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Six Fundamentals Every Entrepreneur Needs to Succeed

Harvard Business Review

Your projections for the business should not be wildly optimistic so you can manage your expectations and those of any partners. Plan for a realistic amount of sales and interest so you can conservatively manage your finances. Getaroom stands out because it presents a new model for hotel room booking. We built a U.S.-based

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Experiment with Organizational Change Before Going All In

Harvard Business Review

By forcing organizations to clearly articulate their goals and then to rigorously judge their decisions by those metrics, experimental tests can help managers avoid costly mistakes and can open up the consideration of other possible solutions. Each group went through the same technical training with a couple of key differences.

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Leading Anywhere

Harvard Business Review

But already a pervasive network also lets firms ship calls to virtual call centers. LiveOps is one company that helps put call center work in the cloud. LiveOps solves this in part with training, in part with contests, to create a sense of community where no actual community exists.

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What Circuit City Learned About Valuing Employees

Harvard Business Review

Initially rebuffed, he flew to Boston and called again only to be told the professor was still unavailable. Finally, he said, "I am staying at the XYZ hotel and will wait here as many days as necessary to see him." In a few minutes, the secretary called back and arranged an appointment for the next day.

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Outsourcing the Old Folks

Harvard Business Review

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel , a new film set in India and directed by Shakespeare in Love's John Madden (age 63), hangs its plot on the notion of "outsourcing" the elderly. They find new life instead of old age. She goes from being outsourced, to becoming a resource. Here too, Marigold's Sonny has some wisdom to impart.

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How Companies Can Identify Racial and Gender Bias in Their Customer Service

Harvard Business Review

In one set of studies, currently in working paper format, we found that minority customers — blacks and Asians — regularly receive worse customer service than whites in ways that are not immediately obvious to onlookers (or even managers). Specifically, we audited 6,000 hotels in the U.S. Map employee-customer touchpoints.

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CMOs and CEOs Can Work Better Together

Harvard Business Review

When making a purchase decision, customers use an average of six different channels, which are often managed by different parts of the organization. The marketing team at Starwood Hotels & Resorts Group also offers a good example of cross-functional cooperation in action.

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