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Communication

Customer Service Strategies

Adam Smith | August 9, 2019 | Leave a Comment

Close Listening & Other Customer Service Strategies

This is a guest post from Daniel Matthews. He is a writer and musician from Boise, Idaho, who specializes in entrepreneurship, business, tech, and writing on just about any idea that captivates him. You can find him on Twitter.

Information is flowing to businesses all the time. Customers are constantly telling businesses what they think about them either directly or indirectly. Conversations on social media, comments, reviews, and communication via helplines all enable brands to gather customer feedback. 

However, that’s only the first step to customer service improvements and, ultimately, growth. Businesses have to take what they learn one step further to actually improve the customer service experience. Here’s how companies can keep customers happy.

Gather Feedback as Early as Possible

You can start gathering feedback about your brand, product or service in the early stages before you’ve officially released anything to the public. Ask a small group of current customers, potential customers, industry experts, or influencers to test the product and provide you with honest feedback. You may not like what you hear, and it may require major changes before moving forward, but it’s better to find out now instead of later.

Practice Close Listening

Close listening means that you listen to what the customer is saying, understand it, and then clarify that you understand what they’ve said. Agents should ask questions to get to the root of customer queries and issues. 

When customers are angry, they are generally upset for a reason, and that reason may not be obvious in the heat of the moment. Close listening goes beyond that to understand the core problem and take action, whether than be to change things like company policies or product design. 

Your response shows that you truly hear and care about what customers say. Close listening is particularly important if a customer has been injured or hurt by a product. Even one instance involving an injury should raise an alarm about potential issues to prevent as soon as possible.

Direct the Narrative Through Your Responses

Businesses can’t control what customers say about them, but they don’t have to be at the whim of those comments and reviews, either. When a customer leaves a negative review, it’s important to respond to them as soon as possible and in a public way. That way, other customers can see that your company faces issues head-on. 

Customers don’t want to feel like they’re alone, and they want to know that their problems will be given attention. They don’t expect perfection from businesses, but they do expect to be treated well as customers.

Provide the Same Level of Support Online and Offline

Businesses that only pay attention to customers when they make public complaints can get a reputation for poor customer service. Customers want to feel like they’re important no matter where they are — whether that be in a store, talking with a support agent on the phone, or posting a review on social media. Businesses should communicate in the same way no matter who is (or is not) going to see it. Companies have to be consistent in their customer service in order to be trustworthy.

Give Certain Customers a Point Person

Customers who are having a complex issue may have to call customer service several times. If they have to wait through a menu and explain their situation to a new agent every single time, they’ll quickly get upset with the company. At that point, you risk having an unhappy customer or losing them completely. 

These customers should have a point person who they can easily contact through a direct line. Even better is if that point person contacts the customer — so long as they do so when they say they will. For customer issues that have been escalated, it’s best if the point person is a manager or supervisor instead of a regular agent.

Provide Technical and Product Support

Customers can’t be satisfied or pleased with products they’re unable to use. One role of customer success managers and the customer support department overall is to provide technical and product support so that the customer can actually reap the benefits of what they’ve purchased. 

That means that support agents have to be experts in the products or services you sell — if they can’t teach your customers how to use them, who can? Take the time to provide agents with the training necessary for them to answer customer questions accurately and thoroughly. 

Build a Knowledge Base

The more you work with and listen to customers, the more you’ll realize that many of them have the same issues. Maybe they have trouble navigating part of your website, or they seem to run into trouble with a particular product. 

If you find that you’re answering the same questions and solving the same problems over and over, build a knowledge base that customers can use on their own. You’ll empower customers to solve issues through self-service. This is more convenient for them, and you’ll alleviate the pressure put on your customer service department. Your agents can then be free to handle more in-depth issues or to work directly with VIP clients.

A customer service department is only as strong as its agents. Without happy agents who are willing to provide stellar support, your customers won’t be treated the way they should. Clarify your expectations and empower agents to go above and beyond for the sake of the customer experience. Your customers will thank you through positive reviews and brand loyalty.

