Dell Customer Service Fail = Employee Satisfaction Fail = Bad Business

From Boing Boing:

To be fair, I rarely have a good experience calling toll-free customer service numbers for any company. But in the hour and a half that I spent on the phone with Dell, I spoke to about ten different people, listened to an hour of hold music, repeated my customer number, my order number, my address, my return authorization number, my purchase ID number, my phone number, and my computer's service tag number at least two dozen times total, and spelled out my name another dozen times. I got blackmailed into staying the phone with one person eager to make a sale and was commanded to get off of my headset (I'm not kidding — one guy literally yelled at me to get off my headset because he couldn't hear me) by another. At the end of the day, I was left with no idea whether I could exchange my 6-cell for a 3-cell and a conviction that these Dell customer service reps must be unhappy, untrained, underpaid, or all of the above.

Now boing boing has about a million readers. Nice job Dell! Let's face it - we have come to accept that "customer service department" means "customer dissatisfaction department.

It does not need to be this way.

Prestwick House Ranked as one of the Best Book Publishing Companies to Work for...Again!

Prestwick House is one of only two businesses to appear consistently on this prestigious list since the survey’s inception in 2007.

"The Employee Satisfaction Revolution" now available from Amazon.com

Here is the link.

The first copies of "The Employee Satisfaction Revolution" are here

These copies were rushed off the printing press. The release date is still November 1 - but this is flat out exciting.

Transforming "the" work into "my" work

Adam Hibbert posted this great comment over at
The EMployee Engagement Ning:

It's a useful way to look at the issue from the other end of the telescope - hopefully will help us get the engagement debate out of the old carrot/stick mindset, which I try to remind my colleagues is truly only appropriate for Donkey work. But let's not mistake that for a fundamentally different theory.

The point is, the stereotypical old Theory X organisation had one value for employees - pay. In keeping with that mode of relationship, they just brought their labour time in, and kind of acquiesced while the organisation figured out ways to pump it out of them. The model Theory Y organisation we're all in this place to create has many values for employees, which ideally combine to stimulate and satisfy our creative urges and help us make ourselves more useful, as a willed choice (btw, a self-enriching experience).

Primary among these values, I'd argue, is having our skills and experience recognised by seeing how we're able to contribute to the decisions of the organisation - that value transforms "the" work into "my" work, at which point you can expect me to engage all of myself with it.

Must Read NYT Editorial

Bob Herbet's NYT editorial attacks the most pernicious and damaging political & economic myth of the past 20 years - that if we work to enrich the wealthy, that wealth will " trickle down" to the benefit of working Americans. He begins...

We’ve spent the last few decades shoveling money at the rich like there was no tomorrow. We abandoned the poor, put an economic stranglehold on the middle class and all but bankrupted the federal government — while giving the banks and megacorporations and the rest of the swells at the top of the economic pyramid just about everything they’ve wanted.

Read the whole thing.

What's Your Company's ES (Employee Satisfaction) IQ?

Take the test by clicking here and cut and paste the results in the comments section here.