Top Customer Service and Business Articles

Each week I read a number of customer service articles from various online resources. Here are my top five picks from last week. I have added my comment about each article and would like to hear what you think too.

Customer Service Tips from the Worst Employer by Mary Nestor-Harper

(Beyond.com) Winning loyal customers is about building honest, respectful, trusting relationships. Why should it be different when the customers are your employees? Drawing from lessons from Dan Sullivan, a business coach, he lists four principles as key to delivering excellent internal customer service. Not surprisingly, they are basic things you’d expect from an employee.

My Comment: This short article has some excellent ideas on how to treat your employees the way you want your customers treated.  It really isn’t that difficult; show up on time, be polite, do what you say you will do and follow through.  Isn’t that the way everyone (customers and employees) should be treated?

How Enterprise Leaders Like Bill Marriott Create Customer Loyalty by Robert Reiss

We all know that a key to technology success is user-friendliness. Consumer hardware is “plug and play.” And software – both consumer and B2B – should require no particular expertise from the end-user. Gone are the days when you needed a 500 page manual on your desk in order to be able to use an application. All the hard work is at the back-end, where the user never sees it.

And so it is with marketing.

The best marketing programs have an elegant simplicity about them. The message shines through, simple, clear, and easy to grasp. The wide variety of mechanisms we use to reach out to a potential audience all work together, with a synchronization that is smooth enough, cohesive enough to be both self-evident and transparent to the casual viewer.

But, as with software, the simpler it seems at first blush, the more back-end effort is required

Effective marketing, just as with commercially successful technology, demands blood, sweat, and tears that are never seen by the customer. The blood, sweat, and tears are not the customers’ problem. They are only interested in the benefits.

Today, we are offered an every-increasing stream of programs to automate marketing efforts, “marketing for dummies” guides for so-called best practices, social media “how to” webinars, and increasingly narrow and specific tools and mechanisms, means and methods that, we are told, will inevitably increase our marketing success and revenues.

Successful software starts with a vision, moves to an architecture, and only then begins to build code.

Local marketing is a tricky game. The competition is fierce. Every day is a street fight for eyeballs, local market share, and revenue. Local marketing--and local search specifically--is hard. 

Why do so many SMBs fail at local search? 

Not Everyone Fails...

After this blog is published I expect a deluge of comments that ridicule the title by pointing out that many SMBs don't fail at local search. 

Of course they're right. Not every SMB fails at local search. But many do. 

The 4 Factors of SMB Local Search Failure

1) National Brands Doing Local SEO

Do a little test. Do a Google search in your city for a tires, for example, or for restaurants, or a plumber. 

Over 50% of the results--maybe more--will not be local businesses at all. They won't be SMBs. Instead they will be local locations of national brands. 

It’s challenging to find your customers, but it probably shouldn’t be, right? I mean, you create a product and find a market and there you go. Business 101.

Today, however, it’s more challenging than it’s ever been. Your customers are living on their terms, not yours. They are doing their best to avoid your direct marketing and advertising. They are living their lives with or without you.

Something I stress to clients is how no customer will ever be as obsessed with your brand as you are! They are carrying on and fitting your brand into their lives.

Today, consider how and where your customers might be interacting with your company. Take, for instance, the demand for mobile apps. When users interact with apps, they have expectations for how they should work. Today’s multi-channel users don’t necessarily think “well, designing for mobile is different than designing for the web, so I can expect an uglier, less efficient experience.” They instead think “I have something to do and I have 5 minutes on the train. I wonder if I can do this on my phone!?” When it works, it still feels special and convenient, a driving factor for customer loyalty.