How to give great customer service – not :-)

January 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Enjoy this real-life customer service interaction that I had yesterday

Background

I signed up with a UK-based online graphic email marketing company a couple of days ago to help promote a friends’ short charity campaign. We had 4 days and counting to get 2000 emails out. It’s a ‘vote for my YouTube’ campaign – cut off point Friday, so time (clearly) was of the essence.

Having used this particular company before (doh!) I went straight to their site and tried to sign up. Ah, no buy button. Anywhere. Bizarre. I know what I want… I just can’t buy it.

I phoned them and asked how I could buy the product I knew I needed. I was told rudely that I had to sign up for a free account. Uh? ‘Then you convert it to a paid one’. I offered him the feedback that nowhere did it tell me that information. He couldn’t care less.

Despite that experience, I signed up for two reasons: 1) I’d used the software before and although it was cranky, at least I knew it worked in the end and 2) my friend was running out of time. She paid her money and I then spent a full 4 hours (yes, 4) fighting with the visual editor to create the newsletter email.

I triumphantly pressed ‘send to mailing list’ – and got a message saying ‘cannot send until your account is verified’.

Nothing in the help made sense of that message and there was no online help (as it was 8pm in the evening by that time).

So we lost 14 hours or so – until I had the chance to get onto them via a live support chat widget the next day. Here’s what happened.

Sam: Hi – signed up yesterday, been trying to send to mailing list since yest PM but says ‘account not verified’ – verified account yesterday afternoon.  Can you pls look into that for me

Joe: Hi Sam

Sam: Hello – did you see my question?

Joe: yes

Joe: let me check your account

Sam: thanks

Joe: your account is now verified Sam

Sam: Thanks, any explanation what happened?  Lost us quite a bit of time out of a 4 day campaign.

Joe: all accounts need to be verified before they can send anything other than test sends. You need to request verification when you are ready to send out to a list.

Sam: We clicked the verification email link yesterday.  Is that what you mean?  If not, where does it tell me we need *another* kind of verification?

Joe: no, problem – you’re verified now and can use the account to send straight away

Sam: Joe, would appreciate an answer to my question

Joe: there is no < verification link >

Joe: maybe you mean the < activation link >

Sam: Ok.  So I clicked < activation link > in email.  Where does it tell me I need to < verify > my account before I can send?

Joe: when you try to send an email, the pop-up will tell you that you need to contact support to have the account verified

Sam: Nope.  It just pops up and tells me ‘Can’t send because your account isn’t verified’  it doesn’t tell me to contact support.

Joe: what point are you trying to make Sam ?

Joe: the account is now verified

Sam: The point I’m making is that your system a) uses ‘verify’ in a way that a customer won’t understand is different from ‘activate’ b) it then fails to send but doesn’t tell me clearly why c) it doesn’t say contact support

Sam: Result is I couldn’t get this send out last night, costing my friend 14 hrs out of her campaign

Joe: would you prefer us to cancel the account and refund your money

Sam: Did I ask for that?

Joe: you state that this caused ” your friend ” – is this YOUR account Sam ?

Sam: Listen, Joe – before you start trying to be confrontational, please be aware that I work in online reputation management – I will be blogging this experience

Sam: This account is for a friend who is running a campaign

Sam: a charity campaign

Joe: actually – if you are a charity

Sam: She signed up for the account, I created the newsletter

Sam: She isn’t a registered charity yet

Joe: we do offer a free account to not-for-profit

Sam: thank you but she is not a charity yet

Joe: ok

Sam: Ok, before I go

Sam: I called Aacme Graphic Email Marketing yesterday to offer you some feedback about how hard it was to buy your product

Sam: – I got a rude reception

Sam: I eventually signed up and haven’t had a satisfactory experience with information definately missing

Sam: with the result I couldn’t send, have lost time and don’t feel very good about Aacme Graphic Email Marketing

Sam: I contact you for support and you’re reluctant to either accept my feedback (which could possibly save you a lot of lost sales) or give me a satisfactory account of why the site doesn’t offer the right information

Sam: so…

Sam: it’s not great.

