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Milwaukee Brewers' Aramis Ramirez breaks his bat as he grounds out during the fourth inning of an exhibition spring training baseball game against the Chicago White Sox, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2013, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Milwaukee Brewers' Aramis Ramirez breaks his bat as he grounds out during the fourth inning of an exhibition spring training baseball game against the Chicago White Sox, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2013, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Milwaukee Brewers' Aramis Ramirez flips his bat after striking out during the first inning of an exhibition spring training baseball game against the Oakland Athletics Saturday, Feb. 23, 2013, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
PHOENIX (AP) ? Milwaukee Brewers third baseman Aramis Ramirez has left a spring training game against the Los Angeles Angels with a strained left knee.
Ramirez snapped an 0-for-10 skid to start the spring with a bloop double down the left-field line in the third inning Saturday.
After time was called, Ramirez stepped off the bag and was met by the team trainer before walking slowly back to the dugout. He will be re-evaluated on Sunday and is day to day.
It was Milwaukee's third significant piece of injury news Saturday. Right-hander Yovani Gallardo was scratched from his scheduled start Sunday with tightness in his groin, and left fielder Ryan Braun was out of the lineup with a bruised left knee.
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Thousands of company leaders around the world ask: Does customer service truly differentiate a company ? head and shoulders ? above the competition? Do customers return to companies because of customer service?
These leaders raise the issue from a financial perspective.
Well, there are many companies out there ? from Ritz Carlton, Chick Fil-A, Zappos and Nordstroms, to lesser known mid-size companies that have thrived for decades ? that all prove the answer to the question is a clear ?yes?.
Yet despite volumes of research-based statistics and financial proof, the question persists. When leaders who have seen the numbers ask me this question, my answer is:
?Customer service differentiates you head & shoulders above the competition when you?ve got the customer?s back!?
Let?s look at this phenomenon both in the business-to-business (B2B) world and the business-to- consumer (B2C) world.
B2B
You are a CEO or you own a company. You are looking for a supplier or distributor for a very important strategic aspect of the business. ?Whom do you choose?
?The issue for you is trust that your best interest is also in their best interest!?
This is the true definition of customer service.? Customer service is not a department. It?s not a team of agents or sales reps. It?s not a low level function of handling problems and exceptions.
Customer service is a relationship of trust that exists in every aspect of business interaction.
Trust differentiates your company head and shoulders above the other companies when you show the customers you ?have their back?.
B2C
In the everyday consumer world, the customer asks the same key question: Will my best interest be in their best interest?? Will this company ? whoever they are ? put my needs first and succeed through meeting my needs?
The more important the product/service is to the customer, the greater the influence customer service has on the decision.
How does a customer define importance? Is it just the price? Everyone connects high customer service expectations with high cost products and services (e.g. Ritz Carlton, Nordstrom etc.)
It goes far beyond that. It also includes:
Customer service ? the relationship of trust shown in every interaction ? puts your company head and shoulders about the competition when you show the customer you have their back.
Listen, understand, engage, connect, and deliver. Throw away the robotic scripts and get personal.? That?s when you will see customer service contribute to your bottom line.
?
?2013 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. This post was written specifically for the SwitchandShift blog. If you wish to repost or republish this, please email info@katenasser.com and thank you for respecting intellectual capital.
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Art by: AlfOriginal
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach?, is Founder & President of CAS, Inc. now in its 23rd year. Kate is a former techie turned people skills guru with Masters in Organizational Psychology. Leaders in diverse industries have tapped Kate to train thousands of corporate employees in high performance teamwork, employee engagement, the ultimate customer service skills, and adapting to change. Kate teaches positive interactions for business success and is known for her engaging sessions and coaching leaders on inspiring employees. Her clients include Pfizer, ThomsonReuters, Baker Hughes, Johnson & Johnson, Goldman Sachs, IBM, John Deere, SAS Institute, and National Institutes of Health to name just a few. You can see a preview of Kate's latest DVD at http://katenasser.com/training-dvds/.
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Nicolelis lab / Duke University
If you're a lab rat, life is full of choices.
By Nidhi Subbaraman
Two rats ? one in North Carolina, the other in?Brazil ? worked together on a task by communicating telepathically, thanks to implants in their brain.
Electrical signals from a "leader" rat?s brain were collected, encoded and then zapped into the "follower" rat?s cortex in the form of an electrical signal. The follower rat then pressed one of two levers based on a light visible only to the leader rat.?The Duke University experiment is the first time two animals have collaborated through such an artificial link, and shows that the mammal brain can be trained to act on electrical signals from another animal.?
Miguel Nicolelis, the Duke neuroscientist who led the team from Duke and the?International Institute for Neuroscience of Natal in Brazil, believes that information transfer could extend to other senses, too. ?You could think about taste, vision ? I don?t see any problem doing this,? he told NBC News.
