Word: productivity
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...customer-service systems, I think your article should have been titled "The End of Customer Service - As We Know It." Thanks to the Internet, not only are people more empowered to access information on their own, but in many cases, they end up more knowledgeable about a company's product than the customer-service agents themselves. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly difficult to retain employees, making service inconsistent at best. Technology will fill these gaps and provide better, more consistent service. John Putters, President, Visionstate, Edmonton, Canada...
...ahead 11 years to 2000, and Ford again had its checkbook out, paying $2.7 billion for Land Rover, another luxury British carmaker that had run into some rough road. It also invested many billions more trying to turn both companies around, mainly by upgrading aging plants and developing new product lines. It was a big bet, and it didn...
...introducing a low-cost X series that buyers shunned for essentially being too Ford-like. "They tried to make Jaguar a full-line BMW on the cheap," Nagley says, but the public wasn't interested in "pale imitations with appalling style." At Land Rover, however, it got the product mix right and sales increased - they jumped 18% last year to 226,400. So why is Ford also unloading Land Rover? "I think they're desperate for cash. It's not a good thing when a company sells off a profitable unit," says John Wormald, managing partner at consultant Autopolis. Ford...
...discovered the "relationships" that so many orthopedic companies have established with orthopedic surgeons. Companies give money to doctors to test products, to help design or tout products and sometimes just to use a particular product (as in kickback). Orthopedists are hardly the only doctors paid by medical companies, but when the sheer amount of money being given to orthopedists came out of the shade into the sharp San Francisco sunshine last week, it did make quite a few of us blink...
...admit that even I had to look it up. What I found is that a recession is most commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product (or GDP). In researching this column, I was surprised to discover that consumer spending represents over 70% of gross domestic product. This struck me as ironic because, according to Hitwise search data, consumers searching for "recession" are not even clear on what the term means: they're searching for the definition of "recession," just like...