Sam: Thank you for ‘validating’ – I have sent the emails

Joe: the reason for the verification process is to limit our exposure to spammers. Every account needs to be manually verified

Joe: this gives our clients a better experience once they have been validated

Joe: as there is less chance of our systems and network being corrupted by spammers

Joe: we are sorry if this has caused you any inconvenience

Sam: Joe, that’s fine – but if you p*ss them off before they even get ‘validated’ (by not telling them that’s what needs to happen) then you won’t get to give them a better experience

Joe: This is not usually the case

Sam: Seriously how would you know?

Sam: Who ever takes the time to fight through your defensiveness to give you this feedback? Hmm?  Seriously

Joe: via the amount of sign ups we get

Joe: and yes we do get feedback

Sam: Oh, lordy.  How about the ones you DON’T get

Joe: generally via our live support

Sam: Anyway, look, I still hear you don’t want to accept my feedback

Sam: so thanks for sorting this out

Joe: no we do

Sam: and I’m outta here

Joe: and it has been taken on board

Sam: ciao

Joe: have a good day Sam

Sam: you too

Filed Under: feedback, what do you think? Tagged With: , ,

Smallbusinessdirectory.co.uk – scam or not? You decide…

January 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I’d love to be able to tell you whether the spam I got today from ‘smallbusinesdirectory.co.uk’ comes from a scam..

…but unfortunately it appeared to be defunct by the time I got there.  Fast work, Tiscali!

By the way, if you are trying to set up a legitimate business in this current plague of worthless and outright scammy business directories, you really need to think hard about your approach.  Introducing yourself via spam isn’t a good start.  You’re going to have to go an extra mile to create confidence.  That’s quite a challenge.

And you’re going to need to use English properly.  And be sensible with your claims.

Ah well, I was kind of hoping for a home-grown business directory scammer to play with on this blog, but seems that I’ll have to wait :-(

Mind you, judging by the feedback coming in to this site, there are plenty of legal, ‘respectable’ online business directories it sounds like we ought to be looking into a bit deeper.

Any more you want to point me at?  Just leave a comment below.

Filed Under: scam warning Tagged With: , , , ,

Online reputation management: do it yourself

January 13, 2010 By 2 Comments

You don’t need sophisticated or expensive packages to monitor and manage your online reputation

It’s not rocket science – you just need the tools that your prospects have got (i.e. Google); the ability to think like them, a dose of humility and a crash course in not being reactive.

Oh, and you need to know there’s a difference between monitoring and managing your reputation.

Online reputation monitoring

The simplest advice for monitoring your online reputation is to start with the FASTEST (and therefore potentially most damaging) channels out there:

1) Set up Google alerts for your name, your company name and products and brands.  Sit back and let Google bring the good – and bad – news to you whenever it hears you being mentioned online.

2) While you’re waiting for Google Alerts to bring you news, go to Twitter and search for your name, your company name and your brands.  It’s the most ‘real-time’ network / source of content there is.  If people are going to rant at the point of dissatisfaction, they’re going to do it via their mobile, and they’re probably going to do it on Twitter.

3) If that’s all clear, next do a search in Google.  Do a broad web search first.  See what comes up in the first couple of pages of Google.  Hopefully, a lot of it will be your web site pages and things you’ve done to market and promote yourself and your products.  If not, sack your web designer :-)

Remember: people use blog posts and forum posts to vent their anger or dissatisfaction. Learn to recognise how these posts and comments appear in the regular web results.

4) To focus entirely on blog content, do a dedicated Google blog search

5) Most of all, learn to think like a customer – an angry one and a prospective one.  When an unhappy customer wants to nail you for not listening,  they’re going to nail you by telling their trusted network how bad you are and follow up by publishing posts and comments online with words like rip-off’ ‘scam’ and ‘fraud’ to the end.  They want their experience of you to be found by others researching your company – and now they have the tools to do it within minutes.  Be warned; this stuff can kill your business in a matter of days.

When a prospective customer wants to find out the truth about your company, ‘XYZ consultants’, they’re going to start by searching for ‘XYZ consultants’.  Then they’re going to add the words ‘scam’, ‘feedback’, ‘rip-off’, ‘review’ at the end to see what comes up.

