Use Positive, Proactive Communication To Improve Customer Loyalty
The example give here was about an annual premium renewal that just came as an invoice. The more impactful way, was to precede the invoice with a personal letter thanking the client for their business, reminding them of the benefits of what they are purchasing, reminding them about this being a good time to review changes that may affect their policy, and inviting them to contact you with questions or concerns.
Action Steps To Improve Customer Loyalty
Don’t wait until the last minute. Make an effort to stay in touch with your customers and clients with positive news and proactive views. This will help improve customer loyalty.
Well Informed Customers Are Critical For Customer Service Quality (and your own sanity)
Key Learning Point For Customer Service Quality
Customer participation is often part of the equation, especially in in service businesses where client participation is key (Attorneys, Accountants, etc). Make sure they have the information and tools that they need to be able to easily complete their tasks (service industry).
Action Steps To Improve Customer Loyalty
Improve the quantity, quality, consistency, frequency, accuracy and attractiveness of the information you provide to your customers this month.
Work on improving your handouts, flyers, e-mails, checklists, informative posters and brochures, stickers and decals, manuals, user guides, videos, web pages, guidelines and instructions to boost customer service quality.
Do a better job of telling customers what to do, bring, prepare, submit, copy, file, track, complete and expect. Tell them more about the time, steps, costs, input, output, problems, indicators and guarantors of success. Make them better informed, better educated and better motivated. In short, make them better customers. Do this and customer service quality will rise, too.
Other Topics
Customer Experience Consulting In Your Best Interest
When client expectations are out of line with the business’s practice.
Accurate Answers May Not Be Useful To Improve Customer Satisfaction
Just because the question is answered accurately, does not mean that the client has been helped. Try and determine what the client is “really” asking and give useful, educational information.
Starting With 30 Cents of Communication for Customer Service Excellence
Stating extra charges up front is a great example of proactive communication.
Make Sure Everybody Knows About It To Improve Customer Service Quality
Make sure everyone in your organization knows the current policies, pricing, etc. It does not bode well when clients receive mixed messages.

Copyright, Ron Kaufman. Used with permission. Ron Kaufman is the world’s leading educator and motivator for upgrading customer service and uplifting service culture. He is author of the bestselling “UP! Your Service” books and founder of UP! Your Service. To enjoy more customer service training and service culture articles, visit UpYourService.com.

Disappointing Jobs Report Reflects Still-fragile Economy
The monthly employment report is watched closely, and when results are much better or worse than expected, the market often reacts sharply. May’s report was considerably worse than expected. The economy created only 69,000 jobs during the month, the slowest job growth over the past year. Economists expected an increase of 150,000, according to Bloomberg.

In addition, the unemployment rate rose slightly to 8.2% from 8.1% in May, and April’s job growth was revised down, showing only 77,000 jobs created (115,000 were reported initially).* While many had hoped the U.S. employment situation would remain strong despite Europe’s troubles and slower economic growth elsewhere, that wasn’t the case. In response to the disappointing jobs report, stock prices dropped and long-term bond rates fell, continuing the trends seen in May.

Consumers Continue to Power This Soft Recovery
Jobs are a key driver of consumer incomes, which fund spending. And consumer spending constitutes almost 70% of the economy. Even with slower job growth, average hourly earnings crept up 0.1% in May, putting them 1.7% higher than they were a year ago. In addition, real consumer spending rose 0.3% in April and personal income gained 0.2%, according to the Commerce Department. While these growth rates are slower than anyone would like, they show support for continued economic growth at a modest pace.

Companies Are Well-positioned
U.S. companies continue to hold record-high cash balances, and they’ve started to return some of that cash to investors in the form of dividends and share repurchases. In 2011, 320 companies in the S&P 500 raised their dividend payments, and 181 did so in the first five months of 2012, according to Standard & Poor’s. With average first-quarter earnings growth at 8%, we expect corporate America to continue to raise dividends, which is good news for investors.

A Broader Perspective
The economy has struggled and growth has been spotty during this recovery. But the economy is now producing 6.7% more than it did at its recession low in the second quarter of 2009.** Despite all the worries from month to month, more than 3.7 million jobs have been created since February 2010, and there have been private sector job gains every month since then.* Companies have continued to prosper, as reflected in their growing earnings. And foreign investors view the U.S. favorably, as they continue to pour money into U.S. stocks and bonds.

