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Gift exchanges between co-workers can help  promote a relaxed work environment as well as add some fun and excitement into the workplace .

Gift giving  at work, like any other gift exchange,  can be fun and enjoyable . Here are some rules,  or guidelines as it were, to follow to  ensure that everyone has a good time and nobody gets their feeling hurt.

1. The reason that we have gift exchanges at work is to build relationships between co-workers there by creating a pleasant atmosphere to work in.  Gift giving in the office should not be considered  an opportunity to try and bribe your boss or anyone with expensive gifts. You can’t buy friendship, at least not the right kind of friendship.

2. Now this is very important.  If there is a dollar amount limit on the gifts to be purchased DO NOT EXCEED IT!  For some buying that one extra gift at the holidays can be financially stressful, also you don’t want to appear to be trying to buy your way into someones good graces by getting something expensive.

3. Spend some thought when buying gifts. Don’t rush into the store at the last minute to purchase gifts. Take some time to find something that the recipient would enjoy. Knowing something about the person for who you are buying a gift helps in selecting a gift that will indeed be appreciated.

4. Stay away from buying personal items such as lingerie when buying gifts for work. Perfume used by women is a personal use item. Unless you know the person well and what perfume they use don’t buy personal cosmetic items. You may love a certain perfume but others may not share your taste not to mention that giving personal gifts can often send the wrong message to not only the recipient but to others in the office or a spouse.

5. Do not leave your gift in the bag you bought it in. Gift wrapping gives a classy and elegant look to any gift when done right.  There are many simple and inexpensive ways to wrap a gift. Don’t forget to include a signed gift card when giving a gift. You will be surprised how many people include a gift card and forget to sign it.

Remember to stay within the agreed upon budget, avoid gifts that are too personal and keep in mind the tastes of the recipient not yours. Following these tips will ensure a fun and memorable time for all.

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About The Author:

	Mike Liddicoat is a Husband, Father, Speaker and the Sales & Marketing Director of AttaBoy! Solutions. His goal is to help businesses maintain relationships, ensure future business and acquire new referrals through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.
Contact Mike

When it comes time to get a gift for a family member or friend how do you decide what to get.  Well you take into consideration their likes and dislikes, hobbies or interests.

You choose something that, based on your intimate knowledge of them, you know they will enjoy.

But what about when it comes to business gifts?  How do you make a good choice when you may not know that much personal information about your recipient?  One way is to guess.  Get a gift and hope for the best.  However, you may not get them a memorable gift or a gift they can use.  It might just be something they will toss away or give to somebody else.

The best  choice for a gift is one that the recipient makes for themselves.  But how do you do that?

Easy!  Our Gift Collections make giving business gifts and incentives easy by offering the Gift of Choice. With these collections, recipients choose their own gift from a wide selection of top-quality, brand-name merchandise by redeeming them online. It’s the perfect solution for small to mid-size businesses – and virtually every budget, occasion, and event!

How do they work?

It’s simple and convenient for your business. You just:

1. CHOOSE the budget range you want to stay within.
2. BUY a Gift Collection on line or from your sales associate.
3. GIVE the gift to the recipient to redeem for their perfect gift!

Then, the recipient:

1. DISCOVERS and browses their Gift Collection online.
2. SELECTS the perfect gift from the many name-brand items.
3. RECEIVES the gift shipped right to their door, free of charge.

Here are some occasions when these Gift Collections work amazingly well:

• Sales incentives
• Holidays
• Employee weddings/new baby
• Customer thank you
• New customer welcome
• Corporate events
• Promotions
• Service awards
• Employee acknowledgment
• Safety awards

Here is what these Gift Collections can do for your business?

They can be given to employees, co-workers, supervisors, managers, customers, business associates, and service providers to help:

• Increase productivity
• Generate sales increases
• Improve morale
• Strengthen employee performance
• Create a safer workplace
• Inspire great ideas and suggestions
• Develop loyalty and dedication
• Enhance work environment

Why give these Gift Collections?

Well they have been rewarding, motivating, and inspiring employees and customers for nearly 40 years, and they are trusted by businesses because they offer:

• 180-day Satisfaction Guarantee
• Easy online redemption
• Popular brand-name gifts
• No minimum order required
• Monetary value not displayed to recipient
• Saves the time and expense of shopping for gifts

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About The Author:

	Mike Liddicoat is a Husband, Father, Speaker and the Sales & Marketing Director of AttaBoy! Solutions. His goal is to help businesses maintain relationships, ensure future business and acquire new referrals through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.
Contact Mike

Can you believe it’s been a year?

Anniversaries are very important milestones. Whether it’s a wedding anniversary or a business anniversary, neither should be overlooked. Both are meant to be celebrated!

Recognizing a wedding anniversary can be tricky business. In the personal realm, generally you are in fairly good contact with friends and/or family and know what’s happening in their personal life. This makes it much easier when sending a card or gift. However, since business may be a little more removed, you should be much more cautious if you plan to acknowledge wedding anniversaries. It wouldn’t look too good to send an anniversary card only to discover later that the marriage had ended.

For businesses, it is much safer to celebrate anniversaries related to the customer or employee relationships. Recognize customers for one or more years of doing business with your company. Or acknowledge the number of years an employee has been with you.

