Proactive Ways to Deal with Bad Customer Service

Bad customer service can happen when an organization lacks the resources or insight to handle unforeseen happenings. For example, if you are a courier company, bad weather can upset your consignment delivery plans. In this case, do not expect your consumers to understand your predicament. They will want the best service no matter what.

Customer care and its impact on brand reputation

Great customer service will build brand reputation and customer loyalty. It will also prevent negative reviews. Review sites like Trust Point and Review Center allow angry customers to give way to their frustration online. This can cause a great deal of damage to your reputation and credibility.

If people are happy with the service they received, they will probably not bother to leave a positive review. But if they are angry or upset, they will readily leave a negative review. This explains why your organization needs to provide excellent customer service all the time.

Bad customer service – a case study

An independent courier company recently learned this lesson the hard way. Due to bad weather, they couldn't deliver shipments on time, but the company didn't bother to inform customers beforehand. Consequently, thousands of angry customers took to the internet to voice their dissatisfaction with the service they received. People complained that the courier company's tracking system was not working properly and that they had not received their consignments even after waiting for weeks.

Many people felt that publishing a negative review online was the only way to invite attention to their problem because speaking to a customer care executive or receiving a reply via email was simply impossible - the company had no dedicated customer care team. In the end, the company's sales and marketing manager had to make personal calls to angry customers to ease the situation.

The courier company landed itself in a soup because it had not anticipated the problems. Worse still, it had never really understood the need to have a dedicated customer care division. The company did have a small team of agents, but they only catered to its clients who were mainly retailers. The end-user was nowhere in the picture. So when problems arose and people started complaining there was no one to listen to them.

An important lesson that all organizations should learn from this incident is that everyone who wears the company badge has a responsibility to provide customer service when the situation demands it.

Multi-channel contact

Ideally, your customer support should incorporate multi-channel contact. People should be able to contact you via multiple channels. If they can't reach your agent via telephone, they should be able to reach them via email.

Social media is also a great platform to provide customer service. In this particular example, the company made no attempt to contact its customers or the recipients of the shipments. Retailers promised their customers that their shipments would arrive on time, but when that didn't happen, people became furious. The company should have at least provided a phone number and an email address. This would have allowed customers to contact them. If they had proper workforce management, their existing customer care team would have engaged with people sooner. In addition, they could have recruited temporary staff to meet demand.

It is true that all organizations cannot have a full-fledged customer care division. Still, resolving issues quickly is imperative in this age of information explosion. Coming back to the courier company, an inability to take prompt action made them look like they just didn’t care about their customers. They are unlikely to regain their customers' confidence anytime soon.

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Profitable Blogging with Increased Affiliate Income

So you have a blog and are trying to make money via affiliate marketing. Haven’t seen a decent share of success?  We’ve done reasonably well, so we'd like to share some practices that we've followed over the years.

Don’t rely only on the sidebar

Under-monetized blogs often have lovely ads in the sidebar, but sales don’t pour in. We’ve seen that sidebar ads result in the lowest sales compared to other affiliate advertising methods on my blogs. So, if that’s your blog’s sole affiliate marketing method, you need to make some changes – right away. 

 

Start micro-tracking regarding what brings in sales

You can track affiliate links on the basis of their placement using SID codes. These codes are parameters related to your affiliate links which track performance. You may track display ads in the sidebar using “sidebar” as the SID code and affiliate links within reviews using “review” as the SID code.

This helps you make more money because you get information regarding ads and links that work and those that don’t. It also enables split (A/B) testing for finding out the display ads which work best for the specified audience.

Offer solutions

We agree it’s great to post awesome, new ideas on your blog which will make you stand out from the rest. But when we’re looking at affiliate income, We've found that understanding the audience’s existing problems and resolving them has contributed to a large part of my revenue.

When you offer solutions and create affiliate links to products or supplies required to execute them, you’re sure to strike affiliate gold. There are some good, free tools that can help you know the questions, needs, and problems of your audience. 

Don’t overlook SEO

Search engine optimization is powerful so make sure you don’t ignore it. You need not be a hyper aggressive SEO expert. Just make sure your blog follows the basic SEO best practices. As readership increases, you’ll get links, authority, and social signals. When page SEO is good, you can utilize these to the best extent possible.

Each post should not attempt sales

Don’t appear greedy or desperate. If your blog comes across as an extended and repeated sales pitch for each product, your readers will get alienated.  And no readership equals zero sales. It’s important to understand the difference between recommending products and selling them.

We make it a point to post a few genuinely useful posts which don’t have review focuses between those that do. By being helpful, you increase readership, and subsequently sales.

Write in depth reviews of appropriate products

We think reviews are the best way to generate affiliate income from a blog. So try to make them meaningful. Recommend products that you love, and use and show proof that you actually use them. Offer details about both pros and cons. Ensure you mention how a product solved a problem or fulfilled a particular need.

Though products mentioned need not have exact relevance to the blog topic, they need to have relevance for readers. For example, if yours is a cooking blog and the audience comprises of mostly women and many of them have kids, then advertisements of the “Mommy” kind won’t be too off the mark.

