It’s harder than ever to build an enduring company. As soon as a product strikes a nerve with customers, competitors emerge globally because the costs to start are so low.
When most people are unhappy customers, they get mad; I try to get rich. All of my businesses started the same way: I got rich by improving the world and making a lot of people happier in the process.
If it’s servicing a real need, that doesn’t go away in a recession. If you’re serving a true need, and if you have a loyal group of customers that are falling… As the world goes through a tough time, these customers will stay with you.
The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.
Our values are that we do think that people have a right to privacy. And that our customers are not our products.
It is my mission to ensure we make the changes needed to provide our customers with the highest level of service and the deepest sense of respect. Ultimately, our actions will speak louder than words.
The lesson for businesses is you are dealing with real people. Those are your customers, those are your employees, those are your bosses, and the better you understand how real people tick, the more successfully you will be able to accomplish your goals.
We try to find better solutions – our customers have given us a lot of trust.
I can’t ever remember being struck by lightning when making a big decision. It’s always about taking in more and more data points and making tack adjustments as you figure it out. I call customers, suppliers, industry analysts and try to get as much information as possible.
Did you ever see the customers in health – food stores? They are pale, skinny people who look half – dead. In a steak house, you see robust, ruddy people. They’re dying, of course, but they look terrific.
We want a marriage with our customers, not a relationship.
Technology is something we buy to sell to the customers. Ericsson, Nokia and IBM do technology for a living, so let’s give it to them because they know best. It has made the business model of Bharti very, very sustainable.
The Russian customers don’t feel very comfortable with online transactions.
Windows Mobile enables our industry partners to customize devices according to their customers’ needs while including productivity features such as access to e-mail, contacts, calendar, and other critical business information for mobile workers on the go.
For Virgin Galactic’s customers, it is transportation to the most amazing experience of their lives. I very much look forward to sending some Scots into space.
We sent our user research team out to sit with customers for periods of time and get some insight into how Slack is working. We also get tens of thousands of points of contact via Twitter and our customer support ticketing system every month and can synthesize those results.
It’s clear to me now that Ethereum is the new currency of the Internet. It’s way ahead of where Paypal was in its day, and it’s much more exciting to its customers than Paypal ever was.
You learn so much by having customers and figuring out what they want and keeping them satisfied.
As I said before, a big part of my strategy says – and the management team I think is in agreement with this – we don’t have to be out there with a lot of noise all the time. What we need to do is paint a vision for customers, promise them deliverables, and go hit at it.
Once an ebook hits the Kindle Top 100, sales tend to snowball as new customers discover it in greater numbers.
Russians are not a very friendly people. It’s hard to get them to speak nicely to the customers. It’s just not in their culture.
Over the years, the way our customers shop our stores and websites has changed and will continue to change with the increasing popularity and convenience of smart phones and tablets.
Our customers’ business interests are heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry.
In each restaurant, I develop a different culinary sensibility. In Paris, I’m more classic, because that’s what customers like. In Monaco, it’s classic Mediterranean haute cuisine. In London, it’s a contemporary French restaurant that I’ve developed with a U.K. influence and my French know-how.
People who are constantly looking for the opportunity to do something new are also people who are not going to be helped by having job titles – job titles create expectations of specialization and focus which don’t map really well to creating the best possible experience for your customers.
We don’t want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.
With tough interpretation of taxi and zoning regulations, neither Uber nor Airbnb would have gotten started. By the time many cities recognized their existence, both were fairly large and had the political support of their customers.
Customers will always be nervous about lock-in, and I think the experience they had particularly with a company like Oracle, where it’s a really hard thing to get out of, and they’re so hostile to their customers, that I think it’s a concern for every enterprise.
I think at least my philosophy of leadership is you focus more on the areas you have to improve or the mistakes than you do on your successes. And that’s just how I am in real life. I don’t want to let down my customers, my employees, my shareholders.
Great customer service does not come by chance. It is the result of training and ensuring there are enough assistants to serve the customers.
At Amazon, we are very careful about what big strategic bets we place, but the ones we make, we keep iterating until we find something that we think has resonance with customers.
The hybrid engine costs a lot of money, and customers are hardly willing to spend so much more for a car.
The trust institutions have in the marketplace, the confidence customers and suppliers and workers and employees have, are very important to a business’s effectiveness.
Most banks tell their customers that they only pay a small upfront fee for international payments. But in reality, customers pay much more.
Booking windows are shrinking, and customers are going mobile: trends which position HotelTonight perfectly for the future.
If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.
Your company is a product. Who are its customers? Your employees, who use it to do their jobs.
Using science to tell us what customers are looking for is second nature for us here.
I simply believe that people who respect their customers and have faith in their own technology products should welcome competition and that consumer choice should be a paramount value in retailing.
In the cloud, customers don’t want a six-month contract negotiation; that concept is absurd when you can implement a cloud-based suite from beginning to end in a month or a few months.
Higher capital requirements increase bank costs, and at least some of those costs will be passed along to bank customers and shareholders. But in the longer term, stronger prudential requirements for large banking firms will produce more sustainable credit availability and economic growth.
I thought we were going to get customers excited by telling them there were no antibiotics in our meat or no growth hormones used to raise the animals or no RBGH in our cheese or sour cream. Well, that’s not a very appetizing message.
Don’t open a bar if you think all you need to be is social and greet the customers. You have to run a business.
All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.
I am honored to be named chairman of Duke Energy’s board and privileged to lead our company forward for our customers, employees, and shareholders.
A smart manager will establish a culture of gratitude. Expand the appreciative attitude to suppliers, vendors, delivery people, and of course, customers.
Has anyone actually asked the customer if they want to have something available directly after the show? You hear that three bags are going to be released tomorrow in five shops, so you produce 15 bags. How many customers are you going to satisfy with that? Fifteen!
Thanks to iCloud and other services, the choice of a phone or tablet today may lock a consumer into a branded silo, making it hard for him or her to do what Apple long importuned potential customers to do: switch.
It takes a while for executives to understand that every company is a spatial company, fundamentally: where are our assets, where are our customers, where are our sales. But when they get it, they light up and say, ‘I want to get the geographic advantage.’
In terms of the energy-banking concept, what we’d love to be able to do is to act in a way where customers could deposit excess energy when they didn’t need it and withdraw it when they did need it.
I’m making a case against how money managers are handling customers’ money. The objective of the customer is not being met if the fund managers are diversifying their assets into hundreds of businesses. If they do this, they are typically performing close to the indexes. But that’s not the way wealth is created.
