Archive for May, 2009

Why Email is Killing your Service Support Business

Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 23:13  
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We live in a world of technology. Nowadays people choose to click online to research, to chat, the shop, to be informed, to be entertained and to connect to others. While cyberspace is thriving in almost every single way possible, if is also slowly killing your business. 

And the culprit is Email. 

Although email may be extremely convenient, inexpensive and effective, it is actually doing more harm than good. 

Read on to discover the top three ways that email is killing your business.

1. It’s unreliable: You never can tell if your email was sent through. Emails are constantly getting lost in cyber space. There are problems with connection, with servers and with your customer’s servers. 

Sometimes a customer will send an email and you will not get it for days. Furthermore, sometimes your reply will get lost. 

Either way, the customer will blame you and this miscommunication error will result in an unhappy customer and a lack of sales. 

2. It’s not personal: Emails are so standard these days that we forget how personal a real live conversation can be. When you receive an email, it is hard to determine the tone, emotion and feeling in the email. 

Customers are left wondering if your response is a generic email, an auto-response or an actual, personal attempt to solve the solution. This can be extremely frustrating for the customer.

3. It’s not in “real time”: Emails are quick; there is no denying this. However, they are still not in ‘real time’ meaning the response time can vary depending on when the reader receives the email and replies to it. This can be anywhere between 10 minutes and 10 years. 

Of course, when replying to customer inquiries with emails, you always reply within a standard period, say 24 hours; however, this is still not a real time solution. 

Often a customer needs help now, not whenever the email is answered. 

So what’s the solution to this?  Simple. Help Desks. 

Help Desks fix all of these email-related problems. They are reliable as someone is always there to answer a customer’s call. There is no more confusion or worry about whether your email went through. 

Furthermore, they are personal as each customer complaint is handled in an individual fashion. Speaking one on one to a customer service rep will allow the customer to feel connected and prove to the customer that your company cares about them. Speaking to a real person can work wonders in the customer service sector. 

Finally help desks are in real time. That is, when a customer calls, they will be connected to someone immediately. There are no long response times while the customer waits for a sales rep to log on and check their email. 

A customer inquiry should be answered the moment they place it. That way you are proving to them that you care about their problem right then, and that you are dedicated to helping find a solution now, not later. 

Help Desks are the perfect way to ensure your customers complaints and inquiries are taken care of in a professional and personal manner.


Loyalty Marketing Program

Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 05:13  
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What is it that does best for your commercial enterprise? Often you have wondered about it and wandered about the various options that are coming up in front of you. You might think a good and efficient labor force or simply technology or something simpler like advertisement.

But the truth as we found out was that if a company can develop a sincere and loyal client base, not only will the sales increase manifold by virtue of direct sales to these clients but in fact they will also preach about your company and make it famous enough to draw sales.

Loyalty marketing has for such reasons become such a concern nowadays. In the present stature of competition it becomes important to sustain a group of extremely dedicated clients who have a strong bond with the company and help spread it and recover sales figures. They also last the longest.
 
Your loyalty marketing strategy should be well planned out and devised with due attention paid to every aspect possible. For this you need to know a few things. To begin with you have to know with what frequency your customers and which ones are returning to your enterprise to make purchases.

Offer special services to your valued customers and you’ll see them responding positively in turn. Thus you craft an efficient two-way system that facilitates al your transactions in future.

At no point should it look to them that this is becoming a sole money-garnering tactic on your part. There should be considerable attention you pay to their requirements too.

Your strategy should be important in how you approach your customers to ask them to refer you to new customers. There are 4 basic measures by which strategy is devised. These are:

  • Customer behavior tracking: To facilitate loyalty marketing, there needs to be a definite attempt to locate your consumers and especially the loyal ones. You have to find out the expenses he/she incurs on your products. Their behavioral dimensions and attitudes towards the company should b noted simultaneously. This way you know in advance who is impressed enough and who is not.
  • Measurement: Keep a track of the performance objectives that your company is trying to accomplish. Also find out the customers’ retention analysis data. These will enable you to track what is working against your concern.
  • Dialogue Marketing: Make sure you are sending the right signals and the right ideas to your preferred customers. Also crucial is that you are sending them at the right time.
  • Customer Rewards and Benefits Programs: Match the needs and the requirements of your loyal customers and offer them bonus and other gift items that will always please the customer concerned and act as incentives for them to push your firm.
  • Loyalty brochure: There should be separate loyalty brochures that you could deal out amongst your customers to tell them what’s in store for them.
  • Customer Rewards and Benefits Programs: For loyalty marketing, this is a very helpful platform for your loyal customers to actually earn or reap rewards from your company that is actually particularly matched to every individual customer’s needs and preference.

