You may think improving your website or your point of sale system or even your after-sales service will help increase your sales. They most likely will. But there usually are more places that customers (and potential customers) interact with your brand (touchpoints). Ignoring these other customer touchpoints may counter-act the good you’re trying to do.
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Nov
10
2010
Stop Negative Public Relations Before It Happens
Heard the latest example of a company receiving negative public relations via the web and social media? Alaska Airlines apparently gave a paying customer’s ticket away to someone on standby because that customer had to run to the bathroom to change her baby’s diaper. That customer service error led fully fledged public relations debacle: Alaska Airlines Hates Families After reaching a dead-end with the company, the couple turned to the Internet to air their complaints (which seem reasonable). All this negative PR could have been easily stopped before it happened, without any fancy technology or marketing — provide good customer service.
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Aug
24
2010
Social Media Must Align with Customer Service for Success
You may be doing a great job with social media for your company — creating great content, having conversations and really engaging with your customers. But, if your customer service doesn’t align with the expectations set by your social media interactions, your success will only be short term. Eventually customers will experience your customer service and if it doesn’t align with expectations built by social media, all your hard work will be for naught.
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Nov
25
2009
What We Hope For
As businesses, our goal is to provide something of value to our customers in return for payment (usually in cash). We’re very thankful and appreciative of our customers for purchasing from us – because we get to keep providing products and services. We take our income and in turn spend it on products and services from other businesses and so the economy works (for the most part). While we’re all in business to make money (and hopefully do something you’re passionate about), what we hope for is that we’re providing something that our customers value and are thankful for.
May
04
2009
Word Associations – Customer Service – What Comes to Mind?
I think we all have different images about what customer service should be. But what’s the first thing that pops into your head? I polled twitter to find out:
A lot of frustration. As @TerryBean said, a “dying art”. @mistygirlph mentioned customer experience. @damnredhead and I had a longer conversation about how non-verbal communication is often forgotten (hands in the pocket or crossed arms). I like the images @impossibleman mentions – “standing along side” and “walking them through”.
Customer service is one of those touchpoints that companies often ignore as a cost center – or if they do provide customer service, forcing the employees to follow scripts or processes instead of actually helping customers. Customer service is a huge part of the experience companies have with customers. It’s not just about after the product/service is bought. It’s beforehand, it’s during and it’s after. Customer service is about experience and reputation. Customer service impacts all business departments – marketing, PR, accounting, etc. Being dedicated to customer service and actually providing good customer service are two different things. But customer service is something that can help companies make it through a tough economy.
I had a conversation with @CharlieCurve on the phone and he mentioned the problems Twitter was having last summer where it was down for days at a time. People were frustrated but were still fighting for the brand, wanting it to make it – embracing the FailWhale. If your product or service were to have that kind of problem, how would your customers react?
Technorati tags: customer service, brand, customer experience, business, marketing strategy, marketing
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Apr
03
2009
16 Quick & Easy Ways to Increase Usability On Your Business Website
Usability is the science of making things easier to use. Usability is especially important to websites since visitors can easily and quickly go somewhere else. Try these tips to make your website easier to use and help your visitors find what they’re looking for.
- Search in the upper right – Especially for large sites, make it as easy as possible for visitors to find what they’re looking for.
- Consistent menus – generally on the left or top of the site. Visitors should be able to navigate wherever they want and get a feel for the site structure.
- Include a home link – Visitors may want to get back to the homepage easily.
- Contact page – with a business phone, address and email. It increases your reputation and makes it easy for potential customers to get in contact with you.
- Sized to fit – Fit into the minimum standards screen resolution of 1028×768 without scrolling horizontally.
- Easy to read – Use text colors with good contrast, size and easy to read fonts.
- One layout – If your site has a consistent layout throughout, it will make it easier for visitors to navigate and find information.
- Pleasing to the eye – Color scheme is important to your professional image and makes it easier to visitors to understand what you do, as well as navigate your site.
