services and goods of all types, to have productive relationships.”  ~ Skip Anderson

Good morning all. I've been swamped here and I should be writing instead of posting, but I needed a mental break, so it goes. It's a quickie, which assuages my guilt somewhat.

I had the privilege of calling the attendee list for the upcoming California Staffing Professional conference next week in Los Angeles.  I have attended several of these conferences in the past (not this one) and have received calls from vendors to let me know what services they were offering and where they would be located on the vendor floor.  I would l

Several years ago I worked with a business that understood and practiced perfectly the concept of fully-empowered, cross-functional teams.  (It is an organizational structure and methodology that I strongly believe in.)  One of the principles in that business was that whenever the phone rang:

• It was to be answered by someone.
• It wa
  

(OK, maybe "Superclient" is a bit strong, but at least a client who makes us creatives super happy and therefore super productive.

Last week, I recounted one of the best encounters I've ever had with a public relations professional helping me with a story.

Public relations and its practitioners often get a bad rap. (I still have scars from a quick stint in corporate PR back in the early 1990s.) Sometimes it's self-inflicted--Exhibit A being the follow-up calls to ask "Did you get my press release?"--but just as often, it's the nature of the beast.

I know you're thinking, "Molly Maid? Really?" But hang with me here. A few weeks ago on a lazy Sunday, I contacted two cleaning services through their respective online forms.

During a recent visit to a hospital to cover a story, I spotted a suggestion box labeled "CHAPLIN REQUESTS." (Yes, I resisted the temptation to ask if they had any mustachioed silent-film stars handy for my amusement while I waited.)In fact, I didn't say anything.

As writers, we're not afraid of expressing ourselves in text. Indeed, there's a certain amount of pride at our abilities to make the written word do a little jig on the page, to persuade, to entertain, to make people laugh, cry, etc. We can do anything with a clever turn of phrase, right?But my experience has been that the phone is often the best tool to deal with an interminable back-and-forth with a client.

When I was in New York with my fiance earlier this month, we stayed in an amazing hotel called the Maritime. I’d like to say that I just stumbled upon it or that we were given a great recommendation from friends, but this discovery was based on hours of research – visits to travel comparison sites, trawls through reviews, photos and recommendations and lots of graft.

I switched my checking account to Citizens Bank from Bank of America almost 5 years ago, because I was sick of BofA's fees. I chose Citizens because there was a branch two blocks from my house, and I didn't think they were likely to be bought out.