Why customer service matters - even online!

After a few bad customer experiences in the past weeks (especially with South West Trains), I thought I'd take some time to talk about customer service and how important it is, even in a digital world.

What is customer service?
In my opinion, customer service is all the interactions between a business and its customers (or potential customers), whether it is at the research stage, during purchase or when the transaction is complete.

Why does it matter?
as the old sayings go, "the customer is king" or "the customer is always right". I do appreciate that these are very old fashioned sayings, but I think the same rules still apply today, albeit online rather than offline only. As a business, you have to realise that if you do not treat your customers well, they will not do business with you, an no customers means no business. So to sum it up...look after your customers!
A lot of new online business owners seem to assume that having a nice website is enough and very often neglect the customer service aspect of their operations. This is a mistake that can be very costly, especially in a market where customer loyalty is decreasing and shopping around is so easy.
Remember that a happy customer can turn into a loyal customer and an advocate for your brand, and it is cheaper for a business to retain customers rather than acquiring new ones. This obviously doesn't mean that you shouldn't have an acquisition strategy too, but that can be the topic of another post.

How to get it right?
So what can you do to make sure that your customers are looked after?

• Display contact details - make sure that your site includes a highly visible phone number on every page, as well as a chat functionality, call back request tool, email address....
• Train your staff (or yourself) - If you run your business alone, make sure you are aware of the basic customer service rules and be available for questions and assistance. If you happen to have a team of people working for you, make sure they are fully trained and understand the importance of good customer service. Put processes in place for pre and post sales enquiries, customer handling, refund policies....and all of the other steps involved in the purchasing process.
• After sales service/marketing - Once a customer has bought from you, why not try and convert them into loyal customers? Some simple and well targeted marketing campaigns can help you increase return rates and repeat purchase. For example, why not send your customers an email a month after their initial purchase to ask them how satisfied they are? You can also encourage people to leave feedback on your website, and if the comments are really positive, use them on your site as references. People are always looking at reviews, case studies and opinions before purchasing these days, so make sure your name and satisfied customers are out there.
  Monitor what is being said about you on social media sites, blogs, forums, and interact with your customers whenever possible.
• Get the right tools for the job - having a proper CRM (customer relationship management) software will help you achieve better results by storing details about your customers. The more you know about them, the easier it will be to satisfy them and build a customer profile.
• Good customer service starts inside your business - if you run a fairly large business with several departments involved with the customer experience, make sure that your staff apply the rules of customer service internally. After all, each department will have its own internal customers, and if they don't know how to serve them well, it is unlikely they do a good job of serving external customers, the ones that bring revenue.

Common sense and friendliness can go a long way when running a business, but rules, training and appropriate tools will get you a step closer to customer service excellence. Kano's model on customer needs is always an interesting read if you want to learn more.

Have a good weekend

SEO on a shoestring - the free tools that could save you a headache

You're a new business, you've got a shiny new website with all the bells and whistles and you're ready to do business online....it all sound great up until now, but how do you get people to your website??
Even though people are more and more internet savvy these days, it is still clear that Search Engine Optimisation, aka SEO, remains a bit of an unknown subject for a lot of companies (lucky for me, keeps me working :) )
So if your marketing budget doesn't allow you to use the services of a search marketing agency or SEO professional, where do you start? I thought I'd compile a quick list of tools that should get you started and put you on the right track. Many of the tools listed below are the ones that I use on a daily basis and even though they may not be the best, I find them really useful and I'm sure they can help you achieve some good results.

Google Webmaster Tools
Although I do not want this post to sound like a huge endorsement for Google, I have to admit that they offer some of the best free tools for SEO on the market. Webmaster tools allows you to verify your website with the biggest search engine in the world and gives you a rather impressive list of options to choose from to check that your site is being indexed properly, so it should definitely be on your SEO checklist.
And if you're completely new to SEO, reading the Google Search Optimization starter guide should give you all the basics in an easy to understand format.

Keyword Research / website trends
Staying with Google (I can see a theme building up here!), make sure to use Trends, Insights for search, and trends for websites to understand what keywords are being searched for across the world, seasonality, country specific searches and find out how websites perform. The keyword tools will help you decide which keywords to focus on for your business.
To help you decide which keywords to use for your business, use the Google Keyword Tool. Start with some core/generic keywords for your business and expand your list with suggestions made by the tool. Don't forget that long tail keywords (very specific search phrases with 2 or more keywords) can sometimes convert at a higher level than generic and very competitive keywords.
I'd suggest using more than one keyword research tool, and WordTracker is one of the best out there. Other options are keyword discovery and Bing webmaster tools

Web Analytics
Yes, you've guessed it, my tool of choice for analytics on a budget is.....Google Analytics. I'm sure I've talked about Analytics at length before, but despite its flaws, it is still the best free analytics tool out there, and it will give you great insights into your website when looking at search engine activity, keywords referrals and much more.

Link popularity
Because link popularity is such an important part of search engine rankings these days, you need to make sure that you increase your LP on a regular basis. While this remains largely a manual process, you need to check that what you're doing is working. I've been using MarketLeap for years now to check LP, but all the major search engines provide functions to check your incoming links.

Finally, now that you've got all the tools to get you started, make sure you read about SEO as there are a lot of blogs and forums that will provide you with a lot of information. Consider SEOmoz, search engine land and the Google blog amongst many others.

Happy optimising, and remember that as for many things, common sense prevails and always keep your customers in mind when doing SEO!

ROI metrics - web metrics part 2

Ok, first of all i've got to apologise as I haven't been posting for a month now, lazy me.
Things have been very busy at work and I did feel quite lazy during weekends, but enough excuses....and thanks Rochelle for nagging me and pushing me to write again.

Let's try and pick things where we left them, web metrics and how to choose the right metrics for your business. In the previous post we covered the basic metrics that any business should measure, but there is a potentially infinite number of metrics you could use for your own business, some of them more complicated than others.

ROI metrics
Let's take a look at some ROI (return on investment) metrics. These metrics are often needed to justify marketing spend and understand which of your marketing channels are working the best.
If your a new business/start-up, then you'll want to make sure that your limited resources are used to their full potential, so ROI will be crucial to you.

• CPL - Cost per lead
  This is a measure of how much each lead that comes into your business costs you (a lead can be a quote request, a phone enquiry, an email or whatever you think could generate revenue for your business). To find out the cost per lead for your business, add the total of leads you're getting on a daily/weekly or monthly basis and compare it to your marketing costs for the same period: Cost / leads = CPL
  So for example if you received 20 leads in a week and spent £100 on marketing, then you CPL will be 100/20= £5
• CPA - cost per action / Cost per Click (CPC)
  This is very similar to the CPL but measurement is done on action (eg a click to a page). The formula is the same as CPL: Costs / Total actions= CPA. The CPC model is the one used in search engine advertising programmes such as Google Adwords.
  
• CPA - cost per acquisition / cost per conversion
  Once again the principles are very similar to CPL/CPA but the metric used here is conversion. As mentioned above for CPL, it is up to you to decide what a conversion is for your business. If you are an ecommerce shop, then a conversion could be a completed sale, but it could also be a completed questionnaire, a registration to an event... So the Cost per conversion formula is Costs/ total conversions= CPAcquisition

ROI metrics are vital in a business environment, especially if you work in a competitive industry with limited budgets. You need to make sure that you get as much impact from your marketing dollars as possible, more bang for your bucks!
Whatever business you're in, make sure to establish clear and accurate metrics from the beginning so that you don't lose track of what marketing activities work for you.

Have a good weekend!