This article talks about a concept, which is demanding more and more attention as time goes by: how to satisfy customers, and how to win back displeased consumers.

The Dissatisfied Customer

There are many ways to solve the issue of customer service, and according to Nicole Fallon, the author of the article, the key idea is to get in contact with a displeased customer as soon as possible after the bad experience between producer and consumer. I must agree that this should be a key point, because psychologically, people establish their opinions and thoughts of others very quickly, and reacting as fast as possible before someone’s mind is made up could very well be what helps a firm keep its customers.

According to studies shown in the article, around 93% of customers would not change their opinion of a firm after a bad experience if the company did not react fast enough. The only issue with this for large firms is that it is incredibly hard to deal with so many people so quickly. Since the stronger and bigger companies have more people with issues to deal with everyday, it is hard for them to deal with each case individually. This could also potentially be the reason many firms have discounts or bonuses for members or people who buy their products frequently enough, as a type of customer service since they cannot help each case individually.

Because of all this it is very possible that what distinguishes the top firms in a certain area of expertise is how they handle their customer services. It is also quite likely that in the future there will be companies that will provide this service other firms.

Link to article: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7058-disappointed-customers.html

Image taken from: http://www.psdgraphics.com/psd/customer-service-icon-psd/

(This blog post is a response to James Sun’s post “An Even Higher Minimum Wage”)

After reading the article in question, I agree to a certain extent with what James Sun said, that by increasing the minimum wage, the rate of unemployment should increase right along side it. However, if Tom Mulcair goes along with this plan and does it over the course of the next five years rather than all at once, then this idea has the potential to be less harmful to the employment rate rather than if it all happened at once.

Also, I find the fact that the article says that in 2005, female workers from ages 15-24 provided around 60% of the minimum wage workers within the country. By now this statistic is likely to have changed somewhat; however, it is impossible to change a figure that large to a more reasonable size in such a short amount of time, we can therefore assume that young female workers are still representing a large portion of the minimum wage workers within Canada. This does not go exactly along the lines with what the new NDP was fighting for, as they were vying to stand for the thousands of families that lived with an income at this line. Since a large section of these people are new people entering the labor market, they will not likely have a high paying job in the first place anyway, and possibly still live with family or with their family’s help and are not as affected by the effects of the minimum wage as are perhaps workers with 2 to 3 small children.
I agree that the minimum wage could be increased. However, I do not think that doing so would necessarily benefit everyone involved, since a large majority of the people with salaries at that line are potentially still students or living with relatives and are not as affected by the negative effects of the minimum wage as are perhaps stated in these articles.

link to James Sun’s post https://blogs.ubc.ca/fesd78/2014/10/04/an-even-higher-minimum-wage/

link to article http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tom-mulcair-says-he-will-propose-15-federal-minimum-wage-1.2765515

Image taken from: http://www.cija.ca/canadian-politics/statement-by-ndp-leader-tom-mulcair-on-rosh-hashanah/

Event planners of the future

I find this article very compelling for many reasons, one of them being that it shows that with enough innovation and creativity, any firm that was on the brink of going bankrupt can surge anew. Also, the type of business that Tangoo represents (event planning business) is what my group and I discussed for our first group assignment, and I find it interesting to see how other companies in the same area of expertise have evolved in recent years. Another reason I find this article so interesting and fun to read, is that this is a firm created by a recently graduated Sauder School of Business student, and it is always fun for most of us in the business school to read of our peers success and creativeness.

I think that this line of thought that Tangoo brought out, with the development of an IOS app for event planning, will be used by almost everyone in the future. This is because at our point in time, many people like to change their plans quickly, and it can sometimes be hard to plan for an event a few weeks in advance, and with this app, people will be able to change their reservations at any given time.

By taking the leap of faith and being the first firm to do this, Paul Davidescu and his team show the incredible innovativeness that usually comes with small firms, and the capability to think of what your 21^st century customer needs.

article link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-managing/leadership/dinner-planning-company-re-emerges-overnight-as-pocket-concierge/article20898113/

Tangoo logo image taken from: https://tangoo.ca/