He says his wired rat duo show that the linking of mammalian brains is possible, but why stop at just two? "I could see a swarm of rats be informed by one rat," he says, "Most of them driving to the source based on information from another individual," a concept he calls a "Brain Net."
Nicolelis and crew published their findings in Scientific Reports Thursday.?
?I still think it's wild that he made it possible,??Ron Frostig, a neurobiologist at the University of Irvine who was not involved with the experiments told NBC News.?
This experiment is in many ways extension of brain-machine tech that has been on slow boil at the Nicolelis lab for over a decade. Earlier in February, the Nicolelis lab showed that rats could be trained to act on infrared cues. Rats, like people, can?t naturally sense infrared light ? an infrared sensor activated a implant in the rats' brains. Eventually they learned to follow that signal, approached the right hole, and received a reward.
In the latest "mind-reading" experiment, both lead and follow rats went through a series of training phases. The leader rat was trained to use a lit light bulb to choose which of two levers to press. The second rat was trained to receive and act on gentle zaps of electrical stimulation in its brain. Once the two were wired up together, the second rat received signals from the leader rat's brain indicating which lever to choose. When the follower pressed the right lever, it was rewarded with water, and the leader was rewarded as well.
The leader rat eventually figured out that the clearer he was with his ?instructions,? the better his chances of getting a double reward. Frostig pointed out that this training was crucial to the success of this series of demonstrations.?
While the link between the rats seems telepathic to casual observer, the rats don't necessarily know the other exists, Nicolelis explains. The follower rat feels a tingle in its brain and discovers that interpreting it one way rather than another leads to a reward.?Marshall Shuler???a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University who was Nicolelis? student in the late 1990s?? describes it as a "special and powerful case of conditioning." "What's unique about this is that one animal is getting information that has nothing to do with it environment," he told NBC News. ?
How about human telepathy?
The researchers are years away from testing this kind of electronic telepathy in people. Still, based on what is known about how people respond to brain stimulation and implants, Shuler?says we might be better than the rats at interpreting intracranial cues.
"I would think that humans would be able to exploit this information even more efficiently," Shuler says.?
Nicolelis says they are ?perfecting the experiment? in monkeys, training them to collaborate in a virtual game. In the past, the Nicolelis lab has trained brain-implanted?monkeys to control a cursor on a screen using only their thoughts. In another computer game, a monkey pawed at virtual discs of different simulated textures, and was trained to pick one texture over the other, demonstrating one way information about touch could be fed back into the brain.
Shuler says that this line of research isn't just about person-to-person telepathy, but may very well help computers talk back to human brains. ?We?re quite comfortable with patterns arising from our own sensory mechanisms,? he explained, ?What?s less intuitive to us is that, as experimentalists and engineers impose artificial patterns, the brain is able to render that information useful.?
Take the field of prosthetics, a zone the Nicolelis lab is at home in. Ultimately, Shuler says, the goal is to get prosthetics to send touch data back to the user. A number of labs have shown that the brain or residual nerves can move a prosthetic limb. What many of those smart body parts lack is a way of relaying sophisticated feedback back to the brain. The Nicolelis lab may well provide the answer.?
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Free Syrian Army fighters from the Knights of the North brigade move to reconnaissance a Syrian army forces base of al-Karmid, at Jabal al-Zaweya, in Idlib province, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Syrian warplanes carried out airstrikes on rebels trying to storm a police academy outside Aleppo on Wednesday, while jihadi fighters battled government troops along a key supply road leading to the southeastern part of the city, activists said. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Free Syrian Army fighters from the Knights of the North brigade move to reconnaissance a Syrian army forces base of al-Karmid, at Jabal al-Zaweya, in Idlib province, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Syrian warplanes carried out airstrikes on rebels trying to storm a police academy outside Aleppo on Wednesday, while jihadi fighters battled government troops along a key supply road leading to the southeastern part of the city, activists said. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
A Free Syrian Army fighter from the Knights of the North brigade moves to reconnaissance a Syrian army forces base of al-Karmid, at Jabal al-Zaweya, in Idlib province, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Syrian warplanes carried out airstrikes on rebels trying to storm a police academy outside Aleppo on Wednesday, while jihadi fighters battled government troops along a key supply road leading to the southeastern part of the city, activists said. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Free Syrian Army fighters from the Knights of the North brigade move to reconnaissance the Syrian army forces base of al-Karmid, at Jabal al-Zaweya, in Idlib province, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Syrian warplanes carried out airstrikes on rebels trying to storm a police academy outside Aleppo on Wednesday, while jihadi fighters battled government troops along a key supply road leading to the southeastern part of the city, activists said. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
A Free Syrian Army fighter, Abu al-Yaman, left, a commander of Knights of the North brigade, cheers as he leaves with other rebels one of their caves to reconnaissance a Syrian army forces base of al-Karmid, at Jabal al-Zaweya, in Idlib province, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Syrian warplanes carried out airstrikes on rebels trying to storm a police academy outside Aleppo on Wednesday, while jihadi fighters battled government troops along a key supply road leading to the southeastern part of the city, activists said. The Arabic words in the cave entrance read:"Knights of the North brigade". (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
Free Syrian Army fighters from the Knights of the North brigade move to reconnaissance a Syrian army forces base of al-Karmid, at Jabal al-Zaweya, in Idlib province, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Syrian warplanes carried out airstrikes on rebels trying to storm a police academy outside Aleppo on Wednesday, while jihadi fighters battled government troops along a key supply road leading to the southeastern part of the city, activists said. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
BEIRUT (AP) ? Syrian rebels clashed with regime troops in the narrow stone alleyways around a historic 12th century mosque inside the walled Old City of Aleppo on Thursday, while a government airstrike in the countryside north of the city killed at least seven people, activists said.
