Read entire article:

http://www.b2cmarketinginsider.com/online-marketing/importance-of-online-customer-service-and-reputation-management-0496

Whether you are at an established company or at a startup the pressure on you as a marketer to deliver is immense.  To make matters more challenging it is likely that your marketing budget has been cut.  Every dollar you spend is questioned for ROI and in most meetings you are asked about developments in social networking, customer service and online reputation management because it is in the press and tantalizingly promises high return at low cost.

Whatever category your business is in, online customer service and reputation management are marketing tactics you should be employing that compliment almost any brand at very little cost.

Customer Service

In today’s economy no single thing matters as much for your sales and loyalty as building a great customer service brand.  This is an area of marketing often overlooked or muddled with expensive and hard to use tools.   If you are even aware of your customer service problem it is likely you first came across it the way most consumers do by finding a review about your company online on a search engine.

Online reviews are here to stay and many current and potential customers use internet search engines to help guide their online research in deciding where to buy.  You can leverage the world of online consumer reviews in your favor and often have more impact on thousands of active consumers’ purchasing intent then the best TV commercial.

Whether you have a large customer service department or none at all, already have a good customer service reputation or need to build one, many new online customer service tools exist today that are often free or low cost.

What You Can Do Now to Improve Customer Service and Reputation

Start asking your top customers to review you on customer service sites like MeasuredUp.com or angieslist.com.  By confidently asking top customers for customer service reviews you will have dozens of complimentary reviews of your company online in no time.   These will negate most bad reviews, increase your ranking on search engines and help interested potential customers to find and trust you when researching online.  The goal is not to have only good reviews as even the best companies have some bad reviews about them online.  The goal is to have a balance and to demonstrate through association that your brand is focused on improving customer service.

Online Comments

Individuals are talking about you on the Internet whether you like it or not.  On thousands of personal sites, as well as Facebook and Twitter, content that mentions you or a competitor is constantly being added.  You need to join this conversation even if you can’t control it.

What You Can Do Now to Respond to Online Comments

Identify a person on your staff to spend about 5 hours a week searching for unflattering reviews or mentions about your company or articles about something that is relevant to your business.  When there is a comment field have them write some intelligent and helpful content in response.  State that they are an employee of the company and include a URL to your site.  Do not try and pretend to be a consumer as this will likely be found out and create further uncomplimentary content.  This effort will help rebut negative views, show your company cares about its reputation and will help drive traffic to your company website.  If you come across compliments add on a quick “Thank You” comment and that you care about your reputation and appreciate the support of customers.

This tactic is focused totally on trolling Facebook, Twitter and Blogs to “invite” connections with current and potential customers.  This is a hard position to measure effectiveness on but you have to consider this proactive marketing.  The opportunity cost saved is that you don’t have uncontrolled rumors online.  Many PR firms are starting to offer this service but the fact is they don’t really get it and won’t be able to react as quickly as someone in your company culture who understands your brand.

With these two easy and inexpensive marketing tactics you can quickly augment your existing marketing efforts and start to raise your company’s social media presence, customer service and online profile while helping increase sales and build online reputation.

These tactics should be factored into your budget as the cost of doing business if you want to compete in today’s interconnected digital world.

About the author: Marc Karasu is a senior marketing executive and digital marketing expert with 20 years experience.  He is also the founder of Measuredup.com, the leader in online customer service and reputation management. He can be reached at MeasuredUp.com or his marketing consulting website MAKtaste.com.

Vote for MeasuredUp.com at Discoveringstartups.com

www.discoveringstartups.com/measuredup-com-customer-service-resolutions/

From Retailcustomerexperience.com

By Marc Karasu

Being an executive in this economy is tough. Being a marketing executive is almost impossible.

Whether you are at an established company with a well-known brand or at a startup, the pressure on you to deliver is immense. To make matters more challenging, it is likely that your marketing budget has been cut. Every dollar you spend is questioned for ROI and in most meetings you are asked about developments in social networking, customer service and PR because it is all anyone reads about and promises tantalizingly high yield at low cost.

