You might have an amazing product or service. You might have done a great job promoting it, everybody knows it, they can see it everywhere and new customers are likely to recommend it. But if the customer service you offer is faulty, say goodbye to repeat customers and to long term deals. Because no matter how good, affordable, innovative, useful your product is, there always are problems! In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be, but in ours, there are. And what happens when your customer has a problem is what turns your relationship with them into a long term one. Yet here’s where most businesses fail! Continue reading

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I know a lot about the pressure in a customer support department! I know about the large number of emails, chats and phones an engineer needs to handle! I know how vague customer requests can be. But under all that stress and all that pressure and in that awful race against time, one rule still needs to be complied with: before starting to write the reply to an email inquiry, stop and read the initial message and make sure you understand it.

If it’s vague, ask for details. If you don’t get it, ask a colleague for help (support teams are usually quite tight and help each other a lot). Whatever you do, do not reply to the email when you don’t fully understand it. Don’t rush into sending a reply, just to tick another email off the target when you think you know what the customer is asking.

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What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Happy Monday everyone! A new week has just started and I bring you a fresh reading list. Hope you find these articles useful and that you add your own findings in the comment box.

Motivation is paramount no matter what you do or where you do it (home or in the office). Jean Murray of Home Biz Notes has put up a list of 7 ways to stay motivated.

We all tend to distort the truth: when we clean up because parents come to visit (I do this extremely often), when we’re asked to say the first thing that comes to our mind, yet we stop to think. We have our reasons for it, but we all do it. This leads to Nami Dunfords simple conclusion: all customers are liars.

What should you do to build your brand? Apparently, it only takes 3 steps to knit it. That’s Drew McLellan’s recipe.

Mig of eWritings takes os back to traditional SEO. And she’s teaching us a little more about the Meta description tag. You know, those few lines that appear under your link on Google search result pages!

Do you think some people are difficult? They might think the very same about you! Barbara Rozgonyi shows us how to deal with such people by being one of them.

Brad Shorr uses silly wordplays to explain sales. More specifically the difference between spending and investing.

That’s all for today! Ejoy the new week and see you next Monday!

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I’ve recently received an email looking like an attempt at email marketing, promising me some world renowned book for free. I was intrigued by a) the fact that the spam filter didn’t catch it and b) my not knowing anything about the book. So I took a second look at the content, thinking it might be some promotional ebook version sent out to bloggers by someone with way too little experience.

I saw the price for the book, big and shinny, along with a promotional discount image. I deleted it and moved on. But it got me thinking about all the promises marketers and PR people make in their emails and how not keeping them makes them lose potential customers, potential exposure on different channels, their reputation and more. Continue reading

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Are you wondering why I’ve kind of disappeared? Well, the reasons are two: my not feeling very well and Kayla chewing up my laptop charger. Does the last one sound a bit like the “Dog ate my homework” excuse? Well, at least it is funny! But being without my laptop really reduced my online time. Why? Because I have to get my boyfriend away from his computer and work without most of my tools. Then again I have no saved passwords and it gets into a big hassle very fast.

Bottom line, I want my computer running . At all times if possible. Now the big question comes: why didn’t I buy a new charger. Well, I couldn’t find one. In the big city, capital even, of Bucharest, with its 4 or 5 Sony Centers, there are little to no Sony Vaio chargers.

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