Best email newsletter service? Campaign Monitor

January 27, 2010 By Sam Deeks 4 Comments

Campaign Monitor impresses me from the start as ‘get going straight away’ email newsletter package

Choosing the right email marketing software isn’t easy. Anyone can put up a site and create a slick impression but it’s only when you’ve committed your money that you find out you’re dealing with chancers operating out of their bedrooms.

If you’re not particularly techie but want a service that you can pick up and use, you’re going to be disappointed. For a start, whatever service you’re using you’ll find out that even creating a newsletter from a standard template isn’t a simple, drag and drop affair, far less editing a template to customise it.

I suspect that’s the biggest surprise the non-techie business person gets: nothing in the world of HTML and email is ‘what you see is what you get’ meaning that unless you understand something of HTML and php editing you’re going to struggle to to build a good looking newsletter. Which, of course, is why people leave it to agencies.

But once you realise that and learn enough to bend a template into something that suits you, there’s still a massive spread of difference between services.

I’ve only used two packages – but they’re a world apart. The first, GraphicMail appealed simply because of its name and the fact it had a ‘.co.uk’ at the end. Hey, I thought, I’d prefer a UK person to help me out when I inevitably get into trouble. On the plus side, GraphicMail is a low cost service, coming in at something like £9.95 a month for 2000 email sends. That seems simple enough – although (unbelievably) there is no ‘buy’ button on their site. After giving them some (clearly unwelcome) feedback to that effect, I was told that you had to sign up for a free account and convert it to paid. So what if I’d used it before and knew what I wanted? No answer.

Once aboard, the GraphicMail editing interface is clunky. There are plenty of free templates to get started with and you use the online editor to make any changes to the template and to the content. For a relative novice, it’s pretty unfathomable, resulting in continuously losing the whole template when accidentally (clumsily) deleting some CSS div or something or other. To be fair, my ineptitude isn’t GraphicMail’s fault but other systems (see below) anticipate this and do a far better job of minimising the risk of losing everything.

I sent a campaign from GraphicMail (eventually) after an unacceptable delay resulting from awful signposting on their site and a dreadful customer service conversation via chat.

Two days later, I decided to look for a better service. This time I read a ‘top 10 email newsletter systems reviewed’ list – from which GraphicMail was noticeable by it’s absence. Top of the list was Campaign Monitor, so I signed up to give it a go.

The whole experience was different from the beginning. The site is calm, professional and every part of it is so logically laid out that it anticipates what you need to do before you need to do it. Campaign Monitor is clearly designed for the professional design / web agency who wants to run multiple email campaigns for multiple clients. That immediately appealed to me, as I have at least three clients I needed to create campaigns for.

What also struck me about Campaign Monitor was that it soon became apparent that it would let me have an account, create various campaigns, import all my mailing lists and then charge at the point of sending. Something about that just makes sense. Why? Because with Campaign Monitor, by the time you come to send your campaign, it will have filled you with such confidence that you’ve made the right choice, you’ll pay without hesitation.

And here’s a lovely touch: you pay by credit card for however many you send. No ongoing fees. Just pay as you send. How customer-focused and sensible. Alternatively, you can buy a pile of credits up front and just use them to send. It’s a flat fee of $5 per mail-out (or ‘campaign’) plus 1c for each email sent.

So far, everything about Campaign Monitor works brilliantly. Templates are edited offline (with Dreamweaver or some such software) and imported back into your account. The beauty of this is that it means Campaign Monitor doesn’t struggle to live edit your templates AND your content online. It concentrates on just handling your content.

The only niggle I have with it is that when it came to creating my content, I found myself having to add images to my newsletter via HTML and switching back. That’s right, there’s no ‘image upload’. And then, of course, I realised why: Campaign Monitor isn’t there to serve your images to clients; that’s something you have to do. That, when you stop and think about it is a smart move (what jobbing web designer wouldn’t have their own server space?) and would also deter the ‘casual’ or inexperienced newsletter creator.

