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, blogging, business blog, customer service
Embrace the Digital Home Office
I founded Home Office Web Tools for one purpose: to teach home office workers, small business owners, and entrepreneurs how to transmogrify their businesses using Web 2.0 and social media technology.
In my search for ways to manage my various past businesses 100% digitally, the wealth of resources available simply confused my preoccupied mind. I had enough to do without experimenting with yet another untried, untested online service.
Mustering the time and focus necessary to discover reliable, authoritative forums and reviews proved too challenging to balance with family responsibilities, a day job, etc. and it occurred to me that other home business owners probably had similar problems.
Which is why we are here. I plan to share with you my discoveries and techniques for both managing and marketing a small home business online. Along the way, we will explore such topics as:
- Outsourcing—the single most powerful tool available to the Bartholomew Cubbins-like home office worker. Learn the value of sharing all those hats with capable virtual assistants.
- Business Automation—let he who wants to continually waste time doing repetitive work avoid this section. Anything that can be automated, should be automated.
- Podcasting—how to get inside the ears and minds of the people who can most benefit from your services, expertise, and message.
- Social Networking Sites and the relationship marketing model. Crowdsource your way to better products and services by working with your audience!
- Web-based applications that enable your virtual home office to exist anywhere within range of a hi-speed internet connection
- The iPhone—the essential piece of technology for your journey of liberation from your business.
Look for regular blog updates and an upcoming weekly podcast, where we will discuss these online tools and how to best use them to accomplish our personal and professional goals.
Looking forward to serving you…
Devin Best
Tags: home office worker, small business owners, virtual assistants, social networking sites