Can You Really Deliver Customer Service This Great From Your Home Office?
You’re not going to believe how great this solution is for your home office! With the addition of one little plugin to your blog, you now have a closed-loop online customer service system for your business.
The Comments Must Flow
I recently implemented the Disqus system on HomeOfficeWebTools.com to manage and track blog comments, as you can see below this article. Checking the Disqus blog for updates, I posted a reply to a note on the Disqus blog and got a reply within 30 minutes via email from Daniel Ha, addressing my concerns. At 10:30 pm.
The time of day and the response time caught my attention. Excellent customer service, for which I commend both Daniel and Disqus.
The thing that really caught my attention was a little note at the bottom of his email that said,
You may reply to this email to post your response.
Intrigued, I replied to the email, then decided to click the breadcrumb link back to the original comment on the Disqus blog. Lo and behold, guess what I found! That’s right! The entire conversation was posted with threaded comments on the original blog post!
Three things immediately came to mind:
- The method of contact no longer matters.
- The conversation is accessible from both the website and your inbox.
- The comments flow in both directions!
I know that this is just a simple example of RSS in action, but I’ve never seen it packaged so perfectly nor work so seamlessly.
Why This Matters
The point is, using Disqus removes several steps from the process of responding to blog comments, making it that much easier to dialog with your customers and fans. All you have to do is post a note to your blog then let the conversation unfold in the one place you already use as the central hub of your business: email.
Your customer service dialogs become valuable blog content, giving you more fodder for humans and search engines alike.
Bonuses
- You can eliminate your site’s contact form and exclusively use your blog for customer contact.
- Your comments follow you around online, freed from the blog to which you originally replied
- Your Disqus community page generates a link back to your website. Great for search engine rankings!
My existing WordPress comments imported with no difficulty, but your mileage may vary if you have a huge database with thousands of comments and posts to import.
Comments do stay synchronized on Disqus and your WordPress blog, so even if the service goes down, your database is still intact and site visitors can still comment without interruption.
What’s not to like?
What You Need to Do
Take action on this right now. Do not wait to do more research or read other people’s opinions. Click on over to Disqus, create your account and install the plugins or code as directed. Take some time to fill out your profile and tweak the various settings to your liking.
Man, I love technology, and you are going to love the various ways you can now use comments to deliver great customer service.
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Tags: home office, customer service system, customer service, blogging
5 Ways to Leverage StumbleUpon for Small Business Owners
If you run a small business, chances are you are too busy managing loose ends to have time to test all the newest social networking sites that have sprung up in the wake of MySpace and YouTube.
Here’s one for you that will help you sift through the barrage of gar-bage websites out there: StumbleUpon.
From the website:
StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests. Whether it’s a web page, photo or video, our personalized recommendation engine learns what you like, and brings you more.
After you register, complete your profile by telling StumbleUpon your interests. Install the StumbleUpon toolbar in either Firefox or (blech) Internet Explorer, and hit the “Stumble!” button. The service will deliver a page in its system that someone with similar interests as you has blessed as good.
The Benefits
In order of increasing value, here are 5 ways you, the small business owner, can leverage this powerful social networking tool to help your business.
- Discover interesting websites, photos, videos, etc as inspiration for blogging or writing topics. As you Stumble! and rate sites, StumbleUpon will learn about your preferences over time and send you more and more relevant content.
- Bookmark your Stumbling history for later perusal. StumbleUpon will keep track of what you like and don’t like, and allow you to drill deeper into topics that interest you. Use this for future reference when writing blog posts.
- Network with resourceful people online. Being that it is a social network, StumbleUpon is great for finding other people who share your passions and can provide solutions to your problems. You can find and follow people whose opinions you have grown to trust.
- Create a resource of useful websites and tools for your clients, patients, or customers. You can provide your constituents value by getting them to become a fan of yours on StumbleUpon and regularly sending them content you think will interest them. Great way to keep yourself relevant to them.
- Promote your own blog or website, increasing your online exposure. You can add your own content to the StumbleUpon database to benefit from some of that social networking mojo. As long as you push your own stuff in proportion to your other Stumbling activity, you can see develop consistent traffic from the service.
More Strategies and Tactics
I’ve been taking a course put together by Caroline Middlebrooke called StumbleRush. It’s a free, multi-part e-course that I recommend you take a look at, because it details several strategies for using StumbleUpon to promote your blog and website online.
In fact, it was Caroline’s gentle guidance that inspired me to experiment with StumbleUpon and sold me on its value to my online marketing efforts.
Take a look at the course, start Stumbling, and let me know how you make out in the comments.
Tags: Caroline Middlebrooke, social networking sites, internet business, small business ownersSeries: Google Liberates the (Shared) Home Office, Part 2-Google Calendar
This post is the 2nd in an ongoing series about how web-savvy home office types can free themselves from their businesses one step at a time using Google Apps. Topics I’ll discuss in the series include:
- Read Google Liberates the Home Office, Part 1-Gmail
- Google Calendar to manage scheduled actions and commitments
- Staying current with Google Reader
- Research and note-taking with Google Notebook
- Google Docs as THE alternative to Microsoft Office
Google Calendar is the single most useful tool for any home business owner, and gives specific advantages to husband and wife teams. Here is how I arrived at that opinion.
My wife and I were running 3 separate businesses between us. I also held a part-time job with a wildly varying schedule, which I wrote down on tiny slips of paper and brought home. We were also busy parenting a toddler and a baby.
Needless to say, scheduling our life was just ridiculous!
I used my little slips of paper, she used her Palm Pilot and sometimes iCal on her Mac. Pretty primitive setup, I’ll admit, and it did not allow us to manage our lives in any meaningful way.
We needed a solution that would:
- Show different colors for each individual (and grouping) in the family
- Allow both of us to view and edit the schedule without a bunch of B.S.
- Send reminders when and where we can best use them
- Display the most current version of the ever-changing family/office schedule
Google Calendar Delivers the Goods!
After way too much research into desktop software packages that would satisfy these goals, I decided to give Google Calendar a whirl. And boy, am I glad I did!
Google Calendar has a simple interface that displays all your events with colors assigned to each person or group. Adding an appointment is as easy as clicking any open space on the calendar or using the “Quick Add” feature.
Check.
Sharing a calender with a coworker or partner is simple yet sophisticated. As you create a new calendar, edit the calendar settings and type in the email address of the person with whom you want to share. Make sure you enable “Make changes AND manage sharing” if you trust the other parties. If not, either fire them or set a more appropriate access level from the four options. Your choice.
Share your calendars and set your permissions correctly, and it will be like your personal calendar software is installed on every computer in the world. Access and edit anywhere. I love this!
Double-check.
Of course, what good would your calendar be if you had to constantly remember to look at it? Google Calendar’s killer feature is SMS text reminders so you can relax your mind and focus on taking action in your business.
You can also do this by email, but SMS is the most convenient and useful because it delivers me the reminder wherever I am on a device that I always have on me: my phone.
Triple-check.
And the fourth requirement in the list above—always having the most up-to-date schedule information—is handled readily by the fact that all of this calendar mumbo-jumbo resides on the Internet.
Check. Check. Check. Check. All requirements met!
Google Calender is a robust, convenient solution for any business you run out of your home, and liberates the home office family from a nightmare of schedule management.
So, step two in your journey to liberate yourself from your home office may be to migrate to Google Calendar. You can start here by creating a Google Account. Also take a look at Google’s Getting Started Guide.
Let’s dig deeper!
What is your favorite Google Calendar feature? Let me know in the comments below.
Tags: small business owners, virtual home office, google, home business owners
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