Home Wealth Project
Extensive Research On How To Build Wealth From The Comfort Of Your Own Home.
Who is your customer?
Feb 6th
Rule one: You can build a business on the foundation of great customer service.
Rule two: The only way to do great customer service is to treat different customers differently.
The question: Who is your customer?
It’s not obvious.
Zappo’s is a classic customer service company, and their customer is the person who buys the shoes.
Nike, on the other hand, doesn’t care very much at all about the people who buy the shoes, or even the retailers. They care about the athletes (often famous) that wear the shoes, sometimes for money. They name buildings after these athletes, court them, erect statues…
Columbia Records has no idea who buys their music and never has. On the other hand, they understand that their customer is the musician, and they have an entire department devoted to keeping that ‘customer’ happy. (Their other customer was the program director at the radio station, but we know where that’s going…)
Many manufacturers have retailers as their customer. If Wal-Mart is happy, they’re happy.
Apple had just one customer. He passed away last year.
And some companies and politicians choose the media as their customer.
If you can only build one statue, who is it going to be a statue of?
View full post on Seth’s Blog
Matt Trifiro of Desk.com: Meeting Customer Service Expectations in a Social World
Feb 3rd
The Rolling Stones proudly sang, “Time is on my side, yes it is.” These days, time seems to be an adversary that everyone is fighting, especially when it comes to social media and small business. Unlike large corporations, small businesses do not have the ability to hire teams of individuals to monitor and respond to customer service issues on social media sites. So what’s a small business to do? Matt Trifiro joins Brent Leary to offer a solution.
* * * * *
Small Business Trends: Can you tell us a little about your background?
Matt Trifiro: I have been a startup marketing person my entire life. I have been a co-founder and founder of a number of start-ups, and I joined cloud service provider, Assistly, at the end of 2010 to run their marketing team. Within nine months of my joining, they were acquired by Salesforce.com. Now we are a business unit of Salesforce.com and we are called Desk.com. I am the Sr. Vice President for Marketing at Desk.com.
Small Business Trends: Let’s talk a little bit about the speed and expectation around getting great customers experiences.
Matt Trifiro: Mobile has completely revolutionized our relationship to the Internet and similarly our relationship to companies. When I had a good or bad customer service experience, chances are, the device that is nearest me is going to be my mobile phone. The easiest thing to do was to Tweet, and I’ve done that.
With personal publishing systems like Twitter and the ability to contact thousands of people, if you are going to deliver great customer service you have to be connected to all of these high velocity channels 24/7.
Small Business Trends: How effective do you think small businesses are today being able to roll that out to their customer base?
Matt Trifiro: I think completely ineffective. The larger companies spin out a Facebook team, they spin out a Twitter team, they put two or three people on it, and they build it into their work flow and policies and eventually they build tools. Small business cannot afford to do that. It is hard enough to just learn what tool to use with Twitter. So I think that most small businesses are behind the curve in keeping up with their customers.
As a user it is really fairly simple. I just tweet. But as a small business, what would you do with that tweet? How do you assign it to somebody within your company to resolve the problem? How do you ensure that it does not fall through the cracks? When you don’t have a dedicated person on it, it is your job to answer every tweet. Small businesses cannot afford to do that so you really need to look to tools and automation solutions to help you address what is needed.
Small Business Trends: How does a small business prepare themselves to be able to handle the kind of service experience that customers really do expect today?
Matt Trifiro: You have to recognize your customers have different expectations. If you want to be competitive in this new world you have to go where they are. You will have to be there at hours when you are not normally expected to be, using technologies that you may not have ever used in the past.
The second thing you need to do is identify the tools that empower your organization to utilize those channels effectively without completely bringing you to your knees. If you cannot afford to hire a social media person, and an email person, and a customer service individual, you need to leverage technology in all aspects of your business.
Small Business Trends: How does it impact the overall organization in terms of service impacting sales or service impacting marketing?
Matt Trifiro: It is all becoming sales and marketing. If I was selling coffee at Starbucks, the most important thing to me is not that you bought a single cup of coffee, but that you come in every day and you order that triple latte with extra foam that is five bucks. Five dollars every day is a maximum amount of money over the course of the year.