And, when all’s said and done, that kind of makes sense. Campaign Monitor is an easy-in, confidence-inspiring tool that will deter the unscrupulous spammer but welcomes the web agency or designer looking to service a range of clients. It even has clever options for sub-billing, allowing for mark up for email costings. I have no idea about Campaign Monitor’s customer service (I’ve had no reason to need to contact them) although the whole set up of this service leads me to believe it would be good. GraphicMail, by contrast, distinguished itself by my needing to contact them more than once – and giving some truly, memorably, bad customer service in the process.

Enough said. Campaign Monitor. You won’t be disappointed.

Filed Under: feedback, marketing Tagged With: campaign monitor, customer service, email newsletter, graphicmail, marketing, software

Online reputation management: do it yourself

January 13, 2010 By Sam Deeks 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: customer service, feedback, google, listening, online reputation management, reputation monitoring

BA Complaints: How does British Airways respond to feedback?

August 21, 2009 By Sam Deeks 44 Comments

We’ll see how they respond to my recent poor Club World experience

2012 update!

Well, here we are three years later and I just wanted to update with a recent experience with BA Club World and BA First Class.

I flew BA Club to Singapore last week and, to my surprise, found the experience almost exactly the same as 3 years ago. The accommodation was fine; I slept well and the service was reasonably good. Actually, in the case of the one Malaysian (I think) stewardess the quality of service was superb – noticeably higher than that of her English colleagues. But it was when it came to the food that it went downhill fast. The main course I ordered was some beef dish and the moment it arrived I KNEW it was from the same catering stable as 3 years before. It looked revolting and was inedible – EXACTLY as bad as the food I had in Club in 2009 that prompted me to write the original post (see below).

For a ticket price of nearly five and a half thousand pounds, this is unacceptable. If it hadn’t been for the fact that my travel was booked and paid by my client, I wouldn’t have been on BA at all by choice.

On the way back, the travel agency had got me an upgrade to First Class which provided an interesting opportunity to compare the quality of experience of BA’s two most expensive services. For the price of a month’s luxury holiday for two in the Maldives what you get in First Class is a very quiet, comfortable experience with attentive (if not very warm or genuine) staff.

The seat / beds are excellent and some of the associated benefits (access to lounges at the start and finish of the journey) are good too. But the real difference between the two is the food – which is light-years away from the slop served up in Club. In First, it’s planned, prepared, cooked and served properly and it tastes good.

BA First Class was certainly a better experience than Virgin’s Upper Class from London to Washington (which featured tired seat fittings and unremarkable service and food).

If I had spent £11,000 of my own money on these BA Club flights, I’d be furious. Luckily, I didn’t but that isn’t the point here. The point here is that next time I need to travel business I will probably be asking my client specifically not to book me on a BA flight.

I know things are tight in the airline industry but if you can’t afford to provide good quality food on a premium service with such a high price, then I’d suggest that you cannot afford to be running the service at all.

***********************

ORIGINAL POST:

Fri 21 Aug 16:00: Fill out online form

Fri 21 Aug 16:21: Receive email from BA with ‘case’ reference number

Wed 26th Aug 15:49 Receive email from BA (click thumbnail left to read in full)

I recently travelled BA from Mumbai to London in ‘Club World’ class. By comparison to a competitor airline I flew long-haul that same week, it was a poor experience. So poor, in fact, that I was moved to write to British Airways and offer them feedback (under their heading ‘complaints comments and claims’).

Now, we all know that BA – like many airlines – is in dire trouble in this current economic crisis. So much so that it recently asked staff to volunteer to work for a month unpaid to help ease the company’s crisis and keep it afloat (sorry ‘in the air’).

If my flight with BA last week is anything to go by, then it’s also starting to show in the customer experience. I’ve given them my feedback but what can they do? What would you do?

Working for nothing to try to save your job is one thing. Expecting customers to join you in that heroic struggle is another.

Filed Under: feedback Tagged With: BA, British Airways, club world, customer service, economic crisis

Sky Customer Service (Part II: It gets worse)

March 29, 2009 By Sam Deeks 5 Comments

Yes, Sky. Your customer service seems to get worse the further I go to try to give you feedback.

No surprise really is it?

Sky’s system for creating addtional email addresses for account holders’ family members isn’t working. No-one seems to care. I found that out in a 2 1/2 hour phone call the other day.

So I blogged about it. That post appeared on P1 of Google for the phrase ‘Sky Customer Service’. Oh, the power of blogs.