To manage your online reputation online successfully, you need to see these words as a code that customers and prospects use to bypass your own (naturally positive) propaganda.  So learn the code – and make sure YOU search the web regularly for these coded references to you and your company.

You wouldn’t believe how many companies’ reputations are in tatters online and yet they don’t even know about it.  It could explain that gradual drop-off in sales they’ve been seeing…

Online reputation management

Managing your online reputation priorities are as follows (listed in order of the amount of your energy you should expend on them):

1) Create the best products and services you can.  This is bleedin’ obvious, but the best way to create and protect a great on- and offline reputation is to do the basics really, really well.

2) When things go wrong, do everything you can to make your customer happy.  That means invite feedback, listen without being defensive, go out of your way to satisfy them

3) When you don’t do 1) and 2) properly, people will punish you online by Tweeting, blogging, forum posting and commenting anywhere and everywhere they can.  Count on it. When you finally find something angry / hostile / nasty (true or untrue) with your online monitoring (see the list above), the first thing you need to do is NOTHING.

4) While you’re doing NOTHING (i.e. not reacting, not getting into a fight to try to defend yourself), you should be getting really honest with yourself about what it is you might have done to create the situation.

5) Then you should be thinking about what you can do to put it right.  What you can do, and what you are willing to do.

6) Then consider approaching the disgruntled punter publicly (in whatever forum or blog his/her comment appears) and a) apologise for not having met their expectations b) apologise if you didn’t listen or respond to their original feedback or complaint.  Listen, I promise you, no matter how bad this makes you feel, you almost certainly didn’t listen the first time round.  If you can do this from a genuine place – i.e. that you really do care about helping this person to feel better about your company, you’ll be amazed what you can achieve.

7) If you’ve reacted dived in with both feet and made things worse, then call us to take the heat out of the situation on 01822 610841.

8 ) Start to create positive online content about you, your company and your brands to balance, and ultimately outweight the negative.  Beware: this only works when that content is genuine and credible.

Paying offshore SEO or Reputation Management Companies to flood Google with superficial stuff about you is a false economy (an expensive one at that!) – it will be transparent to any half-wit looking to find out what a company is really like.

If you want to do it properly, call us on 01822 610841.

Filed Under: business insight, how to, ORM Tagged With: , , , , ,

Snowing in Florida? Let’s investigate

January 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Has it really snowed in Florida? Or is this just another ‘wildfire’ Google trend gone mad?

Lets investigate.

First, there’s this picture which I’m told is of a man sunbathing in the snow on Daytona Beach.  Suspicious.

Second, there are several blog reports here, here, here, here, here (lols), and here as well as Flickr photosets that seem to show that it has, indeed, been snowing in the Sunshine State.

It could just be a moment of madness showing up as a Google trend.  Mind you, I’ve just been for a walk with my cat in the thick snow in the UK, so anything’s possible I suppose.

Personally, I believe the Daytona Beach News Journal.  If anyone should know, they should.

Snow in Florida.  Who would have believed it?

Filed Under: smile, WOW! Tagged With: , , , , ,

FGM video: watch this, then vote for Julia

January 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

We’ve got 1 week to help Julia win the YouTube Davos competition with her anti-FGM campaign

My friend Julia Lalla-Maharaj made the shortlist today in the YouTube Davos competition with her campaign to end FGM – female genital mutilation.  The winning campaign will get to put their issue in front of world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

If you have a moment to spare and you think that female genital mutilation -  the removal of little girls’ genitals to turn them into commodities traded by men – is unacceptable, please watch the video and then vote for Julia on the YouTube Davos channel.

Thank you in advance!

Filed Under: networking, online video Tagged With: , , , ,

Companies Communications: stop with the spam please

January 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Sorry Companies Communications, but it’s the only option you leave me

I keep getting bloody spam from these people and of course, there’s no ‘unsubscribe’ link in their emails.

So here they are in my ‘Spam Hall of Shame’ complete with highly Google-visible title so that the next time they (or some other spam recipient like me) searches on their name, they’ll get this polite reminder:

PLEASE TAKE ME OFF YOUR EMAIL LIST (you know, the one I never asked to be on in the first place?)

