Read Never Get a ”Real„ Job Online
Authors: Scott Gerber
Encourage your spies to kick you when you’re down. Courteously press them for information. Ask them why they chose another company over yours. What factors led to their decision? What didn’t you offer, say, or do that might have altered the outcome? How did a competitor sway them? Did they decide to go in another direction? If so, why did they decide to do an about face or choose an alternate direction?
Get the inside track on your competitor’s tactics and Good Guy Deals. Take insults and criticism now so that you can improve future sales initiatives and have the last laugh when you’re standing over your competitors’ graves.
Five Ways to Spy on Your Competition
You’ll need to remain one step ahead of your competitors to stay on top of your game. Instantly knowing their every move and misstep will help you to quickly adapt your tactics and close up gaps in your offering to overtake the competition. Here are the six tools I use to keep competitors at arm’s length everyday:
1.
Google Alerts
enables you to get daily e-mail alerts on your competition. The service is also great for getting immediate information about competitor marketing campaigns and press mentions. Cost: Free.2.
Compete.com
allows you to analyze your competitor’s keywords, view their consumer’s online behavior, dissect search engine strategies, and identify other sites linking to their Web sites. Cost: Free to $199 per month.3.
Copernic Tracker
(
Copernic.com
) is Web site tracking software that notifies you whenever your competitor’s Web sites, social media profiles, or online forums have been modified. Cost: $49.95.4.
SocialMention.com
allows you to keep your ear to the social media grindstone. Not only does this service help you find leads, it also shows you how your competitors are engaging social media audiences, and seeks out disenfranchised customers who’ve posted negative feedback about their experiences with your competitors. Cost: Free.5.
QuarkBase.com
helps you to discover new competitors and provides comprehensive data about their Web sites and tools to analyze them. Cost: Free.
Principle #11: Avoid Fine-Print Thinking
Your products or services will put your business in the spotlight; your customer service practices will make or break it. In today’s social media age, negative word-of-mouth travels faster than ever before. A happy customer may tell five friends to buy your product, but an unhappy customer will tell 5,000 strangers not to buy it under any circumstances. No matter how great your product or service is, if you can’t deliver on your promises or properly manage customer expectations, your business will flatline.
Know this: Marketing sells products; customer service sells clients. One-off sales might offer temporary relief to cash-flow woes, but to survive the long-haul, you must put a strong customer service plan into place to build and support a loyal, reliable client base.
Ten Ways to Manage Your Online Reputation
Building a company can take years, even decades; but its destruction can take mere minutes. Warranted or not, one customer’s comments or criticisms on a single forum or social network can quickly spiral into an all-out social media assault on your brand. Engaging users in their social media spaces allows you to address criticisms, alleviate concerns, handle customer service issues, or correct wrongdoings before irate customers morph into online terrorists. Use the following 10 tips on a regular basis to nip negative word-of-mouth in the bud before some moron’s forum thread or wall post decimates your hard-earned reputation.
1.
Secure your brand name’s social media username with
KnowEm.com
before anyone has the chance to masquerade as your company. The free Web site allows you to check out the availability of your brand name or preferred username on over 350 social networks. Cost: Free to $249.2.
TweetBeep.com
and
Google Alerts
are great for keeping track of your brand image, company name, keywords, and service offerings on Twitter and across the Internet. Set up daily alerts for the most up-to-date information. Cost: Free to $20 per month.3.
BoardReader.com
allows you to use your company name and keywords to keep track of forum chatter about your products or services. Cost: Free.4.
Twitter’s
search tool
(
search.Twitter.com
)
and
Hootsuite.com
make it easy to keep track of mentions and tweets containing your brand handle, service, or product. Cost: Free.5.
IceRocket.com
enables you to use your company name and keywords to stay on top of social network commentary videos and blog posts referring to your business. Cost: Free.6.
Blinkx.com
allows you to locate all of the online videos across all video-sharing sites mentioning your company name and keywords. Cost: Free.7.
Contact negative posters
directly whenever possible to offer assistance, determine how to resolve an issue, or ask for the opportunity to right previous mistakes or wrongdoing.8.
Encourage happy customers
to help you bury negative reviews with positive comments. Reach out to your customers and ask them to voice their opinions about your service online. Enlist them to post testimonials about their beneficial encounters with your company.9.