When you look at a customers lifetime value perspective, customer service is almost more important than sales. It is where your revenue is coming from. A lot of customer service questions that happen in public social media are really sales questions and if your customer service team is empowered to respond to customers over social media, that becomes a sale. I think that it effects the entire organization.
Small Business Trends: What are some of the new things Desk.com offers?
Matt Trifiro: We have completely rebuilt our product to service the needs of small and medium size businesses. We have a new agent interface that is super easy to use and very easy to set up. You can attach Desk.com to a Twitter account and be servicing your customers over Twitter with literally five clicks.
You can attach a Facebook page in a similar number of clicks. You can attach an email account. All of the different channels that your customers demand service from are now organized in one place on our new agent interface. All of the interactions with the customers are stored at one place so that if multiple employees interact with the customer, they can see the entire history.
In addition, we have an entirely new mobile agent. A buyer who does some customer support but is on the road all the time now is able to interact with customers to provide support using any HTML5, Android or IOS mobile phone very simply and easily. That is new in Desk.com as well.
Small Business Trends: Where can people go to learn more about Desk. com and how it can help small businesses get up to speed with delivering the customer experience that they are really looking for today?
Matt Trifiro: Go to www.Desk.com. Every account gets their first full time agent for free. There should be no barrier, even to the smallest of companies to try it out.
This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.
Matt Trifiro of Desk.com: Meeting Customer Service Expectations in a Social World
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
RatePoint Customer Reviews Service Shutting Down
Jan 29th
One of our readers alerted us that RatePoint, the customer review software solution that many eCommerce and other businesses used on their websites, is shutting down. The RatePoint homepage is still operational as of this writing. But some customers report being unable to access their accounts, or report what they consider poor treatment.
Michael McDermott of BashFoo wrote a few days ago:
The leaders in online reputation management services, Ratepoint Inc. of Needham, MA reported this afternoon the abrupt shutdown of all operations. In an email that was sent out this afternoon to all “partners, customers and friends” they stated:
“RatePoint’s assets and technologies are currently being acquired, and unfortunately this means that all RatePoint accounts will soon be closed. Effective February 2, 2012, all RatePoint services, including Reputation Management, Email Marketing, Surveys, and Product Reviews will be discontinued. Your ability to access your RatePoint account will end at this time.”
Although the date of February 2, 2012 was mentioned as the deadline date that accounts could no longer be accessed by customers to retrieve their data, some RatePoint customers are reporting that they are unable to access their accounts now.
Poor Communications
According to a thread at the Web Hosting Talk forum, some customers were taken by surprise by the news of the closure. They are scrambling to find a replacement for customer reviews.
What baffles me is that from the homepage of the RatePoint website, it is still apparently business as usual. There is no notice of the pending closure on the RatePoint homepage, as of this writing on January 28, 2012. You have to dig into the Customer Support center to find the notice of operations discontinuing buried deep, with the date of January 4th on it. Yet over 3 weeks later, there’s nothing on the home page about it.
But here’s the worst part: RatePoint made the decision to shut down as early as November 2011, according to this item in their Customer Support database. Yet they seem to have done little to notify customers and — so it would appear — kept accepting new ones in the meantime.
A Venture Funded Company Goes Sour
RatePoint was venture capital funded. According to a press release back in 2009, the company reported at the time that it had “closed a $10 million Series B round of funding led by Castile Ventures of Waltham, Mass., with participation by existing investors .406 Ventures and Prism VentureWorks.” Which goes to show … venture funding is no guarantee of business success.
We reviewed RatePoint back in August 2011 during happier times for the company. Since then, Constant Contact acquired the email marketing portion of the business, leaving the reputation management/reviews piece behind at RatePoint. It’s the reputation management (customer reviews) piece that is shutting down at this time.
What Should You Do if You Are a RatePoint Customer?
So what should you do if you are a RatePoint customer?
- Try to export your existing customer reviews if you can — immediately. There are these instructions for exporting your Business Reviews buried in the Customer Support database.
