Rants and Kudos

I was recently reading about a speech that Emily Yellin, author of Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us, where she recounts meeting a customer service representative (CSR) who had worked as a CSR for two and a half years but had never met a customer. She was, naturally, appalled by this, and suggested […]

I spent the last three days attending ASAE’s Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. The event included its usual array of educational sessions, exhibit floor, and social activities. I attended two of the three general sessions (I was traveling home during the third session) and attended several breakout sessions. Here are my thoughts, in no particular

There are, of course, millions of blogs on the intertubes these days, so it always gives me great pleasure when I discover one of real value. My latest discovery is the Orgpreneur blog, written by David Gammel of High Context Consulting. Click here to read it. As David writes, the site is for “people who

In the past I’ve written about how much I hate taking surveys. (Read that here.) One of the reasons I hate taking surveys is that most survey takers never tell you what will change (or has changed) as a result of the feedback provided. So I was delighted to read an email missive from ASAE,

I wrote about the concept of a “client ombudsman” a couple of years ago (you can read it in its entirety here). What I said at the time was this: “Every AMS vendor should have a client ombudsman. The ombudsman’s job is to reach out to every single client on a regular basis, to get

Just returned from four great and exhausting days in Toronto for the 2009 ASAE Annual Meeting. I’ve attended 10 of the past 11 annual meetings (when ASAE was in Hawaii, my wife was inconsiderate enough to give birth to one of our children at the same time). This was a good meeting, but not ASAE’s

Over the past two weeks I’ve been contacted by two associations who were in the market for a new association management system. In one case, the association had already chosen a vendor but then things didn’t work out, and they had gone back to the drawing board. In the second case, the association had begun

This is a pet peeve of mine, but too often I’ll hear someone say something like: “The average age of our members is between 50 and 65.” Or “We average about 50 to 100 hits on our website each day.” These are both nice thoughts, but what is being provided is not an average, but