Thrive in the Digital Age

Adam Smith | July 26, 2019 | Leave a Comment

How to Thrive in the Digital Age When You Think It’s Overrated

This is a guest post from Devin Morrissey. He has been a dishwasher, a business owner, and everything in between. You can follow him on Twitter.

Digital marketing now represents the lifeblood of the marketing campaigns of many businesses. Even if you don’t love it, it’s well past time to commit to it. By 2021, U.S. businesses will be investing $120 billion in digital marketing efforts. Think digital marketing is overrated? It’s not, but the good news is that it’s not too late for your business to increase its capacity for online marketing efforts.

Digital marketing scales well. You can start with some basics, like a Facebook page and a website, and grow from there. While a professional digital marketer should net you the best return on interest (ROI), many business owners begin with those simple steps, and it’s more crucial to some industries than others.

Before you start (or consider hiring an expert), it’s vital to know about the crucial components of digital marketing and how you can assess its value to your business. 

Engagement Is Everything

This isn’t a new marketing principle, but it’s one that lends itself well to digital marketing because it’s easier to track online. As a business owner, you understand that if you’re broadcasting traditional ads, like print ads, to the wrong audience, you’re not going really stir a conversation about your product or service. You’d certainly do better if you reached your core users or prospective customers.

Digital marketing works similarly. With targeted pay-per-click ads and content focusing on a specific niche, you’ll attempt to reach your intended audience. With digital advertising, though, you can get super specific. You can even target people at certain companies with the right Facebook ad parameters. Jobseekers do it all the time to make sure prospective employers see their resumes or websites. 

Digital Marketing Relies on Data and Analysis

Effective digital marketing doesn’t mean taking a shot in the dark with your content or advertising. It should be informed by data and analysis. To make the most of this data, data scientists work with marketers to tailor a campaign to the right audience. Think of it as telling the ideal story to the people hoping to hear it. 

Data science is a growing field with 2.7 million new data science jobs projected to open per year by 2020. Since the metrics themselves prove ROI for marketing efforts, many business owners see data science as a safe investment. 

Data scientists track multiple data points for each website and marketing campaign. They can help marketers segment email lists so the right messages reach the right audience. Data scientists also use tools like Google Analytics to determine how website visitors use business websites, what content is the most popular, and even what types of interests your users have.

Google Analytics is a free tool from Google. If you’re not already using it to capture data about your website visitors, you’re already behind the competition. Data can have an extremely positive impact on your company’s bottom line, and this free resource should be your first stop for insights about site visitors.

Data scientists can make specific recommendations too. Let’s say you’re selling men’s shaving products. Your Google Analytics data may reveal that your audience happens to love ice hockey. You can use this data in a few ways:

  • Create content or feature ice hockey in your ads.
  • Place content on an ice hockey-related website.
  • Interview an ice hockey player for your blog, even if it’s not directly related to your shaving products.

Your data scientist would then help you track the success of your content and make further recommendations to increase the value of your messaging. 

Content Rules Digital Marketing

As you can probably tell from our example, having relevant content is key to digital marketing. Gone are the days when your strategy consisted of faxing a press release to the local newspaper. Everyone is online — even the aging population, with the quickest growing Facebook demographic being senior citizens. It’s time to get out of that newspaper and onto a computer screen with your content.

Many marketers in the digital age rely on an inbound marketing strategy. The idea behind inbound marketing is simple: Identify what kind of content people want to read, create content around it, and let customers come to you via search engine traffic. 

Going back to our men’s razors example, if you interview a hockey player for your blog, it could potentially bring more customers to your site. At the close of your post, you should use a call to action (CTA), asking your readers to do something such as sign up for your newsletter. You can count this as a newsletter conversion.

Some of the most successful content is evergreen, meaning it’s continually useful. For example, a blog post like “how to teach your son to shave” might perform well over time. It’s something people will always need to know. 