Art of Customer Follow-up

Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 05:07  
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One of the most important factors of Customer Management in business is building up of customer loyalty through follow-up. This field is increasingly gaining prominence since companies now recognize the importance of customer retention, which in turn, leads to new customers.

This type of marketing, which relies more on turning first-time buyers into loyal future customers instead of merely acquiring new customers, is called Relationship Marketing. 

The processes undertaken by a company to handle its customers is called Customer Relationship Management. One of the most common and important processes of Customer Relationship Management is sending a letter.

Though it sounds simple, it helps in bringing many first time buyers back to a particular company. A few things that might be introduced in a letter to induce customers to buy again are:

  • A sincere thank you, welcoming customers to the company’s services and assuring them that they are the most important part of a company.
  • A feedback form, which enables the customer to directly offer his opinions on the services and products of the company. This, in turn, may offer valuable suggestions to be kept in mind for new customers.
  • An assurance that your company was easily the best bet and the customer was, in fact, correct in opting for your company. This helps building up the customer’s confidence that this is the best company for his/her required product.
  • A time-limited offer which introduces a sense of urgency in the customer’s mind. Asking them to grab an offer within a particular time-period raises the customer’s interest. Introducing the same offer in more than one letter with varying levels of urgency (each being more urgent than the previous one) makes the customer excited about the offer as well.
  • A general follow-up merely asking whether the customer is happy and satisfied with the product purchased helps in building up of customer faith.
  • Additional references to other products (by your own company) shows that the company cares abut customer comfort and the personalized needs of the customer.
  • Asking the customer to refer the company to somebody they know, is also a good idea to promote not only customer faith but also introduce new buyers to your company. The customer might also be “rewarded” for his/her effort by giving them a discount on their next purchase (this also ensures customer loyalty.) Using a coupon in the letter encourages customers to pass them on if they don’t require them.

Statistics also show that companies who get back to customers making inquiries about their products and services also gain customer loyalty. By making note of potential buyers, the company also gains a reputation of good service and excellent customer care. 

Any company’s main objective should be to promote a sense of security in the customer. It is important, therefore, that you make your customers feel comfortable, so that they keep coming back to your company, bringing in new references as well. After all, ‘the customer is always right’!


Proven Methods of Customer Retention

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 22:13  
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It is accepted business wisdom that a returning customer is the best customer. In a competitive market where the customer has a plethora of choices, returning customers indicate that they are satisfied with their first purchase and that they trust you.

Trust is an invaluable component in any business relation and if maintained and nurtured, is an assured asset which will yield returns over and over again.

So a crucial part of your job in retaining your existing customers is to keep them thinking of you. You cannot afford to neglect or ignore them at any stage if you want them back. So you have to make provisions for free gifts, discount offers, add-ons, etc. and make arrangements for mailings and follow ups in order to sustain their interest.

It is easy if your customers come through Internet campaigns, for you can then use email lists to keep them informed and interested.

But in the more traditional brick and mortar world, all this is a bit more taxing and cumbersome for you have to invest in print or media ads and direct mailings. These routes are as effective as your email lists, and to have a better chance, you should add the attraction of special offers, sales, and free gifts.

If you use only email, you need to be especially careful and make sure that you are providing your potential customers sufficient reason to continue being on your list. You could try and make available to them significant information about their interests and preferred topics. If you are able to lure them to your website through your email, you could introduce them to other products and offers.

In the snail mail world, it is to your advantage if you can use coupons to put products on sale. This allows you to compare and measure the relative successes of your different approaches or campaigns, and to evaluate the merits and drawbacks of each.

Send out one sales mailing to half of your customer list, and a different one to the other half, and assess the conversion rates of the mailings. The same strategy can as well be used with email.