Report abuse
or inappropriate content on any Web content that is overly abusive or malicious in nature to have it removed by webmasters and site owners.10.
Contact webmasters
and site administrators to remove cache files of deleted negative comments so that they no longer appear in search engine results.
Principle #12: Don’t Eliminate the Word “Customer” from Customer Service
Nothing infuriates me more than people who don’t e-mail or call me back. Even worse are those select few people who answer phones or e-mail as if they are robotic answering machines.
You’re not R2D2 from
Star Wars
, nor are you important enough to be hard to reach.
Customer service isn’t a one-size-fits-all policy. Every client will have different needs, and you must do your best to cater to all of these requests in short order. Good customer service begins at the point of purchase. Immediately after you shake hands with your new client, educate her on the customer service communication options your company offers and make sure that she understands how she can interact within each channel.
No matter which methods your client uses to contact you, be accessible, responsive, and readily available. Never leave clients hanging. Take minutes, not days, to respond. Always let them know that help is on the way. Even if you can’t offer immediate assistance, let them know that someone is listening. If they leave a voicemail, use a recorded message to inform him when he can expect to hear back from a company representative. If he sends you an e-mail, use automated responses to provide response times and links to additional troubleshooting resources.
Six Resources to Supercharge Your Customer Service
Customer service is a 24/7 job. Great customer service can win you referrals and return customers. Bad, slow, or ineffective customer service can lead to a boycott against your brand. This is why you want to be able to offer your customers a series of tools to help them answer their questions, connect with you directly in any way they’d like, or troubleshoot their issues as quickly and efficiently as possible. Here is a list of my favorite six customer service tools to keep your customers satisfied and your customer service department at the top of its game:
1.
can be a 140-character lifeline for your customers. This micro-blogging site can offer your clients quick access to a customer service representative (aka you) and enables them to get in touch with you instantly in an emergency. Cost: Free.2.
ZenDesk.com
offers you and your customers a complete, easy-to-use, online and mobile help desk and support site. Cost: $9 to $39 per month.3.
GetSatisfaction.com
is a Web application that streamlines customer feedback, support questions and answers into a single platform that can be read and responded to by anyone. The support tool can be accessed using various consumer touch points from company Web sites to Twitter to Facebook Fan Pages. Cost: Free to $89 per month.4.
Uservoice.com
enables you to turn popular customer feedback into improved customer service. This company’s widget seemlessly embeds on your Web site and enables customers to submit feedback and vote on the most relevant submitted ideas. Cost: Free to $89 per month.5.
SurveyMonkey.com
enables you to create customized Web-based surveys and offers users a wide variety of reporting tools to analyze the results. Cost: Free to $19.95 per month.6.
PollDaddy.com
is an online poll and rating service that allows you to survey your community, see responses in real time, export analytical reports, and manage Twitter polls. Cost: Free to $200 per year.
Principle #13: Look Like a Titan, but Act Like a Local
If you feel that adding a personal touch is not part of a bigger growth strategy for your company—well, you’re wrong. Personal touches will get you more out of business than anything else.
I once spent 50 minutes of a one-hour meeting talking about a client’s pets and still won the bid over my cheaper competitors. Why? Because I made an effort to get to know her and understand her on a personal level.
Take a genuine interest in your clients’ hobbies, preferences, and passions. Keep a running list of unique things about each of them. If one of your clients likes coffee, bring her a cup of Joe once in a while. Instead of buying the exact same holiday gifts for clients, look to give them something they’ll value.
Don’t hide behind a phone or e-mail address; put in face time with your regulars. Bend over backward for your best and most loyal customers. Treat them like people, not numbers. Make them feel special and appreciated. Giving genuine thought and paying attention to small details will go a long way toward building long-lasting loyalties. Do what the big guys can’t do—be personal instead of cookie-cutter in your approach to customer service. Remember, your earliest base hit and home run clients are your most important ones. Without them, you have no revenue or word-of-mouth.
Principle #14: Force Clients to Sign Away Their Rights to Fight
You are solely responsible for setting your client’s expectations. Failure to do so will let their minds run amuck and potentially bring your well-oiled process to a screeching halt.
After each sale, inform your clients in writing about everything they’ll need to know—from your customer service to your return policy to your delivery dates to anything else that can be questioned. Clearly outline what your company is and isn’t responsible for, as well as what is and isn’t included in your client’s purchase.