Investors who have ignored disappointing economic reports in the past and stayed invested over time have benefited as companies grew steadily, even if the economy made only slow progress. But investors who reacted to every twist and turn along the way may have found themselves exhausted and possibly not invested when stocks reversed course and headed higher. In our view, if you take a broader perspective and stay invested — even when markets react sharply to negative news — you’ll be more likely to stay on the path toward your financial goals.

Sincerely,
A Michael Ciuffetelli
Financial Advisor

* Bureau of Labor Statistics
** Bureau of Economic Analysis

A Michael Ciuffetelli
Financial Advisor
Edward Jones
4250 Barranca Pkwy Suite C
Irvine, CA 92604
(949) 733-8132
michael.ciuffetelli@edwardjones.com
www.edwardjones.com

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By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN and JOHN F. COGAN

Long a harbinger of national trends and an incubator of innovation, cash-strapped California eagerly awaits a temporary revenue surge from Facebook IPO stock options and capital gains. Meanwhile, Stockton may soon become the state’s largest city to go bust. Call it the agony and ecstasy of contemporary California.

California’s rising standards of living and outstanding public schools and universities once attracted millions seeking upward economic mobility. But then something went radically wrong as California legislatures and governors built a welfare state on high tax rates, liberal entitlement benefits, and excessive regulation. The results, though predictable, are nonetheless striking. From the mid-1980s to 2005, California’s population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.

California’s economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms. The unemployment rate, at 10.9%, is higher than every other state except Nevada and Rhode Island. With 12% of America’s population, California has one third of the nation’s welfare recipients.

Partly due to generous union wages and benefits, inflexible work rules and lobbying for more spending, many state programs and institutions spend too much and achieve too little. For example, annual spending on each California prison inmate is equal to an entire middle-income family’s after-tax income. Many of California’s K-12 public schools rank poorly on standardized tests. The unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities of workers in the state-run Calpers system, which includes teachers and university personnel, totals around $250 billion.

Meanwhile, the state lurches from fiscal tragedy to fiscal farce, running deficits in good times as well as bad. The general fund’s spending exceeded its tax revenues in nine of the last 10 years (the only exceptions being 2005 at the height of the housing bubble), abetted by creative accounting and temporary IOUs.

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Chad Crowe

Now, the bill is coming due. After running a $5 billion deficit last year and another likely deficit this year, Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget increases spending next year by $7 billion and finances the higher spending with income and sales-tax hikes. Specifically, he’s proposing a November ballot initiative raising the state’s top income tax rate to 12.3%, making it the nation’s highest, and raising the basic state sales tax rate, already the nation’s highest, to 7.75% from 7.25%.

While Mr. Brown deserves credit for some earlier spending cuts to reduce a large inherited budget shortfall, the budget fails to address long-run structural problems, counting on a cyclical economic recovery and stock bubble for a bailout until the next self-inflicted crisis. Moreover, he’s thus far failed to embrace a bold reform agenda to save money, improve services, and restore confidence among the state’s beleaguered taxpayers and bond holders.

The ballot initiative’s $31 billion, multiyear “temporary” tax increase is larger than the “temporary” hike it replaces and its income-tax hike is retroactive to Jan. 1, 2012. Worse, it doubles down on excessive reliance on high-income taxpayers, especially their stock options and capital gains, which are taxed as ordinary income. During economic good times, it’s not unusual for the state to collect one-half of all income-tax revenue from the top 1%. This extreme progressivity leads to boom-bust cycles of rapidly rising revenue followed by complete collapse. Not surprisingly, the revenue is all spent on the upswing, forcing disruptive “emergency” cutbacks on the way down.

The state’s progressive tax-and-spend experiment is broken, threatening basic services, from courts and parks to education and health care for its most vulnerable citizens. Mr. Brown’s tax initiative only exposes the state to an ever more dangerous roller-coaster ride.

No wonder many Silicon Valley CEOs say they won’t expand in California because of high taxes and burdensome regulation. And no wonder net migration has recently reversed, with hundreds of thousands of workers and their families leaving the state in search of better opportunities.

California still ranks first in technology, agriculture and entertainment among the 50 states. But it is near the bottom in business and tax climate and state bond ratings. It’s a complex picture, but at its core is the high-tax welfare state run amok.

Many Americans fear the federal fiscal train wreck will turn us into Greece. But, barring major change, they need look no further than California to see what this future portends. Relying on ever-higher taxes to fund payments to an outsized population of benefit recipients is a recipe for exporting prosperity. That is one California trend that other states emulate at their peril.

