American and International Info Resources

You can have the best products, the plushest offices, the best location, but unless you are a ‘customer focused’ business, all of this counts for nothing, you will never really hit the heights you deserve.

So what can you do to build a business which focuses outwardly on the customer, and not inwardly on the business?

Build Passion and Commitment

The first building block is passion and commitment. This is the very foundation stone of a customer focused business. Without passion and commitment the structure you will build above will be weak and prone to collapse at the first sign of stress.

The passion and commitment has to come from you and your staff. All of you have to totally believe in the concept of the customer being the centre of everything you do. From the moment you step into work everyone has to do whatever it takes to satisfy the customer.

As the key person in the business what can you do to build passion and commitment? Lead from the front and set an example. Keep the concept at the top of the agenda and demonstrate it in everything you do. Keep talking about it. Celebrate all the great examples of putting the customer totally in focus.

Build Processes Around Your Customer Not The Business

All great businesses have clearly laid down processes on how to get things done. Whether you have a formal Process Manual or a Quick Reference Guide, which sets out your processes, a clear procedure provides confidence and clarity for both your staff and the customer.

But don’t just build your processes around making things easier for you, build them to make things easier for the customer. Look at every step in the process and ask yourself, “Can we do something to make it even easier for the customer to do business with us?” Are there steps which can be refined or even eliminated all together? Be inquisitive, bold and challenging!

Build a Relationship

Building a relationship with your customer is at the very heart of a customer focused model. Build a strong, firm relationship and you will have a customer for life. The basis of relationship building is A.B.C. - Always Be Communicating. Here are some ideas on building an enduring and profitable relationship through ABC:

• Make a point to periodically call your customers. Set up a diary system to provide you with a regular reminder or prompt. Call them even if you have nothing sell! A strange concept perhaps but you never know what will come out of the conversation

• Issue quarterly newsletters telling them about your latest products, what you have planned for the future, a customer profile, news about new employees. Find anything which would be of interest and at the same time binding both of you closer together

• Make it a point during any conversation to find out something about the business you didn’t know before. File away any interesting fact and think how you can use it in the future. Imagine how powerful it would be when you ask how the idea they mentioned in your last conversation was going!

• Do memorable things. Send birthday or anniversary cards to your key contact, a simple thank you note for doing business with us, send articles or newspaper cuttings, which you think will be of interest to them

Build a Culture of ‘Wanting To Know’

If you are to build a reputation for being customer focused you should be making an effort to find out on a regular basis what they want from you. This can be achieved by either an informal phone call or a more formal survey via mail or e-mail. Find out what they like about your business, what they don’t like and what changes they would like to see.

Having gathered together all the information, suggestions and ideas, set out an action plan to follow up. Once you have acted upon the workable suggestions, get in touch with the customers again and tell them what you have done in response to their comments. This will demonstrate that you have taken their ideas seriously and really care about what they think. Powerful stuff!

Being customer focused can be very rewarding and help in building a great business. Which of these steps are you going to put into practice today? Remember this - let the customer be your focus and you will become their focus.

Small Business Success is a resource dedicated to helping small business owners be more successful. If you are looking for a regular flow of ideas and tips then subscribe to Small Business Success a free newsletter, which provides you with quick tips, ideas and articles. Visit http://smallbusinesssuccess.biz

Historically, customer service was delivered over the phone or in person. Customers didn’t have many choices, and switching to competitors was cumbersome. Today, these methods are but two of the many possible touch points of entry for any given interaction. With all the options the Internet brings, competition is literally a click away. If, as has been reported, 65% of your business comes from current customers, then in order to stay in business, you best focus on winning the satisfaction and loyalty of those customers.

With continued attention on customer service, customer retention, and lifetime value of the customer, it is no surprise that contact center operations continue to increase in importance as the primary hub of a customer’s experience. The contact center is still the most common way that customers get in touch with businesses. In fact, Gartner reports 92% of all contact is through the center.

While much attention has been focused on the technology and benefits of providing multiple channels for customer contact, little consideration has been directed to handling the human part of the equationtraining Customer and Technical Service Representatives to field more than just telephone communications. With the explosion of e-commerce, the need to reinforce keeping the human element in the equation is paramount. Certainly now more than ever before in history, customer-centric service is a necessity.