Connect with your customers and make records about their interests, wants and preferences. You can then provide customized products and information for their guaranteed satisfaction

Another simple and effective way to build relations with your customer is to send them greeting cards containing a simple expression of your appreciation for them.

 

You could send out the cards for birthdays or anniversaries, on Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or New Year. You could even use these cards as invitation to attend your special sales or for other more direct announcements.

The advantage of greeting cards is that they are more discreet, more personal and more warm, things that your customer may remember you by. 


Get Your Customers to Say ‘Wow!

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 at 20:03  
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What is the WOW response? It is not that easy to figure out, is it? The wow response is ideally the kind of response that you would receive from the satisfied customer.

A customer, who walks into a shop, finds what he or she wants and is happy not only with what he or she has found but the entire shopping experience, and also a customer who has discovered the bonus of shopping in a way like never before.

This is the customer who will return again and again to the shop and would prefer to do all her shopping in the same place if possible or even let out a “WOW” every time she walks out of the shop after the shopping is done with.

How can your bottom line meet up to the needs of the response, wow?

One key way of accomplishing this is to manage to slip in as many promises as you can in your sale. The ideal would be to slip in as many promisable items that you can imagine your sale to carry with it.

Once you have done this, ensure that you under promise as in you list a week a delivery time when you merely need 4 days to do the same. Do not shy away from such promises as customers necessarily like them and when you work better than you promise they will be simply thrilled and delighted and you will be rewarded with that “wow” response for which you have been trying all this while.  

Work on the first impression that your concern is going to have on the potential customer.

You have to do up your place or site (whichever applicable) as well as possible. There should be every degree of comfort for the customer when he or she explores your shop.

The visitors should like the colors and the textures and everything your design could do should be aiming to soothe the shopping experience of your customer. You should also impress them sufficiently with your services and the kind of help you are offering your customers.

Your problem solving techniques should be optimized to ensure maximum satisfaction to your customers when they visit your place. Do not make your customer feel left out at any point ensuring that you do not cross over to interfering with her shopping. Thus you have to be friends with your customer more than anything else. Your customer when and if she does come back to your shop should recognize you immediately. So keep a habit of making friends with strangers or out of them in turn.

A wow response is further egged on by the value for money that the customer avails off her purchase from your enterprise.

Prices are constantly climbing nowadays and so you should be sufficiently geared up to display that though your price might seem to be high there is definitely more than expected in store for your customer.

Try and squeeze in gifts or something similar as extra for the best effects. This should be an extra and added over anyway in spite of price deductions.

Keep in touch with them. Try and call them again without being irritating. Birthdays, anniversaries are always a nice time to call.

But apart from thus, this should be a part of your service to call them when possible to find out about them and the product.

There you go, now you know how to get the wow response!


Troubleshooting PC Application Errors

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 16:10  
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There are several types of applications running on a Windows computer. First you have the operating system, next the device drivers that are used to control your hardware components and devices. Next, there are applications, such as Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word that you use to do your work. You also have security tools, such as antivirus and antispyware programs that are meant to keep your PC safe from external attacks. Additionally, you have software, such as games, PC maintenance utilities, and media players that you need to perform various other activities.

Most of the tasks that these applications perform are done with the help of exe files. For example, Internet Explorer is launched by running the iexplore.exe file and tscd_win32.exe is used by NTRU Cryptosystems to perform specific tasks.

Application errors occur when one or more required conditions for a particular application or process are not met. For example, you may encounter ikernel.exe application error if there are some problems with the memory chips installed on your PC.

Let us now have a look at some of the steps that you may perform to troubleshoot application errors.