The rebels, who have been slowly chipping away at the regime's hold on Aleppo, received a boost Wednesday from the U.S. in their fight to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad. Washington pledged an additional $60 million in assistance to the opposition and ? in a significant policy shift ? for the first time will provide nonlethal aid like food and medical supplies directly to rebel forces on the ground.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced the decision on the sidelines of an international conference on Syria in Rome, where European nations were also expected to signal their intention to provide fresh assistance to the opposition, possibly including defensive military hardware.
The rebels have made a number of strategic gains in northern Syria in recent weeks, including the capture of a hydroelectric dam and some military bases. They also have been regularly hitting the heart of Damascus with mortar rounds, puncturing the aura of normalcy that the regime has tried to cultivate in the capital.
In Aleppo, a key battleground in the civil war, clashes raged around the landmark Umayyad Mosque in the walled Old City, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The rebels control one part of the mosque, and government troops hold the other.
Rebels launched an offensive on Aleppo, Syria's largest urban center and its commercial capital, in July 2012. Since then, the city has been carved into rebel- and government-controlled zones in brutal street fighting that has destroyed entire neighborhoods and damaged some of the ancient city's rich archaeological and cultural heritage.
The Umayyad Mosque, also known as the Great Mosque of Aleppo, sits near a medieval covered market in the Old City, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The mosque was heavily damaged in October 2012 just weeks after a fire gutted the old city's famed market.
North of Aleppo, a government airstrike on the village of Deir Jamal killed at least seven people, including five children, according to the Observatory. It was not immediately clear what the target was, but regime warplanes frequently carry out bombing runs on rebel-held towns.
Farther south in the central city of Homs, the state news agency said a car bomb caused casualties and extensive material damage, but it did not elaborate.
An official in the Homs governor's office told The Associated Press that there were two blasts and that four people were killed and at least six wounded. The official spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
With the bloodshed showing no sign of abating, the Syrian opposition has grown increasingly frustrated with what it sees as the international community's apathy toward the suffering on the ground and its unwillingness to provide rebels with the arms they need to counter the regime's superior firepower.
The U.S. and its European allies have been reluctant to arm the opposition fighters the ground for fear the weapons could end up in the hands of Islamic militants, who might then carry out attacks on Western or Israeli targets.
So far, the U.S. has largely limited its assistance to the Syrian opposition to funding for communications and other logistical equipment.
The U.S. decision to provide more aid directly to the rebels is designed to increase the pressure on Assad to step down and pave the way for a democratic transition. The aid is also intended to help the opposition Syrian National Coalition govern newly liberated areas of Syria and blunt the influence of extremists.
"For more than a year, the United States and our partners have called on Assad to heed the voice of the Syrian people and to halt his war machine," Kerry said in Rome. "Instead, what we have seen is his brutality increase."
The Coalition, which has been hampered by the same infighting that has dogged the opposition since the uprising began, has struggled to agree on the leadership of a transitional administration since the opposition umbrella group was formed late last year. The group has met on previous occasions to select an interim prime minister, but has failed to reach a compromise.
In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the group said the March 2 conference in Istanbul was canceled for "logistical reasons." It said it would announce a new date as soon as possible.
Walid al-Bunni, a spokesman for the Coalition, said the meeting was pushed back "for few days" to allow for more consultations with members of the opposition inside Syria who have been hampered by security issues and because some local councils who were supposed to take part in the conference were holding elections.
___
Associated Press writers Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, Ryan Lucas in Beirut, and Mathew Lee in Rome contributed to this report.
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