- What if you’ve prepaid annually already? Buried in the help center is a notice of where to mail your refund request.
- Search for a competitor offering a special deal for a replacement. Customer Lobby and Shopper Approved are two such that are offering special deals to RatePoint customers left in the lurch.
RatePoint Customer Reviews Service Shutting Down
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Customer Service Can Be A Nightmare
Dec 20th
As a businessman, my number one goal has always been to balance two things: profit and quality of life. There came a point where I realized that I may have to sacrifice some of the former for some of the latter. And that ultimately came in my decision to minimize the number of customers I had to deal with. That was a business decision that I would never turn back on.
However, most businesses rely on word of mouth and customer loyalty. And because of that, huge amounts of effort and resources need to go into keeping the customer happy. A friend of mine sent me this infographic called The State of Customer Service in a Consumer Driven Market and it reminded me precisely why I made the decision I did.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that customer service is taken so seriously. And I get as irritated as the next person when a big company’s bureaucracy takes me for granted as a consumer. But yeah, there are also plenty of loony’s out there, and the less of them you have to deal with in your business, the better.
Click to enlarge
Source: ClickSoftware Field Service Management
View full post on Business Pundit
Jeff Nolan of Get Satisfaction: Level the Playing Field With a Customer Community
Dec 2nd
“It takes a village to raise a child,” the old saying goes. But for Jeff Nolan, VP of Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, a better saying might be, “It takes a community to build a business.” In this interview, Brent Leary talked to Jeff about why online customer communities are especially important for small companies and how they can give you the competitive edge.
Small Business Trends: Can you fill us in on what Get Satisfaction does and your background?
Jeff Nolan: Get Satisfaction is a hosted platform for online customer communities. We provide a place where companies and their customers can share ideas, answer questions, resolve problems and provide positive feedback.
My personal background is quite diverse. I’ve had a variety of technical roles, marketing and some limited sales exposure but my formative experience is as a venture capitalist. I was one of the founding partners of SAP Ventures. At the end of my duration with SAP I moved into the global marketing organization, then ran NewsGator, a media and consumer app business.
Small Business Trends: Everybody is talking about online communities, but for years I’ve heard the saying, “Customer service is the new marketing.” Do you think in 2012 customer service really does become the new marketing, and where do online communities fit into that equation?
Jeff Nolan: Get Satisfaction was founded around the premise that by providing superior customer support, companies would not only achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, but would also see their business grow at a more efficient rate than if they just plowed money into marketing for the sake of marketing.
It’s no longer just about advertising or driving people to a website. There are two important things going on. One, you have to engage consumers where they are. And where they are is at the intersection of your brand and whatever social network or technology they’re using at that moment.
Two, it’s not just where you do this; it’s how you do it. Consumers are increasingly sophisticated about marketing and advertising, and they’re demanding a more human approach to how they interact with a company.
Small Business Trends: There’s the saying, “It takes a village…” and it seems like today, you could say, “It takes a community to raise a company.” How can small businesses take advantage of online communities?
Jeff Nolan: Customers exist in a context of a life cycle – acquisition, transaction, delivery, support and then advocacy. Your objective is to move your customers through each stage of that lifecycle and then repeat the process. Not just with a new customer, but also with the ones you already have.
Online communities are very important in realizing this goal because they provide an effective, repeatable technology solution for engaging your customers around questions and ideas—from the engagement they have with you before they buy to resolving inevitable issues they have when they do buy. Those interactions create advocates.
Small Business Trends: A lot of people, when they think about online communities, focus on B2C. Do you see a community strategy that will also help B2B?
Jeff Nolan: I think that B2B vs. B2C is somewhat of a red herring. It’s rooted in the old ways we used to sell stuff. There are many B2C products that exhibit the same dynamics of what we would normally consider B2B. They’re highly deliberative in nature. They have a longer sales cycle. They rely heavily on influence from third parties.
Small Business Trends: How does a small business determine the mix between having their own community and also engaging on general social networks?
Jeff Nolan: With Get Satisfaction, we’ve undertaken great efforts to bring those social networks into the fold. We’re providing your [brand] with a consistent community experience, not just on the Web, but also in Facebook, on Twitter, in your mobile applications, in different languages and so on.
