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 system
Whither Problem Customers?
Tina Hilton of Clerical Advantage, writing on Grant Griffith’s blog Home Office Warrior, wrote an interesting post that got me thinking about how I want my life to be and how I want my business to look. The topic of her article is problem customers and their impact on business.
There’s an interesting comparison to be drawn between how entrepreneurs handle this idea and how managers or employees address it.
At a restaurant where I once worked, we received abusive complaints from time to time. The manager would shuck and jive, eventually comping food for the complainant in the hopes of keeping their business. (Like averting negative feedback on eBay in the hopes of maintaining a pristine rating).
His response was predictably consistent—make the customer happy at all costs. Even known complainers and problem customers got the same treatment. I remember a placard on the wall that read
“Every unhappy customer will result in 12 others who won’t show up or come back.”
This is why excellent guest service or customer service is a critical part of any business interested in success. Of course it’s necessary to do my absolute utmost to ensure client / guest / customer satisfaction. But there’s a point beyond which I have to look at what’s going on and assess whether or not MORE is actually better.
I encouraged my boss to run the numbers to determine if the complainers were WORTH the time they took to please.
If you know how much your time is worth per minute, and can figure out an average amount of time each problem customer takes, you can objectively see how much money you’re losing by keeping that customer around.
Just figure out how much of your time they waste and compare it to how much income they generate for you. Don’t forget to factor in the emotional stress that long-term problem clients can cause. The disruption. The constant and ever-increasing demands. We’re talking about the quality of your working life here!
Of course my boss never ran those numbers - he subscribed to “The Customer is Always Right” mentality, fed to him by the higher-ups. He consistently taught our customers that they could walk all over us for the honor of keeping them as customers.
I think it pays to be selective, in business and in all other relationships. The clients and friends that I choose to surround myself with all support me in some way or another. They wouldn’t be in my life otherwise.
The great thing about flying solo is that I get to choose whom and how I influence, and vice versa. Life is too short to suffer fools gladly.
Tags: Mindset, complainers, liberate, customer servicePolls
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