Twenty five years from now customers will still be human beings, still be driven by desires and needs. Virtual environments do not create virtual customers. Except for the simplest transactions, some customers still need to be connected with and nurtured by a live person. Amazon.com has learned this. They employ hundreds of traditional customer service representatives using phone lines to help customers with questions that cannot be dealt with online.

With the ability to handle simple transactions available by using sophisticated, self-service technology, customer calls, faxes, and/or e-mails are more complex, more complicated, sometime even escalated, heightening stress levels.

At the same time, research has identified the Customer Service and Technical Representative as one of the ten most stressful jobs in America today, with job stress costing employers an estimated $300+ billion yearly in absenteeism, lowered productivity, rising health insurance costs and other medical expenses (up from $200 + billion just ten years ago.)

A recent NIOSH study reported that 50% of employees view job stress as a major problem in their lives–double from a decade ago.

Lines of demarcation have blurred and change is rampant in today’s center. Why? Because of our cell phones, voice mail, faxback, PDA’s, and e-mail. We are now more available and accessible than ever before. The lines are no longer clear as to where our jobs or projects begin and endthey can follow us home again and again.

In today’s competitive marketplace there is little difference between products and services. What makes the difference–what distinguishes one company from another–is its relationship with the customer. Who has the awesome responsibility for representing themselves, their companies, perhaps their industry in general? Front line representatives.

The ability of a company to provide human-to-human connections–back and forth live communication–continues to be critically important. The fact is voice is the most natural and powerful human interface, real time or otherwise. That isn’t going to change any time soon. To the customer, people are inseparable from the services they provide. Actually, the person on the other end of the phone is the company. It is no wonder, then, that companies with superior people management, invest heavily in training and retraining, reinforcing the human element.

Yet customers still leave. The latest statistics on why are:

• 45% because of poor service

• 20% because of lack of attention.

This means that 65% of your customers leave because of something your front line is, or is not, doing.

• 15% for a better product

• 15% for a cheaper product and

• 5% other

This is the good and the bad news. It’s bad news because that’s a high percentage. On the other hand, it’s good news because there is something you can do about itit resides on the human side.

It is agreed that people, process, and ’state of the art’ technology are what make companies work. For me, the people process is most important. After all, it’s the people who truly make the difference.

Never lose sight of the fact that we are human beings, not merely ‘human doings.’ The fact is 70% to 90% of what happens with customers is driven by human nature, having nothing to do with technology. Technology is meant to enable human endeavors, not to disable them.

Extraordinary service or lack thereof, separates the good from
the great companies. As more and more organizations are turning to the contact center as a strategic player in the competitive landscape, it is in the throes of re-inventing itself to step up to the plate and become the heart of a company’s customer facing operations.

Empathetic Responsiveness

The ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and see their point of viewnot agree with them, not make them right and your company wrongbut hear what they are saying. After all, basic needs of all of us are to be heard and treated with dignity and respect.

I think of a call as an ABC process. ‘A’ represents the customer presenting their question, request, complaint or problem. ‘C’ is the ultimate resolution. Most times ‘B’ is either skipped or left outbecause of metrics, calls in queue, or simply because you know the answer before the customer is even finished speaking. ‘B’ is where the agent acknowledges what they hearbe it upset, anger, frustration, or fear. Or, a simple ‘thank you for taking the time to call and bring this to our attention.’

After all, if a customer calls in to complain, you have the opportunity/challenge to turn them around. If they don’t call, and only complain to other people, you have no opportunity. Does going through ‘B’ take longer? Not at all. It allows you to move the customer to a more productive interaction and close the call. I’ve heard many customers repeat their opening paragraph (A) over and over, while at the same time the agent is trying to get them to resolution (C). Red alert! Red alert! Acknowledge what is behind the words and you will move them quickly to ‘C.’ I believe you can’t go from A to C without going through B.
If all customers wanted just the facts (and some do), they could ascertain the information online. Most customers (people) want the human interaction, someone to hear them, someone to care. A simple, “I’m so sorry that was your experience. My name is Rosanne and I’m going to do my best to help you right here and now.”