One of the challenges businesses have when approaching community through several venues is ensuring the consistency and reusability of content. We see this in Facebook a lot. Companies that are trying to do customer support through the wall on Facebook face an unenviable challenge, because that is not scalable.
Small Business Trends: Talk a little about the importance of creating real-time good answers as opposed to just marketing content.
Jeff Nolan: When you have a question, you want an answer. If you are investing your time to share an idea with a company about how their product or service can be better, you care about them responding to you, rather than it going into a black hole. Get Satisfaction has a technology solution that humanizes the interaction between company and customer. [Users] get a very authentic behavior that reflects how people talk to each other.
Small Business Trends: How important is it for SMBs to have a strategy of engagement that fosters a community that helps each and creates answers that are important to individual customers.
Jeff Nolan: It’s incredibly important that companies of all sizes do this. But it’s more critical for small companies. Community, superior customer engagement, customer insight and knowing more about your customer levels the playing field.
Small Business Trends: How easy is it for a company to get started creating an online community?
Jeff Nolan: Well, it’s very easy with us because we are a freemium business–we have a free product that is fully functioning. From that you can upgrade into various plan levels that have increasing feature sets, capabilities or customization opportunities.
Small Business Trends: Where can people learn more about Gets Satisfaction?
Jeff Nolan: Go to our website at GetSatisfaction.com, and you can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and all the popular social channels.
This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.
[To listen to audio, click this icon]
Jeff Nolan of Get Satisfaction: Level the Playing Field With a Customer Community
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
If You Still Think The Customer Is King
Nov 16th
If You Still Think The Customer Is King
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Marketing podcast with Aaron Shapiro (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)
You know the old adage – the customer is king, well there’s a new king and every business today must shift their focus to the much broader world of the user. A large segment of this user community may never buy from you, but in today’s increasingly digital world they do influence how your brand is perceived and, in the end, who does or does not become a customer.
For this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Aaron Shapiro, author of Users, Not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business
The trick is to become indispensable, through content and interaction to a large group of users, those that may never spend a dime with you, and your customers will naturally fall from this group. The larger the user group, the larger the customer pool.
Building products and adapting your business for users over customers takes a bit of a mind shift, but successful organizations are doing this in a variety of ways.
From my own experience, I can tell you that making your free products more valuable than your competitor’s paid products is one of the best ways to install this principle.
Shapiro also addresses one of my favorite topics – rapidly deploying new technology that benefits your users.
In one of the more telling moments in the interview Shapiro explains doing focus groups with millennials and when asked how much time they spent online they didn’t know how to answer the question. The next generation is so digital they can no longer distinguish moments when they aren’t online.
You can listen to the show by subscribing the feed in iTunes or a variety of other free services such as Google Listen (Use this RSS feed) or you can buy the Duct Tape Marketing iPhone app. (iTunes link – Cost is $2.99)
View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Lifetime value of a customer/cost per customer
Nov 12th
Two things every business and non-profit needs to know:
- How much does it cost you to get one new customer.
- On average, what’s that customer worth over the relationship you have with her?
The internet revolutionizes both sides of the equation.
Facebook and Twitter are marvels because for each, the cost of a new customer is vanishingly close to zero. When you can get people into a relationship for nothing, you don’t need to make much on each one to be delighted with the outcome.
Note that the ongoing, digital connection with a customer can dramatically increase the lifetime profit as well. Netflix is far more likely to have a higher average lifetime value than the local video store. Musicians are moving from making a dollar a listener from CDs to hundreds of dollars a true fan in collectibles and concert tickets–things they can only deliver because they know who their best customers are.
On the other hand, legions of unsophisticated marketers are getting both sides of the equation wrong.
They invest a lot in hoopla, spin and hype to get strangers to notice them (once), making the cost of a connection high, and then, once they borrow a little attention, they put everything into a one shot transaction, which few people engage in, and those that do create little value, because the permission asset is then discarded.
