Archive for the 'Business' Category
Online Customer Service-An Oxymoron?
Online customer service is not as hard as you think. It’s not quite as simple as smiling when someone enters a retail store, but you certainly can convey that your business is focused on meeting customer needs.
Websites have been around long enough that it’s easy to compare and see which ones make it easy to do business and which are causing their customers grief. Try it yourself. Go to a few sites you have never visited before and see how easy it is to locate specific information. Then go to a few of the rock star online retailers and see how they do the job.
There are a lot of rules to good online customer service. Here are a couple of my favourites.
- First stop, create a site that is easy to use. And I don’t mean easy for you or your coder. I mean it needs to be dead easy for your site visitors to use. Frankly, even if you’re the one building it, your opinion doesn’t matter nearly as much as your prospective visitors’ needs do.
- Make sure there is a way to contact your company available from the home page and every other page in the site. And don’t bury it in text at the bottom! Make it bright yellow if you have to, but make it stand out. Often this is done somewhere in the top right quadrant of the page and many site visitors look here first.
- If you’re selling online, let people know the price before they input their personal information. Would you pull out your credit card and ring through a purchase before you know the price in a bricks and mortar store? Many site visitors will opt out of the selling process if they have to provide their personal data before seeing the full price of the product, including shipping.
In a nutshell, make it easy and you’re more likely to make the sale.
Google Calendar for your Website
Louise’s great suggestion for putting your business on the Google map reminded me of another way to use Google’s tools for your business: a Google Calendar. You can share your calendar with selected viewers, say, to keep your family or partners in the loop. If you want the whole world to know when your Tupperware party is, you can make your calendar public to anyone with just a few clicks. (Do they still have Tupperware parties? OK, maybe you want to list your naughty toys party instead. Whatever floats your boat…)
You can take it even a step further, and include a public calendar in your own website to list your events or schedule. When you sign up for a Google Calendar you can create more than one calendar — so if you had a Bed & Breakfast, for instance, a calendar for each room could show when it’s booked.
There are certainly more advanced and customized ways of doing some of these things, but this is some great functionality if you’re on a budget.
How to add a public calendar to your WordPress site
If you’re comfortable with the teensiest bit of HTML tweaking this is really easy to do.
- Create a public calendar at google.com/calendar
- Make a page in WordPress
- Go to the Google Calendar Details screen and copy the code for including the calendar in your website
- Paste it into your WordPress page. Note, you’ll need to switch from Visual view to Code view in your WordPress editor. You may also need to adjust the width and height to fit your page layout.
Your website calendar page will be kept up-to-date because it loads all the events you add within the Google Calendar interface, each time your page is visited.
That’s it. Neat trick, eh?
Say A Lot Without Speaking A Word
I may have mentioned this before, but what I like about a website is that it can do a lot of stuff for you. For instance, you don’t actually have to talk to people in order to speak to them.
I’ll never forget the first time it happened to me. I got a call from a woman asking about my entrepreneurs marketing program, wanting to sign up. I’m pretty good with names, but I didn’t recognize hers, so I asked how she’d found me.
Turns out someone had referred her, she checked out my website, and decided to buy. Just like that.
I didn’t have to explain, meet with her first, sell her on the value…none of that. The website did it all for me.
That was easy! Hmmm, I think I’ll give that online sales guy a raise…
Websites: Marketing Without Being There
Have I ever mentioned that what I like about websites is all the stuff they can do for you?
I saw a commercial a while back where a fellow arrived at the office first thing in the morning, put a fake steaming cup of coffee on this desk and then left for the day. All day long that cup sat there steaming. Everyone who stopped by his office to speak with him assumed they had just missed him. They thought he’d be “back in a minute” meanwhile he was out having fun, enjoying the sunshine.
A website is a little like that. You don’t actually have to be there, to be there.
Creative Culture & Success in Business
Adaptive Path (a user experience design firm in San Francisco) has a wealth of articles on their site which, as a designer, I find interesting. Many articles are of interest to a broader business audience – such as this interview with Chris Conley.
Conley notes Pixar as a great example of creative business success which “basically create[s] a new billion dollar franchise every four years or so”. Truly an amazing track record. He discusses what makes them so successful, which boils down more or less to:
- strongly adhering to a higher purpose - in Pixar’s case “To create great stories”. Fabulous storytelling is more important than fancy computer graphics. Mission and focus is paramount.
- dynamic leadership & a talented team - every project is led by a director-producer pair that brings complementary strengths to the table and is responsible for the project’s outcome in different ways. Their team is made up of artists and technologists that can make their work better through critique. A strong team is diverse and challenges each other.