Self Service

When asked the question in a recent study, “What is the biggest barrier your company encounters to self-service effectiveness?” only 14% of the customers replied they don’t know about it.’ This means that the 86% who do know about it and attempt to use it (1) find it too hard to navigate, (2) can’t find the answers, and/or (3) don’t trust the system or the answers they do find.

Research shows that customers prefer to deal with companies who are the most consistently accessible. When customers experience a level of service from email and chat support, for instance, that equals or exceeds voice support, then and only then will they gladly migrate to those channels to resolve their problems and inquiries.

To increase customers’ satisfaction, be sure to:

1) Phone: Have a ‘zero out’ option on your system

2) Website: Have your phone number or a button to speak with a human

3) E-mail: Rephrase the issue in the opening paragraph.
Purchasing Process

In an interview with Delia Passi Smalter, the former publisher of Working Woman and Working Mother magazines, we found very interesting statistics regarding female demographics (Incentive Magazine, 2003). It seems that women are making over 85% of consumer purchases and influencing more than 95% of total goods and services. Smalter distinguishes the purchasing process women and men go through. The biggest one, she says, is that women need to feel more of a connection to the TSR; they need to trust the corporation and the brand. Price becomes secondary. Women take in a lot of information, including recommendations from friends and family, company and brand reputation, feelings about her contact person, and how the brand will impact her life. Not so for men. Men take a systematic approach, allowing outside influence to some degree, but mostly they are focused on price.

One of the most influential documents in the world, the U.S. Constitution, begins with “We, the people…” Yes, ‘we the people’ are what makes the difference.

ROSANNE D’AUSILIO, Ph.D., an industrial psychologist, and President of Human Technologies Global, Inc., specializes in profitable call center operations in human performance management. Over the last 20 years, she has provided needs analyses, instructional design, and customized, live customer service skills trainings. Also offered is agent and facilitator university certification through Purdue University’s Center for Customer Driven Quality.

Known in the industry as ‘the practical champion of the human,’ the 4th edition of her best selling book, “Wake Up Your Call Center: Humanize Your Interaction Hub,” is hot off the press and available at http://www.human-technologies.com, Purdue University Press, Amazon.com, or your local bookstore. Her second book, Customer Service and the Human Experience (co-authored with Dr. Jon Anton), is available at http://www.BenchmarkPortal.com/human.

Rosanne is also a Certified Call Center Benchmarking Auditor through Purdue University’s Center for Customer Driven Quality. She sits on the Editorial Advisory Panel and is a columnist for Call Center.

If you are looking for effective spyware and adware protection, you can always look online to check out some of the most effective anti-spyware and adware tools available for you. There are a number of software companies who have dedicated their resources to develop more effective and more sophisticated programs to provide you with the best anti-spyware and adware protection for your PC. Parents should know what happens with their children and try to prevent the possible danger.

Cyber criminals are online waiting for you and will take advantage of you and your unawareness of them. Data loggers, key loggers are just a few programs which harvest info from your computer. Winclear is the only program created specially to auto remove such spywares. If your account was compromised while AccSent was enabled there is a high probability that you either have a security hole in your computer which allowed hackers to take control of your computer or you have a Trojan virus spyware or keylogger software installed on your computer because someone not only had access to your e-gold passphrase they also had access to your email address password. That is why every computer owner needs winclear.

Protect With Winclear :Erase Internet History
Yes, the seemingly endless onslaught of cyber crime continues, this time via the innocent e-card - that which once was a nice surprise in the Inbox has become a gate to identity theft. Exploit Prevention Labs in Atlanta, GA reported in September that company researchers have discovered a scam in which e-cards are used to install keylogger software on the victim’s computer. The scam, which was executed by an Australian cyber criminal ring and is known as MDAC, involves sending to the user an e-card that appears to originate from a major online greeting card service. When the user clicks on the hyperlink to open the card, the browser is redirected to a exploit server, which checks to see if the computer has been updated with the latest security patches. If it hasn’t, the server installs a rootkit and keylogger, then redirects the computer on to an actual e-card. The user continues working on the computer, likely forgetting about the e-card. But from that point on, all keystrokes are being recorded and accessed by the attackers for use in identity theft. Winclear is the only software which is capable of removing keylogger programs. Some may save up to 30 or 60 days automatically. Winclear has been the industry leader in fighting keyloggers for the last 8 years.