No one should write off California. It still has great strengths. And it can turn some of its short-term challenges, such as the pressures from ethnic and linguistic diversity (the state is now 37% Hispanic and 13% Asian), into long-term strengths in the global economy. But the political class must face up to the reality that services will have to be far more carefully targeted; the tax system overhauled with lower rates on a broader base of economic activity and people (almost half of all Californians pay no state income tax); and inefficient state programs reformed to spend less and produce far better outcomes.

Mr. Brown is a man of ideas, having run for president in 1992 on a bold flat-tax agenda. Instead of still more antigrowth tax hikes, he should break the grip on the state legislature of his party’s special interests—public employee unions, trial lawyers, teacher unions and extreme environmentalists.

A California renaissance—building on the best reforms in budgeting and taxes, education and welfare, crime prevention and pensions by such leaders as Rudy Giuliani, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo—is still possible. What it requires is a governor with the vision, determination and political will to see it through.

Messrs. Boskin and Cogan are, respectively, professors of economics and public policy at Stanford University, where they are both senior fellows at the Hoover Institution.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 13, 2012, on page A13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: California’s Greek Tragedy.

Blogger’s comment.
This article appears as an OPINION in the WSJ, but is written by top notch economists. I am not sure where they got some of their numbers, but they are staggering if true. I personally believe that the increased population base HAS increased the government RECIPIENT base much more than the TAX base. The drastic measures this article mentions will never be put in place by a legislature controlled by the recipient base. Growing the tax base is the real long term solution as raising taxes will drive more productive people and businesses out of California. What say you? I’d love to hear comments.

I am pleased to bring you my firm’s February 2012 Business Law Update.

Anti-Harassment Policies and Harassment Prevention Training — Don’t Just Pay Lip Service to Anti-Harassment Law – Stay out of Trouble – Follow these steps as a means to Avoiding Fines, Penalties and Judgments

A recent federal court opinion stresses that just going through the motions of posting policies and providing training is insufficient if the policies and training are inadequate or are never fully implemented (EEOC v. Management Hospitality of Racine, 2012 WL37112 (7th Cir. 2012). In other words, paying mere lip-service to Anti-Harassment requirements will not provide your company with protection. Even worse, it will subject your company to a wide range of preventable fines, penalties and lawsuits.

Here’s some suggestions for your company to implement to stay out of trouble.

1. POSTING: Post a current Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) poster containing information stressing the illegality of sexual harassment. It’s the law.

2. SEPARATE PAMPHLET: Also employers are required to distribute a separate pamphlet on sexual harassment to all employees. Note that neither the DFEH poster nor an anti-sexual harassment policy published in an employee handbook is enough to meet the separate pamphlet requirement. It is good practice to have the employee sign acknowledging receipt of the pamphlet. Place this signed acknowledgment in the employee’s work records.

3. IDENTIFY CLEAR COMPLAINT PROCEDURES, THE PERSON IN CHARGE OF RECEIVING AND DOCUMENTING COMPLAINTS AND HAVE AN ALTERNATIVE PERSON IDENTIFIED AS WELL: Implement a clear complaints system by which your employees can complain to an identified supervisor or manager, or an ‘alternative person’ if the person who receives complaints in your company is the alleged harasser. An anti-harassment policy should also inform employees that they can go to the DFEH or EEOC with their complaint.

4. TRAINING: Train all supervisors to understand what sexual harassment is and how to respond if a complaint is made. If a complaint is made to a supervisor or anyone in charge of overseeing other employees’ work activities, this is sufficient to place the employer on notice of the complaint. These supervisors/overseers need to understand how to handle a complaint. In California, employers with 50 or more employees must train their supervisors every two years; however, training of supervisors should be trained even if the company has fewer than 50 employees.

All the best,

Scott G. Nathan

Law Offices of Scott G. Nathan
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Estate Planning Tips:

Choosing a Trustee: consider location of trust assets, physical location of the trustee to the beneficiaries, type of assets, experience with managing finances and types of assets involved and finally the willingness and ability to serve as an unbiased fiduciary.

Choosing Beneficiaries: will assets remain in the family, choose secondary and tertiary beneficiaries in case prospective beneficiaries pre-decease you, consider the tax ramifications, take into consideration all designated beneficiary assets such as Life insurance, 401(K), IRAs etc