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We all experience it on a daily basis – customer service. Good, bad or indifferent, we all tend to have long memories about how we’ve been treated by a business and are typically more than willing to share our experiences with others, either face-to-face with friends or online on websites like planetfeedback or hellopeter, on blogs, or on social media like Facebook and Twitter.

Regardless of how it’s shared, feedback about the kind of customer service your business provides can have a significant impact on your ability to maintain and gain customers – especially if you’re a small business. Often, this word-of-mouth “advertising” can have a bigger impact than any paid marketing that you may do.

So what can you do (to: JH) build and maintain your business’ reputation for customer service?

1) Keep it personal.
Making simple efforts to show customers you care can build a positive reputation. So make sure to place focused effort on getting to know your customers. Ask about their families, their hobbies, what they’re planning for the weekend ahead – and remember those details (take notes if you need to). Also take time to call customers from time to time, and ask how your business is performing for them. Are they satisfied? Find out what you can do to make their experience with you better?

2) Give back
Find a local charity with which you can become involved. If appropriate, volunteer to help them with your services, such as building a website, creating a database or whatever your area of expertise may be. Also find ways to promote and support the charity by getting your customers involved. Offer a discount for bringing in canned goods for a food shelf or pick a day to donate a percentage of your profits to the charity. Your customers will feel good that you’re supporting a good cause and so will you.

3) Build a local network
Because word of mouth is so powerful, build your company’s network by becoming involved with organizations where other business owners congregate. Get involved with your local chamber of commerce, Rotary Club, Lions Club or Women in Management organization. Take an active role. The people you meet and work with in these organizations are potential people to whom you can refer your customers if they have a particular need and vice versa.

4) Do what you say and say what you mean
Make sure you provide your customers with what you’ve promised when you promised it and, whenever possible, a little more. As the saying goes, “under promise and over deliver.” This may mean delivering something sooner than the customer expects or discovering a problem of which the customer may not be aware and delivering a solution.  Also, if you’re not able to meet a customer’s need or deadline say so right away. Your up-front honesty will help you build your reputation better than saying you can do something to get the job, when you really can’t deliver.

5) Don’t forget your staff
Not only train your employees how you want them to work with customers, make sure you’re modeling those behaviors on a daily basis yourself. Also, support your staff by freeing them to make customer-benefiting decisions without your needing to provide your explicit approval. Lastly, remember your employees are, in a way, your customers too. Treat them well and with loyalty and they will do the same for you.

These items may seem like no-brainer activities. But by keeping these common sense items top-of-mind, you will keep your level of customer service high, which, in turn will help customers opt for your business over other choices they could make.

Tim Holdsworth is a business analyst and writer for AlignTech Solutions. He can be reached at holdswortht@aligntechsolutions.com

As parents, we can only hope that our constant nagging of say please, thank you, excuse me will be remembered when our children are away from home. I know at my house with a 2- and 5-year-old I feel like a broken record with the “whatya say” phrase.

Last Sunday we received a wonderful compliment that reassured my husband and me that we are doing something right—at church of all places. We attended the  9 0′clock church service, while our kids went to the church nursery. It’s better for all of us: the kids have fun playing and reading bible stories, while my husband and I can sit peacefully and listen to the service without having to answer the same question a hundred times: “Can we go yet?”

When we went to pick the kids up from the nursery, the nursery director couldn’t praise our oldest son enough. She said “He couldn’t help pick up toys enough, help wipe down tables enough and his manners were super”. I smiled, said thank you and thought to myself, “are they praising the same child that was just grounded a week ago for a tantrum large enough to cause world war three?” (more…)

Everyone knows somebody who plays one.  From Farmville to Family Feud, moms, dads, and kids are playing these simple games to pass time, sometimes to relax after work and sometimes even at work.

Farmville by Zynga

According to Appdata.com, which tracks the amount of users on Facebook, nine of the top 15 applications are games. The top app developer, Zynga, is a game company with over 200 million monthly active users.  Think about that for a second.  That is comparable to two-thirds of the population of the United States.  And this isn’t just people who have tried their games, these are active users!

The Business Model

The big question is where does the revenue come from?  As a third-party developer for Facebook, you have to supply your own servers so the cost must be astronomical for a company like Zynga.  Sixty million users of Farmville are eating up bandwidth like a lunch buffet. (more…)

The AT&T Yellow Pages folks who service Northeast Wisconsin paid our company an unintended compliment a couple of weeks ago when they shut down one of our clients’ websites by mistake — at least we hope it was a mistake.

Because we have a monitoring system for our clients’ sites—including some websites that we didn’t author and don’t control, we immediately noticed that the site was down and notified the client. The only thing that came up when you went to the website was “This account has been closed. Call [xxx-xxx-xxxx] to have this account reinstated.”

Coincidentally, just two days before the site went down, a Yellow Pages sales representative tried unsuccessfully to talk our client into increasing the size of her monthly service with them, which was already contracted to stay open until September of this year. (more…)

Does a small business really need a website?

For many the answer is “yes, of course.”

However, the reality is that 55 percent of small business owners don’t have a website. Yes, over half do not have a site. And of these businesses, 57 percent say they will never have one, according to Discover Small Business Watch, a monthly index measuring the relative economic confidence of US small business owners who have fewer than five employees.

Perhaps those business owners think they can’t set one up on their own or believe it will cost too much to set up a site. Maybe they think the size and nature of their business doesn’t warrant a site. (more…)

How healthy is your company? With increasing health care costs and more evidence supporting health conscious programs more companies are implementing health and wellness strategies. Also, now that Wisconsin is the 26^th state to pass the smoking ban there’s no better time than now to jump start a brand new program and get your employees involved in something positive.  According to preventdisease.com, the average annual health care cost per person in the United States far exceeds $3,000, and preventable illness makes up approximately 70% of the total costs of illness. We all know that working in corporate America can be stressful and can take its toll on employees. Encouraging your employees to live a healthy lifestyle can also benefit businesses by: (more…)

E3 2010

E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) is upon us once again and fans of video games worldwide are sneaking a peak in their offices at the countless presentations and articles popping up across the world wide web.  From constantly refreshing gaming sites to get a glimpse at the next big game or covertly viewing the streaming content of press conferences, the land of games is abuzz with what the future holds. (more…)

Courtesy of NASA

Catastrophe, calamity, debacle, disaster —all words that can describe the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  What started as an unfortunate event that took multiple lives and many livelihoods—and will have been responsible for the extinction of numerous marine species—has grown to become a tragedy of historic proportions.

The ongoing oil spill and subsequent scurry to resolve it essentially comes down to a lack of disaster planning.  This is not quite what we might have expected from a corporation the size of BP.

And yet lots of companies choose to ignore significant risks to their operations in favor of reporting shorter term profits.  Smaller businesses are just as guilty of ignoring significant risk factors as their larger counterparts.  Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is important for the survival of every business. (more…)