Great customer service is one of of the pillars that supports a successful small business. Offering great service to your clients, prospects and vendors will help establish your reputation, build trust, create brand equity and fuel growth. What are the customer "pain points" when it comes to service? How can your small business become better at delivering a great service experience? 

"Pain Points"

Global customer satisfaction research carried out by Accenture found that the following service issues were the most frustrating for consumers:

• Having to repeat information to multiple customer service representatives
• The inability of agents to solve problems immediately due to lack of information or authority
• Being left on hold for extended periods of time
• Slow service – the amount of time it takes to respond to inquiries

1.0  Phone Management

In my opinion, answering the phone (as opposed to using an auto-attendent) is a great starting point when it comes to providing better customer service. In the digital age, having a live voice at the other end of the line can become become a major point of
differentiation and a big competitive advantage for your small
business.

2.0 Empowerment

Another great way to improve your customer service is to empower your staff by:

• Providing your employees with as much information about your business as possible
• Training your team to be able to handle a wide variety of inquiries
• Entrusting staff with decision making powers that enable the solution of problems "on the spot"

This formula was used by Southwest to become a service leader in the airline industry. An excerpt from "Nuts – Southwest Airlines' Crazy recipe for Business and Personal Success" by Kevin and Jackie Freiberg illustrates the point:

"Access to critical information grants customer-contact people the knowledge and understanding they need to take ownership and responsibility for doing the right thing. For example, a Southwest customer service agent who understands how the company makes its money, where profits come from and what they mean to the company, is in a better position to serve a customer who is making a special request. Customers who deal with Southwest employees rarely get the runaround. Instead they are likely to deal with a person who is well informed, makes sound decisions and has a flexible, creative problem solving approach. their knowledge of the company gives the people of Southwest Airlines the confidence and power to truly make a difference in the lives of their customers."

2.5 Technology

Why the 0.5 you may ask? Well, technology is a double edged sword – it can hurt your small business' customer service efforts just as much as it can help. The Accenture research report had this to say about the effects of technology on the provision of customer service:

"For the most part,
consumers are unimpressed with the role technology plays in service. In
fact, 51 percent of respondents worldwide do not believe that increased
use of technology in service has improved the level of customer
service. Consequently, it is not surprising to find so few consumers
report being satisfied with technology-centric service channels such as
automated telephone and online chat."

Be sure to take a balanced approach when it comes to using technology to provide customer service and ask yourself the question: Is this technology going to help solve a customer service pain point?

One of my favourite uses of technology addresses the slow service issue. Customers or prospects looking for service/information through a website can get pretty frustrated by the amount of time it takes to get a response. Solution: map your website service touch point i.e. "info@yourcompany.com", "support@yourcompany.com", etc to the specific email addresses of your service team and have those email accounts linked to BlackBerrys. This will give
you the ability to engage in a conversation with a customer instantly and address a major service pain point.

For an example of technology that might create a pain point as opposed to alleviating one, check out a recent post by David Meerman Scott – he provides a good personal service story of how technology can miss the mark.

By Mark Smiciklas

Your small business will have the opportunity to forge relationships with clients, prospects, suppliers and employees across many different touch points. It’s important to understand where these touch points can occur and how the cumulative effects of these independent interactions can shape your brand.

Where are the Touch Points?

We are living in an age where infinite touch points exist – the reach of your small business extends far beyond the traditional four walls of your retail store, office or warehouse. Here are some touch points to be aware of and a few questions to ask yourself while looking at the list (With so many touch points, I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface – please feel free to add to the list by posting a comment):

Questions to Ask Yourself

1. How many of these touch points have an interaction strategy attached to them i.e. Your small business recognizes these as touch points and has a goal in mind when communicating through each channel?
2. How does your small business interact across the various touch points?
3. What could you do to improve your interactions across each touch point?

Interactions Build Brands

Wikipedia defines the relationship between touch points and brand loyalty as follows:

“Individuals develop perceptions of organizations based on the
quality of the touch points they encounter. These perceptions can be
positive or negative. Cumulatively, touch points serve as the foundation
of the relationship, and the organization’s brand.

For most prospects and customers, touch points are the basis on which
purchase decisions are made. Once a customer, it is touch points that
can motivate satisfaction or loyalty, or result in dissatisfaction or
defection.”

Think of your small business as a “brand account” and each Micro-Interaction as a simple banking transaction. All the positive interactions are deposits into your account while all the negative interactions are withdrawals.

Now take it a step further and recognize that the ratio of positive:negative interactions needs to be quite high in order for your small business brand to be successful. What is the ratio for success- 100:1; 1000:1; 10,000:1? Your stakeholders will decide how many positive interactions will be required to build trust in your company, product or service and how many negative interactions will be tolerated before your brand becomes bankrupt.

Check out Seth’s blog for a good example of how fine the line is between positive and negative interactions.

Being aware of as many of your touch points as possible will help you begin to think of ways to communicate across each channel. Recognizing the importance of each interaction will hopefully allow you to embrace the philosophy that every relationship and every transaction is the most important when it comes to building your small business brand.

By Mark Smiciklas

I ended a recent post with the suggestion that all of your website content should be offered for free. I thought it would be a good idea to follow that statement up with some ideas and rationale on why free content helps create awareness and build brand equity.

“Free” content is becoming more and more prevalent and is being embraced as a way to build sales by many companies, particularly in the software sector. It’s not uncommon for many software applications to have a free version available – the idea being that offering free content will build brand awareness and result in upgrades and sales of more robust products. Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, is leading the way in establishing the business case for free content and plans to release a new book dedicated to the subject sometime in 2009.

