The Care and Feeding of Difficult Customers
from Gift Shop Magazine
Type the phrase "customer service skills" into your favorite search engine and you will get approximately three million hits. There is no lack of information out there about how to improve your service quality. But what kind of customer experience do you usually have when you go shopping? Sometimes it feels like people could write three million more articles and nothing would change. There is a reason for this, and as a gift retailer, it has the potential to become one of your biggest competitive advantages: good service is not human nature. You could talk all day about having a good attitude or smiling at people, but the reality is that when customers act difficult or have a problem, most of us revert to our survival instincts and defend our policies and ourselves. But learning specific techniques for what to say to customers can dramatically change the way they react to you, particularly in difficult situations. More

In Pictures: 12 Innovative Marketing Techniques
from Forbes
"Most marketing campaigns fall down because they're specifically designed to sell products and generate leads," says David Meerman Scott, viral-marketing strategist and author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. A better plan, he says, is to back off the sell and amp up the entertainment. More

Top Sources of Shrink
from About.com
The percentage of loss of products between manufacture and point of sale is referred to as shrinkage, or sometimes called shrink. The average shrink percentage in the retail industry is about 2 percent of sales. While that may sound low, shrinkage cost U.S. retailers over $31 billion in 2001 according to the National Retail Security Survey on retail theft. Here are the four major sources of inventory shrinkage in retail. More

Store Thefts Increase
from Boston.com
"Theft is a big problem during the holidays, because people who wouldn't normally steal may be feeling desperate and their behaviors could change," said Fields, who spent several years in senior positions at multiple big-box retailers before buying the Massachusetts Avenue store in 1994. "It's very easy to conceal. Somebody can be talking to you and taking a piece of jewelry at the same time." Local business associations, police officials, and criminologists generally agree there's a marked increase in shoplifting from October through December, a crime that costs stores an estimated $13 billion a year nationally. Complicating matters for merchants these days, police and retail analysts predict that these harsh economic times could drive more people to steal during this holiday season. More

Retail Pricing Strategies: Pricing Your Products
from About.com
There are many outside influences that affect profitability and a retailer's bottom line. Setting the right price is a crucial step toward achieving that profit. Retailers are in business to make a profit, but figuring out what and how to price products may not come easily. Before we can determine which retail pricing strategy to use in setting the right price, we must know the costs associated with the products. Two key elements in factoring product cost is the cost of goods and the amount of operating expense. More

Good Service is a Wise Investment
from The Baltimore Sun
High overhead costs are nothing new to large department stores and retail chains. But the results of a sluggish economy can mean deep cuts in customer service personnel. That could lead to a self-service shopping environment that customers may tolerate or even prefer for certain purchases. But it can be a challenge for the customer who has questions or requests help locating an item. Small retailers must keep tabs on overhead costs, too. They are in a better position, however, to provide the level of service that consumers expect. More

Making YouTube Work for Your Business
from BusinessWeek
It took John F. Kennedy less than 18 minutes at Rice University in September 1962 to inspire a generation to land a man on the moon. It took Barack Obama 17 minutes at the Democratic Convention in July 2004 to persuade millions of viewers that he had fresh ideas. It took San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom seven and a half hours to give his State of the City address in December 2008. Yes, you read that last sentence correctly—Newsom's presentation lasted more than seven hours. Newsom tried something different by delivering the entire 10-segment presentation on YouTube. It was different all right. But it could have been more effective had he kept a few basic lessons in mind. More

How To Find the Best Deal on Health Insurance
from Forbes
About 46 million Americans are uninsured. As the recession wears on, their ranks will continue to grow. The Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy think tank, estimates that for every 1 percent increase in unemployment, 1.1 million more adults will lose their employer-sponsored health insurance--leaving them to navigate the nightmarish "individual" health-insurance market. More