Dates, not singles bars. Subscriptions, not vegomatics.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
The unreasonable customer
Nov 11th
There are a few reasons to tolerate the customer who makes unreasonable demands:
- You promised you would
- She helps you raise your game
- Her word of mouth is very powerful
- The cost of frequently figuring out which customers to fire is too high compared to the cost of putting up with everyone
It’s probably worth firing a customer if:
- He willfully corrupts your systems at a cost to other customers
- Your employees are prevented from doing their best work in the long run
- His word of mouth can’t be changed or doesn’t matter
- He distracts you from delighting customers that are reasonable
In general, organizations are afraid to fire customers, no matter how unreasonable. This is a mistake. It’s good for you.
View full post on Seth’s Blog
Three Pillars Customer Support Help Desk Software
Oct 28th
Brand New PHP Web Based Customer Support, Help Desk And Ticket System. Takes Minutes To Install And Will Save Hours Of Time A Day. Every Professional Online Marketer Needs One Of These! Have Multiple Admins With Differing Levels Of Access And Authority.
Three Pillars Customer Support Help Desk Software
Become a Provider of Choice: Shift Your Focus to Customer Experiences
Oct 14th
Griffin Hospital earns customer loyalty, and accolades, by creating customer experiences. Griffin Hospital’s efforts to understand the lives of patients and their families has earned them extreme customer loyalty. Their goal was to imagine what it would be like to be the patient so they could improve the experience for both patients and their families. But Griffin Hospital hadn’t always received this type of accolade.
Back in 1982, Griffin Hospital was very far from enjoying extreme loyalty. At that time, one-third of the local community named Griffin as the hospital they would avoid if they could. That rude awakening pushed them to rethink their purpose and literally everything they did. The hospital wanted to create an experience to remember.
Music in the Parking Lot and a Piano in the Lobby
Being told that it was avoided whenever possible pushed Griffin to rethink the purpose for their hospital, physicians, and caregivers. Their goal was to become the hospital of choice in the community. Griffin knew that if “choice” was the goal, then they had to readjust their purpose; they needed to move from being healthcare providers to being service providers.
Griffin had to stop executing required tasks and determine what experience they would deliver, what patient and family emotions were involved. They found that the emotional journey of going to the hospital begins in the parking lot. So Griffin provides free valet parking and concierge services. Music in the parking lot and lobby welcomes visitors and takes away the sterile “hospital” feeling.
Says Bill Powanda, Griffin Hospital vice president:
“It doesn’t matter if you have the shortest emergency room wait times around and deliver the greatest care in the nation; if parking is a nightmare, your patients won’t be completely satisfied.”
Griffin Hospital Enjoys a 99 Percent Recommendation Rate
Understanding the customer emotions involved in “coming and going” from a hospital visit prompted actions that made Griffin stand out. Those bookend experiences are part of the magnet that pulls people back to Griffin. No longer considered the “black sheep” hospital of the community, Griffin grows through customer referrals. Inpatient admissions grew 28 percent from 1997 to 2009, compared with a state average growth rate of 10 percent. And outpatient services grew 92 percent from 1998 to 2009.
Griffin Hospital has become the hospital of choice not only for their community, but for surrounding communities as well. One-third of Griffin Hospital’s customers come from outside of the community where it’s located. Ten percent of administrators of U.S. hospitals want to visit Griffin Hospital to learn from them.
Do you think about how you punctuate your moments of connection with customers? First impressions last the longest. Is yours purposeful? Does it create the ideal first opinion of your business?
What Are Your Customer Experience Bookends?
Griffin Hospital decided to eliminate the fear of hospital visits with music in their parking lots and a concierge in their lobby. The memory of these “experience bookends” bonds visitors to them. Ask yourself:
- Do you have a purposeful beginning and ending to moments of customer contact?
- Are you creating memories or just executing tasks?
- How would you rate your intent and ability to create purposeful moments of customer contact?
- How would your customers say you are doing?
- Do customers rave about a memorable experience?
- What are the marquee moments in your customers’ experiences with you?
- Do your decisions for creating memorable bookends earn you “beloved” status today?
Become a Provider of Choice: Shift Your Focus to Customer Experiences
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
