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January 17, 2013 by

7 Steps to Customer Service Success for Your Brand

customer serviceIf your business offers customer service, then you should know that treating your customers kindly and with respect makes all the difference in the world to your reputation and your bottom line. There is nothing worse than a dissatisfied customer talking badly about your business and the way they were treated by you—yes you because to them

YOU are your BRAND

It doesn’t matter that you are not personally there, the people representing your company represent you. Here are some tips to help you get your customer service associates up to par.

  1. Always ACKNOWLEDGE your client/customer.  Customers walking in your place of business should always get a smile, a hello and offer of assistance.   If you’re dealing with customers via phone or email.  Make sure to follow up and acknowledge you received their message as soon as you’re able.  If you don’t have the answer or solution right away – say so – and stay in touch until you do.
  2. LISTEN.  But even more important – HEAR what they’re saying.  This is probably the most important skill you’ll ever learn and it’s good for any situation. Once you hear what the customer is really saying then take steps to address the issue.
  3. Interact with the customer. ASK QUESTIONS so you can fully understand the real need. A customer may get frustrated because they don’t understand, feel unappreciated or aren’t satisfied.  Figure out what they need and give it to them.
  4. If you don’t have the answer or solution right away. ASK FOR HELP.  Make sure the customer understands that you will get the information they need as soon as you’re able.  If you’re dealing with a customer in person then make sure your actions follow your words.  Be happy to solve their problem.  If you’re interacting via email or phone- make sure your words reflect your sincere efforts of getting the solution to the issue.  Stay in touch & keep them updated until you have a satisfactory resolution.
  5. Insure that your customer service reps are TRAINED to treat your customers right.  Give them authority to take care of matters as they come up.  Have them keep a written log of each issue along with names, contact info, problem & solution.  This can be very helpful if the customer isn’t happy with the solution.  By keeping a log you can be sure that everything possible was done to correct any problems.  It will also be a great help as you’re creating or modifying policies & procedures.
  6. NEVER ASSUME anything about a customer by the way they dress, look or act. This is so true in customer service. Every customer is important regardless of looks, and making assumptions about customers beforehand will only backfire on you, and tarnish the reputation you are striving to create.
  7. If the customer service rep you have working with you just doesn’t seem to be able to uphold your high standards of customer service, Do Not Be Afraid to REPLACE them.

Your Brand Is You! Implement high quality customer service standards to help increase the respect of your brand.

Acknowledge, Listen, Ask Questions, Ask for Help, Train Your Staff, Never Assume & Replace when necessary.  Buy following these seven principles of customer service, you will be treating your customers with the care they deserve.

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File under: Blog
January 10, 2013 by

Email Marketing: Cultivating Know-Like-Trust

When people think of you and your brand you want them to do 3 things:Know Like Trust

  1. Know Who You Are/What You Do
  2. Like Who You Are/What  You Do
  3. Trust What You Say

When it comes to your brand and email marketing, personalizing your emails, auto-responders & newsletters can help you accomplish all 3 things listed above.

You want the email recipient to recognize the email is from you, like you enough to open the email right away and take action on what you’re telling them to do.

One of the ways you can make that happen is by treating your reader like someone special.  Craft your emails so they’re written directly to them.  Personalize it.  Make them believe you’re talking right to them and the stuff you’re sharing is specifically for their benefit.

Email marketing is one area of your business where you can make things personal between you and your subscribers. Done the right way, this method of marketing can mean more sales for your business.

Another way to cultivate Know-Like-Trust is to actually email your subscribers.  Your readers subscribed to your mailing list and they expect you to send them emails.  Think about this:

If you’re not sending regular emails to your list you are depriving them of the information only you can provide them.

If you email your list on a regular basis you are training them – conditioning them, if you will – to expect emails from you.  When your subject lines are compelling and the email body is interesting & entertaining then your emails will be opened.  Once your emails are opened on a regular basis, your readers will start to take action on the recommendations you make.  But the first step is to write the email.

I’d recommend sending an email to your list a minimum of three times per week. Don’t worry about feeling or acting “salesy”.  If you think about email marketing as providing information, making recommendations and sharing awesome products then you’ll do fine.

You don’t have to sell in each email, auto-responder or newsletter but you should be including a clear call to action in each email that has then DO something.

Think about what you want the reader of your email to do:

  • sign up for an auto-responder
  • buy an affiliate product you recommend
  • buy one of your products
  • leave a comment

Then make it clear to your reader what ONE action you want them to take.

Make it a priority to email your list for at least 3 times each week for the next month and report back in the comments with your results.

 

 

File under: Blog
January 7, 2013 by

Small Business Branding Through Exceptional Customer Service

Value Your Customers If You Value Your Business

Have you ever walked into a store excited about your latest purchase only to leave your much coveted purchase on the counter because of the [lack of] customer service?

Remember how that made you feel?

I’d venture to say that if you were happy & excited to make your purchase when you walked in the store you walked out with a much different feeling about your choice and vowing to find the item somewhere they would actually appreciate you.

Let’s translate that to your own business.

How many people walk away from an experience with you, your site or your product unhappy because they weren’t treated they way they thought they should be?