Build mailing lists

Once you’ve got people on a site, you must try to get their email addresses. Email is a great way to remind people of your presence without needing to find them again. This also becomes an additional channel for making affiliate recommendations.

Simple Guidelines to Boost Your Social ROI

You can effectively connect with potential customers via social media, but only when you make use of it in the correct way. A survey conducted by a business community resulted in the finding that though more companies engaged in the use of social media in the year 2012 as compared to the preceding year, only about 40 percent got an actual return on investment.

Here are some simple steps that can help you get maximum benefits from the money and time you spend. These easy-to-apply approaches can help in increasing both efficiency and engagement:

Organize your social profiles

The Lightspan Digital (Chicago) President, Mana Ionescu, is of the opinion that small businesses often waste considerable time arriving at a perfect post or tweet. To save this time, her agency came up with Daily Social Media Workout, a tool which included some specific tasks, like re-posting a couple of good tweets and sharing pictures, so action plans can be formulated and best practices learned alongside.

Gateway for Cancer Research, an institution placed in Schaumburg, Illinois, managed to increase their fans on Facebook by over 160 percent in 8 months using the tool and working regularly on social media. It also saw a four-fold increase in the number of followers on Twitter. Marketing specialist at Gateway for Cancer Research, Ashlee Landis, said the tool encouraged working smarter in place of harder. She used the list every day to find content efficiently and post details that were likely to engage followers and fans resulting in a saving of 3-4 hours weekly.

Coyote Logistics got similar results by making use of the tool for topic and organization coverage. Within a period of 18 months, the company without a previous social presence had 2,300 followers on Twitter and over 2,400 fans on Facebook.

Use tools for time saving and efficiency

Social media manager of Fusion92, Arlington Heights, Illinois, John DeLuca, feels the use of free scheduling tools can help businesses set up tweets, pins and posts in advance to make sure accounts don’t get neglected when days are busy. Tools like Hoot Suite enable users to see multiple network streams simultaneously so they can track posts from various platforms easily. DeLuca also suggests using Feedly and Netvibes as RSS readers for quickly organizing content for online sharing.

Strategically offer a freebie

Rather than spending large amounts on direct mail pieces which normally have a low rate of conversion, Joe Chura, advised a client Fisher Auto at Boulder, Colorado to offer oil changes for subscribing to the company’s email and posting Facebook "Likes". Chura, CEO at Launch Digital Marketing feels that both exposure and revenue can be increased by investing money in online giveaways.

 

There was a 30 boost in Facebook likes, which resulted in $2,700 worth of free oil changes, but there were $6,000 of additional sales during the visits. The promotion campaign was ready in a few hours as compared to the several weeks required to put together direct mail pieces. Chura is of the opinion that people need to offer their most popular services or products as freebies since this would probably create maximum interest in the brand and promotion.

3 Social Media Blunders to Avoid

If you use the right strategies, social media has the power to drive tons of visitors to your website. But very often, webmasters and online marketers commit some grave mistakes that send their followers packing. For example, littering your Twitter feed and Pinterest boards with shamelessly self-promotional and sometimes even insensitive posts won't help your site or your brand. Overtly self-promotional strategies will only ruin your reputation and scare your followers off. Would you be interested in following a feed that is only about promotions?

 

Let's take a look at some social media mistakes that overly enthusiastic webmasters often commi:

1. You only talk about your own services and products

Of course, you are here to promote your stuff. That is the only reason you spend hours on Twitter and Facebook. There is absolutely nothing wrong with promoting your stuff. But every now and then you must also write about other people's products and services. The best part is that if you promote other people's stuff, they will also promote yours. On the other hand, if all of your status updates, pins, and tweets revolve around you or your brand, you will soon alienate your fan following.

 

Social media experts suggest that you follow the 80 - 20 rule to improve engagement with your potential customers over social media. What this means is that 80 percent of the stuff you post or share should address the problems of your customers. You can also share stuff they may find interesting. You can devote the remaining 20 percent to talk about your brand. By consciously 'downplaying' your brand, you build trust and improve engagement.

2. You don't share your follower's content

You are damn certain that your content is worth sharing, but if none of your followers click on those share buttons, it is time to review your social media strategies. Social media is all about building relationships. In the real world, you can't expect people to help you if you don't help them, right? In the virtual world too, don't expect your followers to share your content if you don't share theirs. Therefore, express a sincere interest in what your followers share. Retweet, share, or pin their content that your target audience may care about. By doing this, you foster a sense of community and engagement within your social circles. You may also exchange friendly messages with your followers. This helps build relationships.

When you share other people's content, they will also share yours. This will increase your brand exposure.

3. You post insensitive comments about sensitive topics.

This is a grave mistake. It is worse than the other two. By posting insensitive comments about sensitive topics, you not only alienate your followers, but also encourage people to trash talk your brand over the social media. As far as possible, avoid posts that are political or religious in nature. If you must, you could perhaps post them on your personal Facebook or Twitter profiles. You must also refrain from posting offensive or obscene content.