- Use white space – Don’t bunch things up. People need white space in order to scan and read your site.
- Speak normally – Overly technical text or too much hype makes reading difficult.
- Use bullet points and lists – when feasible to make it easy for visitors to scan your content.
- Move forward to the right – Submit, next, go, etc. buttons should always be on the right, cancel buttons on the left.
- Use Flash, rich media, video, audio, etc. sparingly – If you have a video page, great, but your whole site shouldn’t be in rich media or people without the plugins, on mobile devices, or using text browsers will not be able to see your content. Audio, Video, Flash and rich media should preferrably not play without the visitor clicking a button.
- Restrain movement – Animation, flashing and movement make it difficult for people to read and scan your website. Use for relevant informational purposes, not just as a gimmick or ad.
- Limit advertising – We all understand that advertising has a place and a purpose. If you choose to include advertising, keep it relevant, limit it to specific spots on your site, limit then number of ads and mark them clearly as advertising.
- Include a Sitemap – Sometimes it’s just easier to see a list of all the pages on a website. This helps search engines find all your content as well.
Do you have other tips to increase usability? We’d love to hear them in the comments…
(photo by SantaRosa OLD SKOOL @ Flickr CC)
Technorati tags: customer experience, customer-centric, experience centric, business, usability, design
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Mar
26
2009
What Type of Experiences Are You Providing For Your Customers?
Traditional marketing focuses on product features and benefits. But your customers are more interested in the experiences they can have with your products. Usually when a customer decides to purchase a product it’s not because of the features it offers, it’s because of what they can do with the product. For example, we purchased a flat screen HDTV not because of the number of pixels or brightness or refresh rate, but because it looks awesome when you’re watching a movie or sporting event. The experience we’re interested in is how the picture looks when we’re watching TV… the features of the TV just help fulfill that particular experience.
What about online? It can sometimes be difficult to figure out what types of experiences customers are looking for on your website. It helps to think in terms of tasks instead of products or features or benefits. What are your customers trying to accomplish when they come to your website? There probably are many different types of tasks – browsing, searching, contacting, support, purchasing, etc. The trick is to try to make all these tasks as easy as possible on your one website.
Now, instead of thinking of these actions as tasks, think of them as a chance to interact with your customer. What would you do if you were in-person? What types of interactions would you want with a company? Think of each of these interactions as an opportunity to build a relationship with your customer – or add to a relationship. Try to think of website visitors as individual people with their own stories and emotions and opinions.
Now, how would you design your website differently to interact with your customers and build relationships? What do your customers say about your website? They may have some great insight – if you just ask.
(photo by bbjee @ FlickrCC)
Technorati tags: usability, design, customer experience, customer-centric, experience centric, business, strategy, marketing
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Jul
17
2008
Internet Strategy Forum Summit – The Building Blocks of Online Customer Engagement
Presented by Dan Stickel, CEO of WebTrends
Let’s take a look at Google’s innovation and how they do it. They divide their efforts:
- 70% on core products – search quality, crawl/indexing, AdWords, AdSense, Toolbar
- 20% on emerging products – Blogger, Google Mini, Picasa, News, Pack
- 10% on break-out strategies – Offline Ads, Code, WiFi, Talk
Google also has these key ingredients in everything they do:
- Focus on users
- Think big
- Ignore Constraints
- Break the mold
- The right people
- Small teams
- Iteration & experiment
- Bottoms-up ideas & projects
Google harnesses the innovation of the entire world through easy-to-use tools.
Use some of these same ideas to turn motivated visitors to your website into customers. Listen and build a better experience.
Get a 360 degree view of visitors:
- Listen – On your website, through onsite search, via surveys.
- Learn – From offsite information and CRM.
- Act – Email, Direct Mail, and use behavioral targeting.
Technorati Tags: customer experience, customer-centric design, internet strategy, internet strategy summit forum
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