When choosing a gift to send, it’s okay to give something a little more personal for a wedding anniversary. Just be sure to give something that both the husband and wife would appreciate. For a business anniversary, you are better off to have a planned out award program based on years of service -especially for your employees. This will avoid any problems of one employee receiving something the perceive as less than what someone else received in the past. On the other hand, you have more flexibility with your customers. Gifts can be based on the volume of business a customer does with your company or any number of other factors.

Taking the time to take notice and make a big deal of both personal and business anniversaries will mean alot to both your customers and your employees… and will go a long way towards earning their appreciation and continued loyalty.
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About The Author:

Sally Liddicoat is a Wife, Mother, Speaker and the Founder & CEO of AttaBoy! Solutions. Her goal is to help businesses increase sales, generate ongoing referrals, strengthen relationships and create loyal customers and employees through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.

Contact Sally

Reward and recognition are the best ways to reinforce the importance of providing excellent customer service and a great way to get your employees attention. If you are wanting them to work towards the standards that you have set, set the goals and put an incentive program in place now. Don’t wait for the annual employee review to either recognize or reprimand employees how your employees serve your customers -generally that may be too late.

Delivering little rewards more often is a far better method and works very well for reinforcing desired behavior. Provide verbal recognition frequently. Tell your employees what they are doing the right when you see them providing good service. It’s much more motivational. And do it in front of the other employees so they get the idea too.

Pass out little rewards on the spot for small efforts and bigger rewards for efforts that are above and beyond your expectations. Your customers like to feel appreciated, and so do employees. You must reinforce the importance of good customer service by acknowledging and rewarding your employees effort to meet your standards. When your employees understand and offer the level of customer service that both you and your customers expect, and then are rewarded for it, everyone wins. Your employees get in the habit of and strive to offer great customer service. Your customers are happier because they are treated well. And both benefit you and your company.
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About The Author:

Sally Liddicoat is a Wife, Mother, Speaker and the Founder & CEO of AttaBoy! Solutions. Her goal is to help businesses increase sales, generate ongoing referrals, strengthen relationships and create loyal customers and employees through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.

Contact Sally

One of the biggest mistakes a company can make when dealing with their customers is to only look at the immediate effects of a decision and not take the long term effects into consideration. We all know that it can be very costly to earn the business of a single new customer. Once we have them, we need to keep them -almost at any cost.

Here’s what happened to my husband… About two years ago he purchased a hand sprayer for the yard. When he went to use it the other day, it was cracked and no longer working properly. He was about to throw it out when he noticed on the label “Lifetime Guarantee”. So… he called the company and the young lady on the phone told him that their return policy had changed and he needed his receipt. As you can imagine, he didn’t have it. After all it had been two years and it had only cost about $4 or $5 anyway. When he told her that he didn’t have the receipt she advised him to return the item to them and they would check it out -if it fit the criteria, they would send him out a new one.

Well, he needed a sprayer now -not a month or more from now. After the call he was a little frustrated and sent an email to the company explaining the situation. He also let them know that he was just going to go purchase another one, however it probably would not be their brand.

My husband, who is quite the handyman, is also pretty frugal so he tried to repair the broken sprayer and he was able to fix it. After about 4 days went by, he received an email from the company asking him to describe the damage to the sprayer. He sent a reply to their email with the information. About 2 days later he was notified that a new sprayer was being sent out.

Now that’s customer service! He has only ever bought one thing from this company and that was 2 years ago. But this company knows the value of a customer. It is far less expensive to send a new sprayer than to stick to their return policy. Why? Because now when my husband needs yard equipment, he will look for that brand. He has already told several people what the company has done for him and will continue to tell even more. The company also knows that for every person he tells his story to, he would have told twice as many had they enforced their policy and not satisfied their customer.

As difficult as it is to get new customers, it’s twice as hard to undo bad press. If people are going to talk about your company you want them telling good stories rather than bad. Your customers are what keeps you in business. Do what you need to do to keep them happy. Bend the rules sometimes, they are really more like guidelines anyway. By doing so, you will earn a customer for life.
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About The Author:

Sally Liddicoat is a Wife, Mother, Speaker and the Founder & CEO of AttaBoy! Solutions. Her goal is to help businesses increase sales, generate ongoing referrals, strengthen relationships and create loyal customers and employees through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.

Contact Sally

Good business gifts can help to strengthen the relationship. Bad gifts can just as easily break them. And no one wants to be known as the person who gave someone a lousy business gift.

According to an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune, almost half of all employees that participated in a survey about business gifts disliked what they received. The survey indicated the following:

• 59% said they did not keep the gift
• 48% did not like the gift given
• 41% said they threw the gift away
• 32% felt the gift was not useful
• 24% felt the gift was cheap
• 22% said they gave the gift to someone else

“Paper weights and calendars… with coffee mugs, stuffed animals, pens, hams and fruitcakes” were at the top of the list of bad gifts according to the article.

There is a lesson to be learned here -and it’s not ‘skip giving gifts, people are just ungrateful anyways’. Business gifts are important and when properly selected can create results that will benefit your business. The lesson here is to give gifts that are considered valuable to the people receiving them.
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About The Author:

Sally Liddicoat is a Wife, Mother, Speaker and the Founder & CEO of AttaBoy! Solutions. Her goal is to help businesses increase sales, generate ongoing referrals, strengthen relationships and create loyal customers and employees through appreciation marketing. Throughout this blog you can sign up for updates, news, special offers, discounts and more. So take a look around, leave a comment or two and enjoy.

Contact Sally