Exemplary customer service is all about treating your clients & customers they way they feel they should be treated.  Make them feel special and appreciated and they’ll be loyal to you and your brand.

If you don’t know how people feel about their experiences with you then you must make it a point to find out.  Putting the value of your customers above everything will help you find true success. Without your customers you don’t have a business.

Now, that we’ve touched on how important your clients & customers are to your business let’s talk about the people that represent you.

They way you treat the people that help you run your business will directly reflect on how they treat the clients & customers with whom they have contact.

If you treat your “helpers” rudely or with indifference then that is how they may treat your customers.

The way people are treated by the representative of your company is a direct reflection of you.  Make sure that the people that work on behalf of your company are treated with respect and understand their value to you so that they can reflect that feeling to your clients & customers.

brand loyaltyExemplary customer service is synonymous with your brand.

Let someone have a bad experience with you and before you know it they’re sharing that bad experience via word of mouth and worse through social media.

Be respectful to each and every person that finds their way to you. It is important to be courteous and make your customers feel as if they matter – that they are valued.

People are less likely to work with or buy from a business because they have seen online or heard by word of mouth that a company provides bad customer service.  With quick access to the internet all it takes is one negative word on Twitter or Facebook about your business and you may be doomed to failure.

The key to brand loyalty is exceptional customer service. Go out of your way to show customers that you care about them whether they buy or not. Respond quickly to emails, comments, contact forms and most especially to a customer standing at your counter or cash register. They will remember that they were treated well, had their questions answered and made to feel important.

 

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles FreeDigitalPhotos.net

File under: Blog
September 14, 2012 by

Tips For Improving What You Already Have


As entrepreneurs, we often rush to get a project out and to market. Even though some parts of the process may not be complete but because they are not critical to the brand nor for sales, we launch the product with the intention of coming back later to complete or improve it. The problem is, later almost always never comes around and before you know it, we’re off to a new project or some other priority comes up.

However, growing a business doesn’t always mean creating new things. It also means making what you have better. The thought of going back and looking at everything you have seems like a rather daunting task and it can be. To get you started, the following are some pointers to get you going.

Promoting Yourself More

This is more of a problem for websites than actual storefronts if you have one. Take a good look. Do you have banners or clips that lead people to areas of your e-store or deeper into your content? If not, add them. They can be traditional banner ads that promote your own inventory or special offers. Or, they can be blurbs. In short, keep people clicking around your site for as long as possible.

If you’re on social media, take some time to review your own stream as well. What have you posted in the last 7, 14 or 30 days? It’s OK to not be self promoting on every tweet or post because social media doesn’t work that way BUT, if all you are posting is other people’s blog posts, funny stuff, personal references and so on, that’s not going to work either.

Go through old posts on your blog and pick out those that have done especially well and re-post them to your social networks. Make sure you update your post to have a call to action to join your list or buy your products too.

Implement split testing

When sending out email campaigns or advertising online, it is very easy these days to test out two or more versions of your ads and emails. Doing this will quickly tell you which headline or ad copy gets more attention, more traffic or more sales. You’ll also stop wasting money on ineffective advertising too.

Update literature and autoresponders

Things change over time and you may have new hours, new products, discontinued ones or simply information that is not relevant anymore in your communication. Update them and while you’re doing that, ask yourself if the designs can be updated to look more current, to reflect your brand today. Do you need to do it?

Make your sales process smoother

If you have a service business, is the process for taking a lead to a customer and completing the project fluid? Do you have all the contracts ready and/or do they need updating? If you sell online, is your ordering and delivery process confusing? Do customers tend to get stuck in one area regularly? How can the process be smoother and easier for your customers so they have the best experience as possible?

Qualifying your leads

Building a list can be an expensive, resource intensive process. You want to make sure you don’t just end up with a list of names, but one that is ultimately responsive. One way to guarantee that is to build a more qualified list. There are many ways to qualify people before they get signed up. Through the proper advertising copy, even your offers. If you use WordPress to manage your website, consider a plugin like Survey Funnel. It leads prospects through a series of easy questions and subscribes them to different lists based on their input. This way, you can always craft your message so they are highly relevant to the reader.

File under: Business, Marketing
February 24, 2012 by

Cover Yourself Or Risk Losing It All

In the small town where we live, there was once a pretty good family restaurant. Let’s call them “Steed’s”.

Steed’s served seafood buffet – the only one in town. The food was good and prices reasonable. While they weren’t exactly booked to the brim, they had a steady flow of customers daily. So they were profitable. Steed’s had also been there for decades. The family who owned it also owned several businesses in town and were quite reputable. Sadly, they are no longer in business and the reason had nothing to do with economy or big businesses crowding them out. What literally drove them bankrupt was a law suit.

Image via Wikipedia

The story was, a drunk driver coming out of their restaurant hit a bicyclist and killed him. Steed’s was found guilty of serving too many drinks to the driver.

This is truly tragic for both the bicyclist, his family and Steed’s. No matter what you personally think of the case and who’s at fault, the truth is, as business owners we must make an effort to cover our business or lose it all like Steed’s did. Years of hard work, feeding the family and perhaps years more to come all gone.