  1. As soon as an application error occurs, the first task should be to check that all conditions required to work with the particular application are met. For example, if you encounter the iexplore.exe error, then you may first ensure that your PC is connected to the Internet or ensure that Internet Explorer does not have too many add on components installed that are preventing it from working normally. If a system file, such ikernel.exe generates errors, you must run diagnostics tests on your system hardware.  To do this, you may use a good PC diagnostics utility.
  2. Next, because all applications require exe files to perform various actions, ensure that your PC is not infected by a virus. This is required because virus infections are a major cause of several problems related to exe files. To ensure that your PC is free from virus infections, you must update your antivirus tool and perform a full system scan. If an infection is detected, you must get rid of it to resolve the error. It is recommended that you run the virus scan twice to ensure that no malicious information is left behind.
  3. Application errors may occur if you fail to update your software on a regular basis. Software manufacturers release these updates to include enhancements in their products and also to patch up any bugs or security loopholes detected in them. To update Windows and other Microsoft products automatically, you must keep the Windows Automatic Update feature enabled at all times. You must also update your other software whenever you are prompted to do so. Lastly, to update your device drivers easily and efficiently, you may seek the help of a good driver scanner tool.
  4. If your hard disk is cluttered with junk files and is fragmented, errors are bound to arise. To prevent this, you need to use the Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter tools to first clean up the hard disk and then defrag it to make it contiguous and fast.
  5. Finally, ensure that your registry is intact and the errors are not generating due to erroneous entries within it. To scan and repair registry entries easily and efficiently, you may use a reliable registry cleaner tool.

Keep Your Customers Happy

Sunday, May 17th, 2009 at 17:59  
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You want to please all of your customers, but the problem is they are all different and unique. Pleasing all of them is impossible. Rather select a small segment and try to please them and automatically the number of happy customer grows.

I know of quite a few experienced business men who usually take a feedback from their customers. This is an excellent method of knowing the needs of the customer but the feedback must be used with discretion. 

However, some business men may make the mistake in taking each suggestion very seriously and thus constantly change their product line and business practices. But this constant change may make the businesses unstable and cause frustration, extra cost and extra work.

Customer feedback is important but their interpretation is critical. You can’t please every one rather try to please those you can. Find out the customer need and then streamline the products and services.

Be intelligent in business. Get focused on what needs to be done and the profits will grow. Choose quality over quantity. Try to please the one’s you can. Trying to please everyone will end up pleasing no one. Create a better strong business by combining your strength and majority of customer needs.

Let’s take here an example of a business woman who owned a jewelry store. She has an expertise on diamonds and 60% of her clientele come for that. She also keeps other gold and silver jewelry. She should have been more focused on diamonds and not dilute her market with other things, and grown bigger. 

She could have done surveys which are diamond oriented and could have become the biggest diamond retailer in the neighborhood, by just adjusting her focus.

Always try to focus on your strengths rather than weaknesses. You’ll prosper as a brand and bigger service provider.

Do your best to please people and leave the one’s you can’t. You’ll have more happy customers and strong and stable business.

Here are some tips:

  • You can’t please everyone, so only try to please those you can.
  • Find out your customer requirements.
  • Eliminate ideas that are not focused on customer’s desires.
  • Build on the areas that cater to customer needs.

Here are some important points you should keep in mind while customer handling:

  • Everyone is different and unique.
  • Customer feed back is essential but your interpretation of that is critical.
  • Pleasing everyone is not possible so try to please the one’s you can and you’ll end up with more happy customers.

You must combine your strength and desire of majority of customers to create a better and strong business.


Customer Service Lifetime Value

Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 22:31  
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Are you aware of the lifetime value of a customer? If by now you have not given a serious thought, it’s time you do now. Customers are the king. They can make or break your business and there’s no two ways about it.

If you already know that, I can bet you do take extra care of each and every customer of yours. There is a simple formula that could do the trick for you and let’s see how it works.

While making our sales we need to show it to our customers that we have something always ready to improve the situation.

You will be surprised once you find out the worth of each customer. To find out the value of the customer one needs to know two pieces of information. We first need to know the average a customer does a year and next we need to know how long the average customer does business with us.

Once you have managed to get this vital piece of information you need to multiply both the values. The product of the two values would determine the lifetime value of the customer. Customers are like gold, precious!

By retaining all our customers we can add value in two ways. There is a definite way to increase business. To do so, one needs increase the frequency and value of the orders. Another way in which you could duplicate good customer is by referral and introducing new business.

It is very important to build strong customer relations. A business research shows it is much more difficult to keep an old customer than to find a new one. It’s sad and humiliating if we lose our customers to poor salesmanship.

