Category: Uncategorized

Many companies focus on spending money on advertising campaign and the marketing of their goods, but completely underestimate the importance of having a good customer service. Referring to Rachel Lee’s blog post “Americans Fed Up With Poor Customer Service”, over 60% of customers are dissatisfied after walking out of a store or hanging up on a phone with a call center.

Although it is understandable that companies try to keep their costs low to get away with their quality of customer service such as companies like Walmart, I agree with Rachel that if a company wants to grow big and have their customers coming back next time, a good customer service system has to be developed. In the beginning it may cost a lot of money and resources to provide training to the employee, but in the long run, the training will bring in more revenues as customers are more satisfied with the service and are comfortable to visit again.

Furthermore, increasing the quality of customer service is a better business strategy than simply just lowering the costs of the products. It takes time to develop the strategy, so it will create a higher barrier of entry and there will be less competitors in the market.

In economics, we assume that all companies want to maximize profit and it usually makes sense that every move a company makes it caused by this incentive behind. On the other hand, in the past decade in business school the term “social entrepreneurship” has been rising up. Social entrepreneurship means that business people should also make social change to give up to the society while making money. In other words, companies are making too much money that they are willing to give up some of them to do some “good things”. However, it just generates them more money eventually.

TOMS, the fabric shoes company that has been getting more and more popular recently has a “One for One” business strategy, meaning that for each pair of shoes its customers buy, they will donate a pair to someone in need. However, how much of an impact is TOMS actually making? People in Africa would rather have more schools built and shoes that are durable on rocks and pebbles. Rather TOMS can simply just donate money to charities which has a much better idea of what those people really need. In my opinion, social entrepreneurship is just another business strategy to increase sales.

This is a response to an external blog entry – “The TOMS Footprint: Is ‘ One for One’ really the answer?” by Esther Tung, SFU

Referring to Helen Ip’s blog post “Not Enough jobs in the U.S.”, there are about 14 million Americans who are unemployed and cannot find a job. Even though the labor department has announced that they have created 103000 job opportunities, but that certainly has not lowered the unemployment rate with a significant impact.

My assumption to why the labor department is having struggles to lower unemployment rate is the kind of jobs they created do not match with what the unemployed people want, or vice versa. For example, a fresh college graduate  is looking for a job that is relevant to what he or she has learned in college; however, there isn’t any current relevant job openings available. Therefore, he will be unemployed until either certain specific job opportunities to him are open or he can no longer afford his living expenses that he has to work for something that he doesn’t enjoy.

My recommendation to the U.S. labor department is to research what kind of job opportunities that most  of the unemployed people are looking for. From there, the department can work with some government departments and organizations to create the kind of jobs that people actually desire.

In North America, Harley-Davidson (HOG) is known as a high-class/luxurious brand of motorcycle. However, after six years of operating in China it still sells less bikes than in its home based Milwaukee, whose population is 2,300 times smaller than China’s. Now the question is Why Harley can’t rev up in China?

The main reason that Harley is having struggles on its sales is the strict vehicle restrictions in China. Motorcycles are banned to go on elevated highways and major thoroughfares to curb noise and thefts. There are just too many roads that motorcycles cannot ride on and the rules vary over place to place. And now my wonder is how prepared Harley was with market research before it entered the China market?

Before Harley decided to start selling its bikes to the Chinese, they could have done a research on the popularity that people use motorcycles to transport in China and more importantly, how much the vehicle restrictions would influence its sales. Therefore, Harley could have had different strategies like modifying its bikes to match with the regulations, such as reducing the bikes’ noise level and carbon dioxide exhaustion to increase its sale in the Chinese market.

Comments on Jimmy Liu’s Blog and Maricel Saenz’s Blog

BlackBerry with its fantastic email-receiving and reliable security systems has always known as a very  reliable smart phone which makes many people’s lives a lot easier and more convenient. Yet, couple days ago there was a major BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) service outage and most or all BBM users around the world were affected for up to three days. With the lack of new innovative and refreshing phones and features recently the satisfaction of many BlackBerry and non-BlackBerry users with RIM (the Canadian BlackBerry making company) is going down the hill even faster.

On the other hand, what are the upsides of the BBM’s outage this time? We see there were lots of complains and news flowing in the Internet immediately, but what does that mean? It means that BlackBerry is a huge deal to people and people rely on it very heavily to reply emails and communicate via BBM. Although this BBM outage might have dropped some prospective BlackBerry buyers to eliminate BlackBerry as an option, most current BlackBerry users will still keep using their BlackBerrys as number one item to hold in their hands. This stumble of Rim will soon be forgiving and even forgotten.