Winclear:
Every time we are required to supply a password we need to use a new and different password. That is the reason why you need Winclear installed onto your computer. However just like a coin the Internet has two sides. Protect your computer security by using Winclear! More about Winclear here: Winclear.

Yahoo has announced recently that they will be joining Google in introducing an advertising program where advertisers can pay per click. Using this method advertisers can set a budget by selecting how much they are willing to pay per visitor, and how many visitors they can afford per day.

In response to this opportunity sites like www.googlehomebusiness.com have released eBooks, tutorials, and short courses, that offer guidance to website owners looking to advertise their sites by using pay per click search engine programs from Google and Yahoo.

These courses illustrate the process of setting up online campaigns, writing effective ads, focusing on the right market, and strategies for measuring the results of your online campaigns.

“Just like print advertisers hire advertising agencies to design and run their campaigns, online advertisers need to be able to access seasoned advice for advertising online,” said Donny Lowy, who is the author of Selling Online: Beyond eBay.

According to Donny, there are specialized techniques and methods that are needed to properly advertise online. Since the barrier to entry is very low, there are many site owners who are simply throwing away their advertising budgets on ineffective campaigns.

“Low entry barriers mean that anyone can start advertising online because it requires less than $100 to start. People also see this is an easy way to capture leads and increase sales.”

In reality it seems that the majority of online sites are still struggling. While there are more opportunities to advertise online, and at a lower rate than previously, the challenge of capturing sales online seems to be level with past ratios.

“Online entrepreneurs can beat the odds and capture more leads and increase their online sales, but they need to study the steps that proven online businesses have taken.”

The search engine field was equally shared by 8 large search engines during the last five years. But as the many of these Internet upstarts failed, the remaining players were left with a larger slice of the search market. This situation has presented opportunities for small budget advertisers.

At the acme of the Internet fever there were many search engines serving the search market. There were companies like Infoseek, Open Text, Snap, and Direct Hit. Most search engines that sill operate receive their results from established search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Overture.

Since search engine users have grown in sophistication they have come to realize that these results are being fed by the larger search engines. These users have gone direct to the source and now the majority of them rely exclusively on Google and Yahoo.

Studies have shown that Google and Yahoo control 90% of the search engine market, with Google leading Yahoo by 10 market points.

Yahoo has responded by updating their search engine with more advanced features and faster indexing.

Gone are the days when it took months for Yahoo and Google to index a new website. Now website owners can see their sites appearing in the search engines in a couple of weeks if not days.

The competition by Google and Yahoo has allowed website owners with small internet marketing budgets to enter the marketplace faster, and without having to spend an excessive amount on advertising.

One reason being that the search engines themselves realize that the more sites they have indexed, the more users will use their service instead of the competition’s engines.

The new services introduced by these search engines also allows small internet businesses to prosper by taking advantage of the advertising opportunities offered.

Donny Lowy, the CEO of http://www.closeoutexplosion.com, an online wholesale and closeout business, and http://www.wholesalecloseoutforum.com, an educational resource for the wholesale and closeout business, launched http://www.googlehomebusiness.com to show entrepreneurs how to profit from Google and Yahoo.

My Business is Afraid of the Internet

Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, once said that there would soon be two types of businesses, those online, and those out of business. Those words still ring true today, and many small businesses are missing a huge boat by not getting online.

A good portion of small businesses have been around for a while, long before banner ads and even email became so wildly popular. These owners built their business from the ground-up, working hard and long to develop their products and services. These owners see great value in hard work, and for that they should be applauded.

As technology increases, hard work changes forms. Today, every business, from a babysitter to a widget manufacturer should have a website. An estimated 60% of homes in the US now have broadband, and nearly 90% have at least one computer. These numbers cannot be ignored by business owners and marketing teams. People are flocking to the Internet to find phone numbers, local merchants, and new friends.