The success of our business depends on how often we keep in touch with our customers. The main purpose of the article is to remind us of the importance of keeping in touch with our customer, as this would bring them back.

One should keep in mind that our competitors are always striving to take away our best customers, so the trick lies in keeping them like vintage playing cards. We should set in top priority to thank our customers for their business. It is our duty and we could easily find out how much they mean to us by simply multiplying. This calculation would help you to find out how much your top customers are worth. 


Understanding Your Customers

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 19:38  
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The inability to know your customers is the greatest loss, you, as a potential service provider can face. Since you are nothing without your customer, your first priority should be to know them and what they want and expect from your company or product.

Moreover, knowing them not only increases your chances of selling them more goods, leading to your profit, but also causing the inflow of more customers through recommendation. Hence getting to know your clients, greeting and treating them to their liking is crucial to the success of your business venture.

This kind of rapport with your client is even more essential if you keep in mind the nature and the degree of aggressive marketing your fellow business rivals conduct everyday. Your primary asset in business are your clients, this is because if you know their mentality and gauge their buying trends and their preferences, you have the market in hand.

This kind of valuable customer information will also enable you to replenish stock, get the most viably trendy products in the market, thereby satisfy your customers and in the process entice them into come back again to be serviced.

Moreover not knowing your customers will only hinder your chances at success to a greater degree because if you do not know what pleases your customer, you will never know how to approach them. Some might like curt matter of fat dealings, while another might like that occasional chitchat and “hello.”

So if you do not know who likes what you will only end up causing them dissatisfaction and yourself economic loss, due to sheer ignorance and simple lacking of planning. Moreover if you sit down and think about it this abstract ‘market’ that you talk about is no one but the sum total of your customers. So if you want to target the market, then this is the bunch you have to satiate and cater to.

What your customer says is very important for you and your overall success. After finishing one deal you instinctively try to convince them to buy something else; this is only natural and can be called maximizing profit.

But what you should also be doing simultaneously is trying to egg out information about their economic status, what they can afford and what not, what thy need next in their household which might come from your shop.

All this will help you in fixing future deals with them and wooing them back to your shop. So always engage in conversation with them and most importantly listen to them, they might be unconsciously divulging information that might eventually give you an edge over you’re your next door rival service provider. 


Customer Relationship – Important?

Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 23:40  
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It is said nowadays that whether one buys a cup of coffee, a holiday, a house or a car the decision of purchasing has to be emotional. More importantly it is a crucial factor in customer retention and loyalty. Customer satisfaction is the underpinning factor in customer experience. Customer should feel good in doing business with the product or the service provider.

While purchasing rationality, reflection, judgment of pros and cons do play a part but it has to have an emotional side to it. One’s gut feeling, intuition, sense and interaction plays a significant role in buying.

In every single encounter what the customer feels or doesn’t feel is directly related with the service provider’s managerial capability and handling of customer expectations. Customer experience doesn’t end in keeping a smiley face or having a soft tone while communicating with an irate customer.

It must make the customer whoever they are feel the most important person at that time through operation, transaction and behavior. Addressing a fickle customer who is like “I want it now and can’t wait” and their emotions is not easy and can not be handled by an individual manager. Reaching this emotional goal requires an entire company’s effort which should exceed beyond product quality and protocols.

Before a service provider can decide the best way to achieve this customer satisfaction must decide what exact reaction they want to create every time an encounter occurs. It can be said that customer satisfaction survey and market research can provide the data for that. But sadly enough, these kind of data do not help much, and especially at an emotional level.

Drivers of satisfaction and loyalty must be looked deeply into by the service providers. A good insight into the subject will show that a whole bunch of different factors lead to the sense of satisfaction and loyalty. Expectations, needs and reaction to the organization and the perceived value received by the customer would be some of them. 

The basic requirement for customer satisfaction then shifts from product, service quality, value-for-money, hygiene factors, etc which are common for everyone to creating an emotional, personal and psychological connection with the customer which makes them feel satisfied and loyal. To respond to the emotional approach of the customers the company must have a consistent, differentiated, valued and completely intentional outlook towards customers. This is the best way of dealing with unreasonable, shrewd, specious and feelings based drivers that authenticate the buying decision. 


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