Five years ago, no one would bet on Best Buy. The poster child for showrooming, Best Buy appeared destined for the same graveyard that housed vanquished competitors Circuit City and Radio Shack. Best Buy appointed Hubert Joly as its new CEO in 2012, and he developed a plan dubbed Renew Blue that featured:
50 percent of customers are interested in purchasing custom products and 48% of those customers are willing to wait for a product that they can call "all their own," found a 2016 Deloitte consumer survey. Those findings certainly spell good news for BKBG member showrooms. The ability to produce unique products whether they are split finishes, unique combinations of handles and spouts on faucets, custom system showers or individualized pieces of cabinet and door hardware for kitchens provide showrooms with competitive advantages that can't be replicated by online retailers, big box national chains or order takers down the street.
Two professors from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business found that speaking positively of fellow team members gives more meaning to one's work and provides a greater sense of purpose. They also claim that there are numerous opportunities to highlight your team's contributions and talent that often are not taken advantage of.
Our world is changing so rapidly that you may not believe you have the capacity to keep pace. Wouldn't we all be more productive if we could assess applications that are best suited for our businesses and careers more quickly? Everyone knows someone who is technologically illiterate, but does that mean they can't learn or it's too complicated to even try?
Hiring the right match for you business culture is one of the greatest challenges facing kitchen and bath showroom owners. There are a few red flags that you should watch for when interviewing candidates.
Excellent customer service is the key to holding on to customers, which, in turn, is the key to sustaining long-term profitability. Customer service guru Dennis Snow (Snow & Associates) has developed a hierarchy of customer service expectations derived from research by the Gallup organization.
Word of mouth is responsible for 93% of messages passing from one person to another. Everyday, Americans engage in 16 word of mouth conversations where they say something positive or negative about a showroom, product, service or person. We recommend restaurants and movies we’ve watched to coworkers, tell family members about a great sale and recommend babysitters to our neighbors. American consumers mention brands 3 billion times a day. Our mentioning of brands is about as involuntary as is our breathing. We do it so often, we don’t even thing about it.
Most hiring processes are not effective due to a concept known as "confirmation bias.” This involves people who interview prospects for a position in their firm that make a determination of a candidate's fit within five minutes of the start of the interview and then spend the rest of the time affirming what they want to believe based on those first impressions.