And today I tried to use their online feedback form to let them know that they needed to fix the problem and demonstrate some good customer service.

So I ploughed my way through their clumsy feedback form which appears to be designed to dissuade and demotivate the average person every step of the way. You know the kind of form – designed by some idiot in IT who has no idea that you’re a real, unhappy customer trying to say what you need to say.

The result is that you spend ages trying to give your feedback only to find you’ve done something else wrong that needs correcting. I wasted 15 minutes writing my feedback before discovering that there was a ’1000 character limit’.

Morons. Like I or anyone else knows what 1000 characters is.

This is a pinnacle of customer service stupidity, designed to disempower the average mortal. Well, when it comes to feedback I’m not your average mortal so I rewrote my feedback.

10 minutes later (and still not knowing whether it was under 1000 characters!) I clicked ‘submit’ again – only this time to be told I couldn’t give that feedback without entering my parents’ viewing card number.

I tried to give you my feedback, Sky, but it’s too much like hard work. You could have had it to yourselves to learn from but you obviously don’t want it. So here’s what I tried to tell you (now for everyone else to read, too):

This is on behalf of my parents – account holder name Mrs. Linda Deeks (see address below)

Your system will not create additional email addresses (it says “There appears to have been a problem. We are unable to activate your Sky Email and Tools account”.

Your customer service is poor – and even more infuriating is your lack of willingness to take feedback. Including this 1000 character limit (which has just wasted another 15 minutes of my time).

I’ve blogged about this (now on P1 of Google for an important key phrase). Happy to also blog positively if/when you fix the issue and demonstrate some good customer service.

I’d like a response please.

The moral of this story is that feedback is difficult to give and hard to take but if you’re not willing to listen, your customers will talk to anyone who is.

If you’re really fed up with Sky customer service, you might like this .

Filed Under: feedback Tagged With: bad, blogging, customer service, disempowerment, feedback forms, poor, Sky

Sky customer service 0844 rip-off

March 27, 2009 By Sam Deeks 42 Comments

No wonder Sky customer service likes to keep you talking on its 0844 number

They’re making good money out of it!

I spent 2 and 1/2 hours continuously on the phone to Sky trying to sort out my parents’ rubbish broadband service, their incomplete phone package and – wait for it – get my dad an email address of his very own.

The first thing I noticed when I dialled the 0844 number was how overwhelmingly talkative the nice technical man was. Without any invitation he took it on himself to give me a lengthy lecture on the physics of copper wiring and broadband signals.

He just kept on…and on…and on…and on.

On the one hand, he was very helpful and was able to improve the capacity of the broadband connection a bit. On the other hand, I couldn’t help wondering how much money his monologue on copper telephone technology had earned Sky.

The good news ended there.

The www.sky.com website repeatedly failed to create a new email address for my dad. Why? ‘Because it’s broken’ said the wee fella on the end of the phone. And it’s still broken. What use is a broadband package if you can’t create additional email addresses for the family?

And would you like to sell them the full phone package you inexplicably failed to sell them a few months ago? I enquired. The response was 20 minutes of incomprehensible cock-and-bull and STILL they couldn’t sell them the package. They’d probably made so much money on the 0844 that they didn’t need to.

This is so typical of the UK’s biggest companies. No-one to complain to. No management or supervisors to be accountable. No buck stopping no where. Just a lame suggestion to put my complaint in writing.

I am writing, Sky. Here in this Google-visible blog.

If you’re unwilling to accept Sky’s bad customer service and lack of accountability, here are a few useful contact email addresses from saynoto0870.com you could try:

Sky CEO Email Address:- jeremy.darroch@bskyb.com
Only Other Executive Board Member Email Address:- andrew.griffith@bskyb.com

Director of Customer Marketing (not a Board Director) mark.anderson@bskyb.com

High Level Escalated Complaints Address Used
by Sky To Respond to Complaints Addressed to
Jeremy Darroch’s Email Address CRsupport@bskyb.com

Filed Under: feedback Tagged With: 0844, broadband, customer service, email, rip off, scam, Sky

Benugo BFI Southbank: excellent food, great customer service

March 18, 2009 By Sam Deeks Leave a Comment

A mukau reputation boost for Benugo BFI Southbank

I went to a Christmas dinner at Benugo restaurant at BFI and it was… ok. Actually, it was a bit less than ok and one of the party gave them some feedback via their website.