No longer can businesses dismiss the Internet as a fad. The amount of online sales in 2003 surpassed $6 Billion.

Even if a business has no physical merchandise to sell, there are still plenty of reasons to have their information online. Contact numbers, addresses, and maps can save receptionists time on the phone. Forms that need to be submitted can be printed and filled out before customers come in. Newsletters can help promote any business and upcoming sales.

Websites can be very cost-effective to build. For just a small investment you could be online in a matter of days.

No business should be afraid of the Internet. If your business is, or you are, you?d better get hold of someone that can help you, and fast!

by William Hanke

About the Author
Will Hanke is a self-proclaimed geek who owns and operates Lighthouse Technologies (http://www.techlh.com), a web development and hosting company based in Arnold, Missouri. For questions or comments, email him at will@techlh.com. And buy yourself a good virus program so he doesn?t have to fight your emails with anti-virus spray.

Knowing how to identify the best free online affiliate program is important because it will have a huge impact on the sort of income you are able to generate. Not knowing how to identify the best free online affiliate program will cost you money because even if you are still able to earn some income, you will be unable to reap the full potential of your site, resources and personal skills.

Without exception the best free online affiliate program must allow you to earn income from the sales of your second tier sub affiliates. If it offers an opportunity for you to also earn on a third tier, it is even better. This is very important and this single factor can make a huge difference to the sort of income that you will end up with.

The reason is that no matter how good you are or how high the traffic your best free online affiliate program site receives, there is no way that you can compete with somebody who has got an army of second tier sub affiliates. And if that person even has a third tier army of sub-affiliates making sales on their behalf, they then become completely and totally unbeatable.

While it is important to check out all the other obvious factors when joining an affiliate program, like reputation of affiliate company and ability and track record in paying out commissions to affiliates, your best free online affiliate program must be one that pays you for sub affiliate sales.

Learn more about this best affiliate program from a blogger who is using it to rake in thousands of dollars… and growing. Or get his email newsletter free, send a blank email NOW.

In the dynamic new world we live in, we might almost be forgiven for thinking that we are enslaved by technology and run over on the information highway. Yet, the other way of looking at it is how technology and all those doses of free-flowing information have empowered us, in ways previously unimaginable.

Nowhere is this new power bestowed on us more pronounced than in the world of business and marketing. The Internet has given a whole new impetus to viral and word of mouth marketing; in fact, one could say that it has led to the resurrection of these age old marketing methods. Today, news about a company or business- both good and bad- flows so quickly and with such momentum that it has the potency to create or destroy businesses.

Businesses that don’t listen to what their consumers are saying and how the society rates them are bound to fail, sooner rather than later. In fact, consumer feedback and its impact on branding has become a recurring theme amongst marketing thinkers recently. A growing number of books and case studies highlight the correlation between the success of companies that are in tune with their customers’ needs and feedback, or the rapid decline or fall from grace of companies that do not take customer feedback as seriously.

Most companies do have their own mechanisms to gather customer feedback in an organized and structured manner, but unfortunately many of these feedback mechanisms are designed to tell the companies what they really want to hear. Companies would be foolish to ignore the subtle signals from the market or the muffled voices of disillusioned customers floating around the Internet.

Such public feedback forums certainly have their skeptics and critics who question the creditability of comments that are not moderated. Anyone can say anything about anyone and get away with it, they say. Yet, these skeptics need to understand that the general public seems to have an uncanny knack of discerning right and wrong, and separating the genuine from the fake. Simply put, despite the susceptibility to manipulation, there seems to be a kind of auto-correction in operation that ensures that businesses can ignore their consumer sentiments voiced over public forums at their own peril.

Companies would do well to realize and accept at least the spirit of the statement: Business is for the consumer, by the consumer, of the consumer.

Jonathan Gropper is founder of ResponsePlanet.com, an open public forum for people to rate companies, businesses, music, movies and pretty much everything on the planet. ResponsePlanet.com aims to create a thriving online community for voicing opinions, letting out rants, writing reviews & blogs and even get considerable marketing mileage with free localized classifieds.