Filed Under: GRRRR!!!, Spam Hall of Shame Tagged With: , , , ,

YouTube porn: Zip It, Flag It, Block It why don’t you?

January 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

People uploading porn to YouTube? What, honestly, did you expect?

I wish people would stop getting on all shocked and horrified to find porn on YouTube pretending to be videos of kiddies’ favourite artists.

Does that mean I think it’s right, or good or healthy?  Of course not.

What it means is I wish people would wake up and understand that there IS no way to control the internet and its content (short of being China).  That means our precious kiddies have, do and will be accidentally, occasionally and often deliberately watching porn.  Of the hardest, nastiest kind.

The problem we have in society today is that it’s too unpleasant to even look at truth of that sentence long enough to digest what it really implies (far less the actual material out there that our kids are watching).

Yes, mums and dads.  Hardcore, abusive, nasty, dirty, depraved, degrading and soul destroying stuff that our under 10s are finding every day on YouTube – even before this ‘newsworthy’ attack.  I watched that nice child psychologist, Professor Tanya Byron, on BBC Breakfast tv a couple of months ago talking about going into schools to teach children a new ‘Green Cross Code’ for internet safety; Zip It, Flag It, Block It.  It’s utter nonsense.

Why?  Because Government and well-meaning professionals seem to have no idea about the scale or true nature of this problem.  Don’t believe me?  Then ask yourself this: what’s the first thing an internet-savvy person would do after creating an ‘internet safety campaign’ aimed at kids?  That’s right – grab that keyphrase.  But if you Google ‘Zip It, Flag It, Block It‘ you’ll see that Prof Byron has failed to do that.

What does this mean? Well, for starters it suggests that the people behind this initiative don’t really understand how the world of search and online marketing works.  That, in turn, makes me question how they can possibly have an realistic grasp of the scale or the nature of the problem.

And on a practical level, it delivers children, parents and educators searching for ‘Zip It, Flag It, Block It’ to commentators like me, newspapers and other indirect sources.  And if I can get on to the first page of Google (and I could have got higher on P1 if I’d put the phrase ‘Zip It, Flag It, Block It’ at the start of my post title and repeated in the headers but I chose not to) you can see how easy it is for a pornographer to hi-jack this search phrase to put his/her wares in front of kids. That’s a real world demonstration of how easy it is.

I don’t mean to be unsupportive, Tanya. I respect your intentions and in principle we should try to equip our children to deal with what they find online.  But until we’re honest about the world we’ve created online, about how much unhealthy stuff we – and they – are already consuming and until we are able to have a more enlightened debate about why it’s unhealthy in the first place, I really don’t think it will make much difference.

Like drug and alcohol use, the situation is worse so long as we’re in denial about what’s really going on – even if it’s only because we really don’t know.  Personally, I think the growing effect of the consumption of online content is more damaging than anyone is prepared to admit or is willing to discuss openly.

Remember, there’s no point reaching for solutions until we’ve learned to be honest about the problem.

Filed Under: critical approach to online media, GRRRR!!! Tagged With: , ,

Monster Tuna picture? Nope. Just a bit of photoShop, Tokyo style

January 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Someone caught the worlds’ biggest tuna – and forgot to take a picture? Huh?

Can you believe it?

I saw this news item on BBC website and immediately clicked, expecting (not unreasonably) to see a monster tuna.  All I got was some stock photography of a tuna processing plant.  I went to Google but couldn’t find any pictures, anywhere.  Just more text reports and fishery shots – like this.  What??  A story without a picture?  What’s that worth?  Like, er, nothing?  According to the BBC, their fish weighed ‘nearly four times as much as the average Japanese man’ so, in the absence of any real pictures, I thought I’d help out with my mock-up.

The whole thing smells fishy to me.  I mean, you wouldn’t believe your mate if he came back from fishing with a story about the 232kg fish that got away, would you?

So imagine my surprise to Google this – a 268kg tuna, pictured next to a small kid.  Hang on BBC – that’s 36kg bigger than your ‘record breaking’, invisible, monster.

I know which story I believe.

Filed Under: critical approach to online media, media, smile Tagged With: , , , ,
Newer Posts »