Article: BlackBerry outage: Another burning platform

Comments on Derek Huang’s Blog and Sarah Wang’s Blog

Steve Jobs, the technology godfather, has passed away on Tuesday. In the past decade, he not only changed the smartphone, music and tablet industries. He has also changed the world and how people live tremendously with his innovative ideas. Furthermore, Steve Jobs has also become an icon of every single Apple’s product presentation. The approach that he introduces his new products and the sense of humor he has have certainly impressed so many people, including myself.

With a mind to create incredible and unique products and the ability to effectively sell them to thousands of millions of customers, Steve Jobs is like a superhero figure in the business world. He also once said “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” I completely agreed with this quote of his. The success of business is not only determined by the amount of profits a company makes, the satisfaction of work also matters very much.

It is depressing to see that Steve is now gone, but his spirit and belief will always stay in my heart to keep me moving forward.

Article: Steve Job’s biggest contribution

Comments: Angelica Cabrera’s Blog and Tique Chandler’s Blog

Before moving to Vancouver, I had been living in Hong Kong for thirteen years. During the thirteen years, there was always a domestic helper in my house since my parents both had to work and there was nobody else who could take care of me and my sister. We were very close together and I’m very glad that the Hong Kong’s High Court finally passed the law that the domestic workers from the Philippines are allowed to apply for permanent residency in the city.

Although I certainly understand that giving the domestic workers a permanent residency would cause the government a lot more money on education, public housing and health care, having basic human ethical rights are even more important. If these domestic workers are working for the Hong Kong citizens and contributing to the city, they should definitely deserve the permission to stay in the city permanently.

Moreover, this is only a small step that Hong Kong has taken to improve its worker’s conditions. To further develop it in a long-term run, a higher minimum wage, better work benefits and shorter mandatory working hours will have to be accomplished to reach the ultimate goal.

Article: Philippine immigrant maid wins landmark Hong Kong case (BBC)

Comments on Piper Hoekstra’s Blog and Nadia Gunderson’s Blog

Since ipad 2 was launched a year ago, there have been many companies like Samsung, Blackberry, Hewlett-Packard that joined the tablet competition and none of them could steal Apple’s spot as the king in the market. However, two days ago Amazon, the largest online retailer in the world has announced that it will enter the tablet market with its first tablet ever, Kindle Fire which is priced at $199, two times lower than that of the cheapest iPad. With this competitive price and Amazon’s very own online data storage, the Kindle Fire can potentially be a dangerous threat to Apple’s iPad.

As new technology is coming out everyday, there is a very low chance that people can tell the differences between similar products, like in this case of the tablets market. People often would just go for the product with the highest popularity which they assume it will suit them the best and have the safest guarantee. If a product wants to launch off with a blast, the point of difference of the product has to play an extremely importantly role.  Thus it can open its own market with few or no competitors and attract a brand new group of customers.

Article: Amazon’s new tablet: On Fire

Comments on Melissa Chau’s Blog and Helena Wong’s Blog

Not needing to stuck in the traffic on the way to work and having the most flexible working schedule ever and , working at home might be a perfect scene to work to many people. However, either from an employee’s or an employer’s point of view, there are actually a lot more downsides of it than its benefits. Isolation from the group, difficulty in the company’s management control, distractions in the house, the lack of integration and trust and the list goes on, thus I certainly agree that people should go to a “workplace” like an office to work.

Companies like Google and Microsoft, they have maintained a very good work/life balance for their employees by providing loads of benefits to them. Yet, usually this would only happen in such big companies with huge amounts of profits and budgets to spend, because employees’ benefits is like a long term investment of a company and results may not be immediate. In general, home is a place for a family to gather, not for work and work should stay at a “workplace” and the trick to find the balance between the two is to make the employees feel like home at work.

Article: The downside of working from home from The Globe and Mail

Commented on: Taline Ainein’s Blog and Rachel Li’s Blog

Near the end of 2009, Toyota, known as one of the most reliable and safest passenger car company recalled there was a “sticking gas pedal” problem with millions of its cars. In fact, the issue had been happening with its cars sold in Europe since the summer of 2009. However, according to the Toyota official since there was no accidents that were directly caused by the problem, the first step that Toyota has chosen to solve the problem was to make a new design for its new cars which was a ridiculous “solution” I would never expect from such a company with a high reputation and reliability internationally.

Even though Toyota is basically known as selling cars with an affordable price with “minimal” features, its safety standard has always been one of the main reasons people worship it. However, in this case it shows that Toyota cares much more about its “customers” than its “users”. Eventually Toyota has solved the problem by extending the warranties to all its problematic cars; however, people’s impression to it has already changed either because they didn’t seem to put business ethics as their top priority or they acted too slowly to show that they do.

News Article: Toyota Has Pattern of Slow Response on Safety Issues