Amy Bermar
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Posts by Amy Bermar
How Customer Satisfaction Surveys Tell the Future
January 23, 2012
It’s funny – just asking customers what they want more of is one of the best ways to see where the market is heading, and where the pressure is strongest.
We’ve been surveying our customers via Net Promoter® for about five years, and each year, we ask three key questions:
- How likely are you to recommend Corporate Ink to a friend or colleague?
- What’s your primary reason for scoring this way?
- What’s the one thing we could do to improve this score?
Then we ask a few spontaneous questions – to get a better understanding of where our clients are feeling the most pressure (which typically More >
Wayback Machine: 1989 – My First Year Running Corporate Ink
January 9, 2012
I’ve been running Corporate Ink for 24 years. That’s longer than I’ve done anything else (except being married).
In that time, we’ve worked with dozens of start-ups, as well as many established companies, of course. I hardly ever think about what it was like to be a just-hatched venture, though of course I still like to think we have the energy, vision, culture and creativity that make start-ups so appealing.
The other day, I read this post by a guy who founded his own firm a year ago, and what he learned. He described it as ‘owning’ a PR firm. I never think about ‘owning’ the firm – but More >
Effort ≠ Results
January 4, 2012
I saw a blog the other day hyping a whitepaper talking about how marketers can drive revenue – and not just brand awareness. That someone is hosting a webinar to talk about how at least some companies aren’t yet forcing marketing to make the next connection – it’s just not the leads, it’s the revenue.
It reminds me of how we used to do PR – calling to 10, or 25, or even 50 reporters, to persuade our ‘top’ reporters to re-skim their inbox, read our news, and run it. These adrenaline-fueled sprints had the oddly disconnected name of ‘call-downs’ – the pressure was on to get to all of ‘em, and More >
Keeping Score: What Net Promoter Tells Us
December 20, 2011
Each year, I learn the most about our clients, and our company, by asking our clients to answer 6-7 simple questions. It’s called Net Promoter™ – and it’s a survey that identifies how likely (on a scale of 0 to 10) our clients are to recommend us. But more interesting than whether we score a 9 or 10 is what our clients’ tell us – both in why they’re scoring us a certain way, and the one thing we can do to improve.
In the five years we’ve been using Net Promoter, we’ve seen our scores go up. This year, they went down, which is a huge disappointment. We can reason it away, of course, but the More >
Wanna Be a Star? Four Ways to Tell
December 7, 2011
I recently found this in my email inbox:
Contestants Wanted for New Business Reality Show
Entrepreneurs wanted for new Reality Web Series that will become a PBS Special. “The Apprentice” meets “Oprah” in an online show where participants make real changes on their ‘inside world” in order to achieve measurable success in their “outside world.” Business Growth through Personal Growth.
Requirements:
Candidates should be successful entrepreneurs and small business owners who understand the power of mastermind teams, personal growth work, subconscious reprogramming, and cutting edge online, More >