Remember that effective digital content doesn’t try to fool the user. It makes them feel more positively about your brand. Your customers like digital content and products that make them feel closer, more connected, and part of a community.

If the idea of digital marketing still makes your head spin, consider retaining a high-level view of your marketing efforts. Start with just one thing: one Facebook page, one targeted ad campaign, or one piece of content on your blog per month. Over time, your efforts will lead to growth.

B2B Lead Generation

Adam Smith | July 19, 2019 | Leave a Comment

How to Use Content to Drive B2B Lead Generation

This is a guest post from Kate Lynch. She is a business and digital marketing blogger who spends her entire day writing quality blogs. She is a passionate reader and loves to share quality content prevalent on the web with her friends and followers and keeping a keen eye on the latest trends and news in those industries. Currently she is associated with OmniSend, An eCommerce marketing automation platform built for smart marketers. Follow her on twitter @IamKateLynch for more updates.

There was a time when the best B2B lead generation tactics were limited to direct mailers, cold calls, and even in-person sales rep visits. Though effective, it typically required great personal effort to generate a single lead and even more to convert that lead into a sale. The cost-effective lead generation tactics in digital marketing were reserved for direct consumers and were not considered a platform useful for generating B2B leads.

Now, however, some of the most forward-thinking businesses have harnessed the power of digital marketing–specifically content marketing–to cast a wider net and generate more high-quality leads with minimal effort. Instead of salesperson drop-bys, you can send automated emails. Instead of preparing and sending out vast quantities of direct mailers, you can focus on having the best B2B content in your niche, nurturing a good newsletter following, and ranking highly on Google for relevant search terms.

Consumers are not the only ones who have evolved to become web-centric. Businesses rely heavily on search engines and digital content as well. The people who either make or influence buying decisions within firms use the information they gather from search engines, blogs, ebooks, infographics, social media, and newsletter subscriptions. In fact, recent studies led by Content Marketing Institute show that 88% of B2B organizations have shifted to content marketing as a response to this change in behavior.

Content marketing is a strategy that involves consistently developing and distributing valuable and relevant content to capture the interest of a target audience, and consequently, convert them into paying customers. To engage in this marketing strategy for B2B lead generation, here are the most important things to keep in mind:

Track the results of your lead generation efforts.

In traditional advertising, it’s challenging to track where leads come from. Apart from the tedious task of asking each of your leads where they learned about your business, how do you really measure the results of an ad you placed in an industry-leading magazine? What about all those direct mailers you sent out? How many actually made it to the intended recipient? How many were opened? And how many reached out?

Thankfully, virtually everything is measurable online. On your website, you know how many people visited, what led them to your site, how many read through your content, and how many signed up because of it. For every newsletter you send out, you’ll know how many actually received it, how many opened it, and how many performed your intended action (asked for a quote, signed up for a service, etc.). Don’t take that capability for granted.

Always measure the results of each of your lead generation efforts. That’s the only way to determine what works really well and what can be scrapped. As you streamline your marketing campaign, you’ll enjoy continued improvement not just in the number of leads you generate but also in the cost to attain those results.

Synergize your sales and marketing teams.

In traditional B2B lead generation models, marketing teams were mostly responsible for building and sustaining a brand. For most, the end goal was to cultivate brand awareness so that potential customers are more accommodating when the sales team comes in.

Sales teams generally spend a whole lot of time generating leads. In some cases, they spend more time generating leads than closing them. If your marketing team is successful in launching and maintaining a good content marketing strategy, leads approach the sales teams, and not the other way around. That way, sales reps can devote their time entirely to closing deals.

The trick in getting this to work in a B2B standpoint is to get sales and marketing teams to work together. To launch a successful content marketing strategy, sales need to clearly describe the ideal target audience. Who are they? What do they like? What kind of language are they most responsive to? Marketing teams should consider all that when developing a content strategy. At the same time, sales teams need to work with marketing in order to provide consistent messaging throughout the sales funnel.