Their response was an apology and £50 in vouchers to compensate.

Tonight we went back to Benugo’s for a second visit.

Going back to a place where you didn’t have the best experience isn’t always easy. It’s nice to be able to report that coming back to Benugo’s we were not disappointed. Julian and I both had shin of beef and roasted carrots with spring greens and roast potatoes and it was superb.

The new manager went out of his way to make us welcome and chat with us (despite actor John Hurt and his entourage turning up at the bar at the same time). The service was great too.

A mukau reputation boost to Benugo’s for taking feedback, making amends and going out of their way to keep us as customers and – more importantly – convert us into advocates. Good move!

Filed Under: mukau reputation boost Tagged With: benugo, BFI, customer service, john hurt, mukau reputation boost, Southbank

Who regulates PayPal in the UK?

November 29, 2008 By Sam Deeks Leave a Comment

Listen to The Mu Show #3 to find out who regulates PayPal in the UK – and how to complain

. click to listen

Are you unhappy with some aspect of PayPal’s service and frustrated by theircustomer service? Have you just about given up hope of getting your issue with PayPal resolved because you just don’t know where to turn?

The good news it that help is on hand. The Mu Show #3 tells you who regulates PayPal, who to complain to – and how to complain for maximum effect. We’ve also been poking away at PayPal through our blog posts (like this one) in the hope that the company will start listening and communicating better.

Listen to the show here – and do let us know your views on our voicemail line 01752 548771

Filed Under: The Dripping Tap Tagged With: complain, customer service, paypal, regulator, The Mu Show, UK

Great customer service: the secret

September 23, 2008 By Sam Deeks 1 Comment

What makes great customer service? Your ability to:

Listen, understand, respond

It’s simple – but not easy to do.

Interestingly, the same three things that add up to good online reputation monitoring.

We specialise in looking at why it’s so hard for organisations to listen. Why individuals struggle to understand the experience of the customer and what gets in the way of responding positively and respectfully.

Many organisations try to make customer service ridiculously complex. Our take is that it’s simple, but hard.

Filed Under: business insight Tagged With: customer service, simple

PayPal customer service: how good is it?

September 23, 2008 By Sam Deeks Leave a Comment

Does PayPal give good customer service?

Not in my experience. Not in my brothers’ experience. Not, it seems, in an awful lot of other peoples’ experience.

We’ve all had our fill of listening to call center operatives struggling through scripts in a second language. And losing money because this company seems to bank on people going away in despair rather than stick to their guns and demand satisfaction.

As customers, we expect a) to be listened to and b) our experience to be understood and c) our needs to be responded to.

There. That’s the ‘Dripping Tap’ manifesto.

Listen. Understand. Respond.

Simple isn’t it?

Filed Under: feedback Tagged With: customer service, dripping tap, paypal

Soft but unyielding..

November 8, 2007 By mukaumedia Leave a Comment

Me: “Would you agree that a reasonable definition of ‘fit for purpose’ might be an expectation that this machine would still be functional on its second birthday?”

Senior customer relations person: “Sir, you had the choice to buy the extended warranty and you chose not to”

Me: “I do hope this call is being recorded because effectively you’re telling me that I have to buy an extended warranty if I want this machine to run for two years! I don’t call that a choice, I call that a ‘pre-requisite’! Tell me, if you bought a brand new car and two years later, a part failed that rendered the car a write-off, what would you do?”

Senior customer relations person: (pause) “Sir, I would start saving for another car….”

Me: “Rubbish. You and your entire family would be banging down the dealer’s door demanding your money back – because the car wouldn’t have been fit for purpose!”

I enjoyed the conversation. The Senior customer relations person was very polite and adamant she could not do anything. I took the time to point out that, whatever the company procedures said, the long and short of it was that I was once a happy customer full of glowing referrals and was now an unhappy one unlikely to buy or recommend their products for them any more.

Saving? £600. Loss? My next purchase as a minimum.

Filed Under: GRRRR!!! Tagged With: customer service, flannel, Mac