Posted on July 23, 2008 by Paul Ritchie
Please give my brother a hearty welcome to the blogosphere, where he is now shamelessly flaunting his Spargel obsession.
Stephen’s just getting rolling, but I can’t resist linking to his re-telling of one of my favorite development war stories: Pakled Customer Syndrome. Star Trek TNG hasn’t aged very well at all — my episode yield is about ten percent [...]
Filed under: Customer Service, Organizational Change Management, Program Management, Project Management, Project Success Factors, Stakeholder management, Troubled Projects | Tagged: Pakleds, Problem Customers, Star Trek, TNG, Troubled Projects | No Comments »
Posted on July 17, 2008 by Paul Ritchie
Thoughts after tag surfing…. A lot of the comments on the Starbucks store closings claim that the 600 closings are driven by location mistakes. The recent internal memo from Howard Schultz listing the stores to close in July 2008 headlined the “poor real estate decisions” made (story here). There has been a lot of talk of cannibalization (here) [...]
Filed under: Branding, Customer Service, Leadership, Performance Management, Strategy Management, Turnarounds | Tagged: Christian Mullins, Howard Schultz, John Quelch, Starbucks, Starbucks customer service, Starbucks Gossip, store closing | 1 Comment »
Posted on April 9, 2008 by Paul Ritchie
More on the saga of Starbucks and its renewed commitment to customer service…(earlier posts, here and here).
My local Starbucks was closed on Sunday PM, apparently to introduce a new refill policy (here). What was aggravating was that lights were on full blast and it looked open. Very frustrating to get to the door and see [...]
Filed under: Customer Service, Leadership, Turnarounds | No Comments »
Posted on March 28, 2008 by Paul Ritchie
Before I forget, I want to close the loop on an earlier thread on Starbucks (here and here). From a news item on Howard Schultz’s unveiling of the new expresso machine (here), it looks like they’re quickly implementing some of the changes hinted at earlier.
More interaction with customers…
Schultz announced the arrival of the Mastrena…about seven [...]
Filed under: Customer Service, Leadership, Turnarounds | No Comments »
Posted on February 29, 2008 by Paul Ritchie
We’ve discussed this here and this link is to the Starbucks Gossip blog (if you ever want to know more about Starbucks). A more ominous possibility is mooted by The Onion here (hat tip to Starbucks Gossip).
My experience has been mixed so far… Day One (Wednesday) was so-so, though I’d never seen this dude before. [...]
Filed under: Customer Service, Leadership, Turnarounds | No Comments »
Posted on February 27, 2008 by Paul Ritchie
Jeff Nolan — at one of my favorite blogs Venture Chronicles – comments here on Howard Schultz closing down Starbucks for customer service re-training. I wasn’t surprised to hear about this move, considering what Schultz had to say in the memo referenced in this WSJ article.
Jeff was a bit down on the PR, but I [...]
Filed under: Customer Service, Leadership, Turnarounds | 7 Comments »