- a highly iterative and tangible process - experimenting and sketching begins on day one. There is no waiting for mounds of research or scripts holding back the creative process. The great story they’ll tell gets figured out along the way. You needn’t have it all figured out from the start, get out there and do something.
Finally, Conley says
If corporations were to adopt these principles, behaviors, and values in their innovation-oriented work, they would be orders of magnitude more successful.
There are some good ideas in that list which resonate with me. What do you think?
Get with it! Technology is here to stay.
I bought a pair of Chaco sandals last year before heading out to do the West Coast Trail. I loved my Chacos. They are much nicer than Teva’s and their one strap technology is easy to adjust and fits my feet whether I am barefoot or wearing woolly socks. Unfortunately upon retreaving my luggage from the conveyor belt in Bordeaux this summer, one of my sandals was missing. The Chaco website told me in their FAQs that I could purchase just one shoe, but I asked all of the retailers in Vancouver and none of them would do it. I was quite delighted to receive compensation for my lost sandal this week, so this morning I went out to buy another pair.
When I bought them last year I chose the strap, type of sole and then placed my order. I waited 6 weeks and then went back to the store to pick them up. This morning I thought to myself, shop must have my name in their computer and be able to tell me exactly what I had bought previously. Nope! My name was in a book written in pencil. Or it would have been last year, but they only keep the book for a few months. These guys are selling $500 gortex jackets, high-end tents, sleeping bags and hiking books good enough to trek around the world and they don’t have a computer system? I must have spent over $1000 in outdoor gear in that store alone, yet they don’t have my name on file. Even my hair dresser keeps a file on me with the type of bleach she uses!
The funny thing is that this morning I read a story on Rohit’s blog about semacodes. H&M have come up with billboards allowing users to purchase the items of clothing advertised using their cellphone. It seems like it’s all or nothing. While some businesses are embrassing technology, which I’m not convinced will work, others are just refusing to go digital.
It will be interesting to see if in a few years time, I’ll be able to purchase my next tent from a billboard, while listening to my radio teaching me a new language in my car that knows my travel itinerary….
46 Productivity Tips
The 46 Must-Read Productivity Tips for Freelancers on FreelanceSwitch is full of great stuff. In fact there must be hundreds of tips if you click through to read all the links in the article. But really any business person can benefit from some of these ideas.
Here are five of my favourites:
continue reading »
Serve your clients, no matter what they need
Over the last two days I attended a self-employment workshop at the Sunshine Coast Employment Center, offered by Cassandra Gierden of Prophet Coaching. A valuable idea she offered was to create your own personal “yellow pages” - get out and meet somebody from every possible profession you can think of.
The idea is to be of service to your clients no matter what they need. If they can’t make an appointment with you, don’t just ask to reschedule. Ask them if they need a mechanic and refer them to a great one.
You can make the creation of your yellow pages like a scavenger hunt for yourself: find X contacts by X time.
The concept of serving your clients, no matter the need, is similar to what this blog and indeed many successful sites are all about. Share a little information or service for free, and you become a valuable resource that stays top-of-mind. In the end isn’t that what marketing is all about?
Forget Innovation! Solve Problems Instead.
I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Scott Berkun at a VanUE event this week. In his often hilarious, entertaining presentation, Scott discussed some of the topics covered in his new book “The Myths of Innovation”. His discussion focused mostly on the perceptions of innovation (eureka moment) versus the historical reality (lots of sweat, hard work, and collaboration).
During the Q&A period, people were obviously engrossed in his ideas and wanted to know more about how to be innovative and how to reach the Eureka moment. Scott provided us with the best advice I’ve heard for a long time.
Forget about innovation. Don’t use the word innovation.
Heck don’t use the word design. Solve problems.
You have a problem? Fix it.
Your client has a problem? Fix it.
Incentives are a great way to keep your site up to date
Back in my days as a student, I swam competitively with the University of Ottawa. I can’t say that I was very good, but it did keep me fit and I owe it to the sport for making me who I am today. I don’t swim much anymore. Swimming is actually really boring. Going up and down the pool with your head in the water is really not that exciting. In fact, the only place I like to swim these days is at Kitsilano pool.
Kitsilano is home to the largest pool in Canada. It is 138 metres long, outside in a breathtaking location and filled with salt water. Swimming is still boring at Kits but just not as much. So every year, to motivate myself, I sign up for FastLane. FastLane is a training program that runs twice a week from mid-June, first thing in the morning. So, Wednesday and Friday mornings at 5.45am, you’ll find me working out in the pool with lot of other like-minded people.