Steve Phillips is vice president and chief information officer for Avnet, Inc. In 2010, CIO Magazine named Avnet a recipient of the "CIO 100 Award." In 2011, Computer World named Phillips a "Premier 100 IT Leader." Recently, Phillips met with a group of students from the W. P. Carey School’s professional sales initiative. He answered their questions about selling to the C-suite then shared the Avnet values philosophy.
Social isolation in the U.S. has been on the rise for decades, according to research conducted in 2006 by sociologists. Yet, that sad news might not be bad news for business, if companies heed insights uncovered by John Lastovicka, a marketing professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business. His investigations indicate that loneliness is one route that leads people to fall in love with possessions, and where there’s love, there’s money. People who demonstrate what Lastovicka calls material-possession love spend significantly more time and money on the objects of their affections than others in the marketplace.
Companies like IBM, PetSmart and Marriott have been proving that enormous success, and enormous profits, can be found in services. Yet services have always been difficult to get your arms around — difficult to understand. The Center for Services Leadership recently engaged upon a project that will help move services in the direction of a science. Earlier this year, the CSL surveyed more than 300 business executives and academics about the state of the services landscape. The survey results confirmed what CSL researchers had suspected — that while there is enormous new interest in services, there remains great confusion, and tremendous opportunities, around how services should be designed and implemented. The study also identified 10 specific priority areas in which business executives and academics were most interested in finding real answers.
"There is no arrival at customer service excellence," said Terry Cain, vice president of operational excellence at Avnet, Inc. "It’s a never-ending process." Companies in maturing industries have found that offering customers services is the competitive edge that counteracts declining margins, slower growth, and fundamental challenges to yesterday’s value propositions. Delivering exceptional customer service is for many firms the first step toward developing a services business.
One-third of U.S. adults are obese, and another third are overweight, according to data recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Marketing scholars Naomi Mandel, Andrea Morales and Steve Nowlis have been investigating what influences our decisions about diet. Knowledge@W. P. Carey spoke with Professor Morales recently about two of her studies. One investigated those tempting 100-calorie snack packs, and the other looked at whether your dining companions have any effect on your food selections. The results may surprise you.
"Please hold — your call is important to us." If you’ve ever heard that sentence then you know what it’s like to be "on hold" for customer service. Journalist and author Emily Yellin found herself suspended in customer service no-man’s-land when she tried to get her home warranty company to honor their commitments. The experience propelled her to explore the inner workings of the customer service industry, and to write a book about it entitled "Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us." Yellin was a featured speaker at the 20th Annual Compete Through Service Symposium, hosted by the Center for Services Leadership at the W. P. Carey School of Business. She talked with us about the state of customer service today, and how companies might improve. Symposium podcast coverage was sponsored by IBM.