From a marketing and PR perspective, well known blogger/author David Meerman Scott has preached the benefits of free content as a way to share your ideas, assume a thought leadership position, and build your brand. Scott’s most recent post on the the topic is about hot dogs and a Canadian indie band in New York…check out what they have in common.

Free or Gated

There are two opposing viewpoints regarding the accessibility of free content:

1. Free content should be totally “free”. Users should not have to provide personal information or have to register in order to be able to access your free content.
2. Free content should be “gated”. User should have to perform some call to action in order to access free content i.e. provide contact information such as an email address, etc.

This post will focus on the totally free model, but the debate rages on – for some insight on the gated argument check out “Opposing Philosophies on eBook Marketing” by well noted copywriter, Bob Bly.

Types of Free Content

There are many different ways to offer free content on your website including:

eBooks – Are you passionate about a topic or idea? Write an e-book and use it to:

• provide prospects/customers with useful information
• assist in solving your clients problems
• helps your target market learn something new about their business

I’m in the process of writing my first e-book. You can too – check out page 14 of “The New Rules of Viral Marketing” for some great tips on how to get started (of course, this e-book by David Meerman Scott is free).

Articles – Create an articles section on your website. It’s best if the articles provide useful information for your target audience and add value to a visitor’s experience on your website.

Documents – Become a resource provider to your target market. One of my clients, a business lawyer, recognizes that her value is in the service she provides and not the documents that are used in the process. As a result, she provides document templates such as non-disclosure agreement, contracts, etc for free. Her goal is to create a resource tool that will attract a target audience to her website, expose her brand and create word of mouth.

Some other forms of free content include:

• Whitepapers
• Blogs
• Case studies
• Research findings

Benefits of Offering “FREE” Content

• Creates brand awareness
• Builds word of mouth marketing
• Engagement – facilitates a connection with your audience and helps build relationships
• Helps develop trust with your target audience – visitors accessing your content without having to register won’t need to worry about whether they will start receiving spam from your small business
• Creates a great opportunity to expose your ideas
• Removes any barrier to your content and results in more downloads.
• Viral – free content is more likely to spread online through linking on other websites, mentions on blogs and forums, etc than gated content.
• Empowerment – gives your target audience control in deciding for themselves if your content is valuable without having to give up their permission asset i.e. an email address, etc. With gated content, people that do register may not actually be interested in future communication from your small business – they simply want to access your content to see if it of value to them. As a result, any email you send after they are forced to register will likely annoy them and be treated as spam.
• Free content helps generate sales leads. As your content gains exposure it helps build brand awareness – if your target audience likes what they see, it will lead to relationship building and new business opportunities.
• Search Engine Optimization – the more pages you have on your site, the better the chance that your small business website will be found by potential customers. More free content helps build search engine rankings.
• Becomes a business card/brochure for your small business and provides your target market with an insight into who you are.
• Your target audience has a reason to repeat visits to your website (and will usually stay longer when they are there).

By Mark Smiciklas

In order to retain the attention of prospects and clients visiting your small business website, the content  you present needs to be organized, easy to read and search engine compatible. Writing for the web is different – online reading is not the same as reading from print. Web users, particularly those performing website searches, have limited attention spans – they tend to scan pages for specific information rather than reading every single word of content. 

1. “Clean” Information Layout

Research indicates that the average web user only reads 20% of the content on any given web page. Here are a few ways to design your content so it captures the attention of your visitors:

• Descriptive headings – Let the reader know exactly what’s on the web page by using headings that provide accurate descriptions of the content
• Short paragraphs – present one topic or idea per paragraph to make it easier to scan through a web page
• Bullet points – if some of your web pages present multiple facts within a single section, lay out the content in point form to make it easier for your visitors to “digest” the information
• Bold text – use bolding or capitalization to draw attention to important words/phrases

2. Concise Copy

Avoid the urge to present every detail about your company, product or service. Approach your content from the perspective of your website visitor and (briefly) describe how you can help provide a solution to a problem they might have. When it comes to editing, a good rule of thumb is to take what you’ve written and cut the word count in half!

3. Simple Language

One of the biggest problems with many websites is the amount of gobbledygook that is used. Please try to avoid the use of technical language, industry specific lingo and acronyms. Your visitors will appreciate (and pay attention to) straightforward descriptions of your company, products, services and solutions.

4. Keywords

Take some time to research the keywords that are applicable to your product/service before writing or editing you website content. Keywords are the words or phrases web users type into search engines i.e Google, Yahoo!, etc to find information on the internet. Having the right keywords throughout your site’s content will increase the likelihood of potential customers finding you online.

Google offers a great tool that will help you come up with keywords and provide you with search statistics (how many times the keyword was used in Google searches over a period of time).

5. Great Content

Offering great content will make your website better – An obvious statement, but based on the content on many websites, easier said than done. It’s important to understand the meaning of great content – it’s not content you think is great, it’s content your visitors will find exciting and useful. 

• Write an article that solves a client’s problem
• Write an e-book that helps visitors learn something new
• Start a blog to share your ideas – and invite people to comment
• Publish a white-paper on a topic or trend that is important to your clients/prospects

One last note – offer your content for FREE…making people jump through hoops and exchanging content for email addresses is not the best way to build your brand online. If you offer good content and goodwill, it will pay off in the long run.

Check out a post by David Meerman Scott for more interesting thoughts on the importance of great content.