Your website is no exception. We’ve learned that businesses have been fined $25,000 for not having a risk disclosure on their website. That doesn’t include the amount they had to spend in attorney fees.

That may be small change for some businesses but we know of many who exist online are bootstrapping start ups or the mom or dad setting up shop to put food on the table who do not have easy access to such sums of money. Not counting the emotional stress. This is certainly an experience neither of us wants whether we can afford the fees or not.

The solution in easy. Go to an attorney to have these documents drafted. Unfortunately, your attorney may not be well versed with Internet law and if they were, their fees aren’t likely to be attainable for the average start up or family business. That’s where we found ourselves years ago.

Then, we discovered AutoWebLaw, put it to use immediately and continue to do so on every site we own. You can see the links to these documents in this site’s footer. If you’d like to get your hands on AutoWebLaw, you’ll be pleased to know it is quite affordable and you can get it right this very minute. We did it some time in 2005 and have never regretted it once. It gets used every time a new site is set up which is quite regularly. The nice part is finding new and updated documents for life. Just like the time when the FTC began cracking down on affiliate marketing, the documents were updated to reflect that and boy were we thankful.

And yes, by the way we are recommending this as an affiliate because we like, use, believe in it and think you should too. Consider using AutoWebLaw before it is too late.

File under: Business
December 27, 2011 by

Are you pricing for 2012 or 2002?

Have you noticed how much more money you have to shell out for your groceries lately? If you’ve truly been paying attention to your bills, you’d know it’s been going on for a couple of years.

It’s not just the price tag. Packaging has changed too. Sometimes you find less product for the same price. Heres one we noticed recently. A pack of little smoked sausages used to be 16 oz. It is now 12oz. The price is the same but you get 4 oz less. Some manufacturers have introduced entirely new packaging with different sizes so it is difficult to do a direct comparison, whether to mask the real pricing or cushion the sticker shock, I don’t know.

The effect is still the same. Higher prices. Ultimately, all this affects us. The cost of hiring is higher, the cost of office consumables, transportation (if any) and just about everything else is higher. At the end of the day, if our prices don’t change, our bottom line shrinks. The way everything else costs more now, it’ll eventually shrink till it becomes nothing. Not a good thing if you want to run your business long term.

I understand, believe me. Pricing is often a difficult subject for entrepreneurs. We don’t like raising our prices because we don’t want to upset or lose customers. Yet, we don’t haggle prices when we go to the grocery store. They aren’t afraid of losing our business. It’s this price or you don’t eat.

True, not every product is urgent or vital,to sustain life like the food industry. That may be why you’re hesitant. This is not about greed or turning into a big heartless corporation. Its not about pricing higher just because you can or pricing far out of customer’s reach so we can have a fat bottom line. It’s simply being realistic. If we want to keep growing; To continue paying people we hire fair wages and put food on our own tables, we have got to price our products or services for today.

If you’re afraid of backlash, try different packaging just like the brands in your grocery store do. As we rush into the New Year, and make all sorts of plans, take a moment to consider if your pricing will give you enough room to support the growth and staff you want it to in 2012 and beyond.

Photo by quinn.anya
File under: Business
October 24, 2011 by

Big, Big, Big, Big… Small!

There is a commercial for the Smart Car – a tiny two seater – that has all kinds of people proclaiming ‘Big’ from singers to politicians, business owners to children. At the end, one lone guy sees the Smart Car and says… Small! Implying Big is not the answer, Small is.

While I didn’t think the commercial is particularly clever, it drove the point home for me. Sometimes the solution you’ve been seeking is the opposite of what you have been doing all this time.

Many small businesses often start off by de-valuing their products and services to get things going and then we get stuck there.

I’m not saying having low priced products is bad or even a no-no. Sometimes you need that. What is a mistake though is staying or suppressing your pricing for everything you do, while maintaining a high quality product that in no way reflects your pricing. Very soon, you will feel like you’re working too hard, running out of steam. All of a sudden, the dreams of financial freedom seem just as far away as when you were working at a regular job. You may even begin to resent your business because it doesn’t seem like you’ve come very far. What can you do? Go the opposite way.

Start creating high end products that bring you more per sale, products that people want to buy more of – yes, believe it or not, low prices can reduce sales.  Consider products from Apple. You’d call them anything but cheap. Yet, the iPhone 4S sold over 4 million units in just 3 days. The cherry on top, most Apple customers are fiercely loyal.

Wouldn’t you like to have a business like that? That’s why we invited Armand Morin a genuine Internet Marketing authority to share his knowledge about creating high end, high value products in an exclusive webinar.

The webinar is scheduled for this Thursday, October 27th, 2011 at 9 p.m. U.S. Eastern time. To join us, register here.

It is not everyday we can host webinars with legends like Armand so we are very proud to be able to offer this to you for no charge whatsoever. We’ve already invited people on the mailing list so the webinar has already begun to fill up. Because seats are limited, register today to make sure you save a spot for yourself.

We know you will get a lot of golden nuggets from this webinar. We always do when attending Armand’s webinar. Be sure to attend with pen and notebook in hand. See you there!

File under: Business
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