Establish your authority.

When starting out with content marketing, it’s easy to think that your ultimate goal should be to get the top results on search engines and boost your web traffic. Of course, that’s all very important. But, the most important goal to pursue is establishing your authority in your niche. When you’ve achieved that, SEO and web traffic will follow. So, too, will premium-quality leads.

Establishing your authority is, by no means, an easy task. You’ll need to determine what questions your target audience needs to be answered. Then, you’ll need to answer those questions and provide any other information that they might find useful. Doing this would give you the reputation of being an expert in your field.

Once your target audience knows that they can turn to you for your expertise, you’ll be established as the authority in your niche. That automatically earns you the trust of the decision makers of your target businesses. Once you get there, you’ve basically created an automated B2B lead generation system.

Pre-qualify your leads.

Land-and-expand is a common sales tactic. For B2C, this typically involves asking for the smallest commitment necessary to land a customer and then encouraging them to expand their commitment later on. In email marketing, for example, you don’t overwhelm potential subscribers with a bunch of questions before they sign up. You first ask for their email address, add them to your list, and find ways to ask for more information next time.

For B2B, that might not be the best tactic. What you want to do is pre-qualify your leads so that your sales teams are spending their precious time on those who are most likely to convert. To do this, you can ask simple questions like what their job title is or how many employees work at their company. These might not seem too significant but may go a long way in helping you distinguish genuine leads from those who are just curious.

Nurture prospects at each stage of the customer journey.

Closing B2B leads can be a long, drawn-out process. Business generally can’t make a buying decision in an instant. In many cases, it could take weeks, if not months to close a single lead. In the meantime, you need to make sure your business continues to be at the top of your buyer’s mind. Otherwise, you risk being forgotten altogether.

If content can be useful in drawing in B2B leads, it’ll also be effective in encouraging those leads to make a buying decision. The best thing about it is that you can automate specific content marketing procedures not only to save time but also to make sure your leads are nurtured using targeted messages.

With email marketing specifically, you can map out your entire buyers’ journey and set messages to send at each stage automatically. Plus, you can segment your subscribers in great detail so that each one gets messages that are most appealing to them. If you get this done right, you’ll have an automated system to churn out not only leads but sales as well.

Test and react quickly based on your data.

In today’s data-driven marketing world, another undertaking can help you streamline your content marketing efforts: A/B testing. Constantly endeavor to find the best ways to communicate with your target audience. What words pique their interests? What tone works best? What’s the most engaging design and layout? What offers are most appealing?

All these questions are incredibly important and can only be answered by testing. A/B testing in B2B content marketing involves pretty much the same process you’d go through for any other audience. But in most cases, the stakes are much higher so you can’t get into it haphazardly. For anything that you test, measure the results, and then use the same insights for all your campaigns moving forward.

Next to your actual content, the most critical part of content marketing is your data. It can’t be emphasized enough how important it is to measure your results continually. Then, make the necessary changes to boost your campaigns to optimum efficiency. One thing to note, though, is you need to react quickly. With a good enough tool, you can make changes as soon as you find the flaws. In many cases, a day’s difference could mean quite a considerable sum in sales.

A content marketing strategy limited to email has largely been recognized as one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways to boost B2B leads. But, launching a full-scale campaign involving web content, SEO, and social media has the potential to make your business unstoppable.

No matter the platform, a solid online presence can be all you need to have a constant inflow of B2B leads. The best thing about it is that leads funneled in from these channels are those that are more likely to convert into actual paying customers. In many cases, all your business needs is a powerful marketing tool to support you through your entire campaign.

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Hi, my name is Adam Smith and welcome to asmithblog.com. I am the author of the new book, The Bravest You. Because of my work as an entrepreneur, consultant, writer, and speaker, I have been named a top industry influencer by American Genius. I live with my wife, Jasmine, and three children in Shenandoah, IA.

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