Want to be the sort of customer who gets priority treatment? Who regularly gets a supplier to lower their price when your exec asks for budget cuts, or compels the barista to add more whipped cream to her mocha lattés? Stick to these five behaviors that, in vendors’ eyes, make for a good customer, says Harvard Business School professor John Quelch.
Sticking to outdated grammar rules could be getting in the way of your business writing, says trainer Fred Kniggendorf. For starters, Kniggendorf says ignore these four grammar rules:
Steering clear of business gibberish isn’t easy, since everybody in corporate America uses it. By “gibberish,” we mean the vague language that takes up space but doesn’t say much.
“Could I ask you to repeat your name one more time?” Admins who hate asking that question may fear that they come across as incompetent or unprofessional. The truth, though, is that they just want to get it right. Here are top tips from other admins on handling on-the-phone situations.
How many times have you received an email message with the subject line “Hi” or “Question” or, even worse, no subject at all? Here’s a technique, by Brett Kelly of The Cranking Widgets blog, for labeling subject lines so the recipient knows instantly what the message entails.
Try to track the details of a complex project on a whiteboard, and you may quickly run out of white space. Here are five project-tracking software tools that can come to the rescue.