Whatever category your retail business is in, the following tactics will help you build, track and keep up on the buzz about your brand without the need to invest large amounts of money. These ideas compliment almost any brand at any budget.

1. Social networking – You probably already have a Facebook and Twitter page that may or may not be yielding results for you. To help these pages along and to build up your social networking reputation or refute complaints, you should be leveraging these pages further.

What you can do now – Task a junior member of your team to be your “social outreach ambassador.” This role is focused totally on trolling Facebook, Twitter and blogs to “invite,” “reply” and “request” connections with current and potential customers and groups. By spending 20 or so hours a week on this effort you will slowly help along your Facebook and Twitter following, refute untrue online blog statements and reply to customers who have questions. This is a hard position to measure effectiveness on, so it could be hard to justify in your budget. But you have to consider this proactive marketing. The opportunity cost saved is not having uncontrolled rumors online. Many PR firms are starting to offer this service, but they don’t really get it and won’t be able to react as quickly as someone in your company culture who understands your brand.

Start with an intern and scale from there.

2. Customer service – In today’s economy no single thing matters as much for your sales and loyalty as building a great customer service brand. This is an area of marketing often overlooked or muddled with expensive and hard-to-use processes. If you are even aware of your customer service problem it is likely you first came across it the way most consumers find you: You found a review about your company online, via a search engine, and it was probably not flattering.

Online reviews are here to stay and many current and potential customers use them to help guide their online research in deciding where to buy. You can leverage the world of online reviews in your favor and often have more effect on purchase intent than the best TV commercial.

Whether you have a large customer service department, no customer service department, already have a good customer service reputation or need to build one, today many new online customer service tools exist that are often free or low cost.

What you can do now - Start asking your customers to review you on business sites like Angieslist.com and customer service sites like MeasuredUp.com. By confidently asking customers for business and customer service reviews, you will in no time have dozens of complimentary reviews of your company online. These will negate most bad reviews, increase your positioning on search engines and help interested, potential customers find and trust you when researching online. The goal here is not to have only good reviews as even the best companies have some bad reviews about them online. The goal is to have a balance and to demonstrate through association that your brand is focused on improving.

3. Online comments – The Internet is talking about you whether you like it or not. On thousands of sites, content that mentions you or a competitor is constantly being added. You need to join this conversation, even if you can’t control it.

What you can do now - Take that intern who is working on Facebook, Twitter and blogs and have him also spend five hours a week searching for reviews about your company or articles about something that is relevant to your business. When there is a comment field, have the intern write some intelligent content in response. State that they are an employee of the company and include a URL to your site. Do not try and pretend to be consumer as this will likely be found out and create further uncomplimentary content. This effort will help rebut negative views, show your company cares about its reputation and will help drive traffic to your company Web site. If you come across compliments, add on a quick “Thank You” comment, saying that you care about your reputation and appreciate the support of customers.

4. PR - You have more to say about your business than you realize. Regular press releases about important company events, news or upgrades are often overlooked. Generate interest from journalists by creating content that will interest them.

What you can do now – You know your business and the kinds of things the press wants to cover. Often, the press does not have the resources to generate data for a story. Create a poll on your Web site based on a topic of interest and then pitch the results to your press contacts. This will often lead to an exclusive or inclusion in a larger story about the topic.

If you have good contacts you also can pre-pitch an idea to them to gauge interest and then create the poll customized to their needs. Polls like these help raise your company’s credibility, build your reputation and keep your brand in front of customers.

With these easy and inexpensive marketing tips, you can quickly augment your existing marketing efforts and start to raise your company’s social media, customer service, online and PR profile while helping increase sales and build online reputation.

Spending 3 million dollars on :30 seconds of an ad is a scary thing for many companies.  However if you have the right brand for the audience, the right product and the right idea for an ad it can be a great investment in your company leading to increased sales, traffic and brand.

Given the economy this year it is an even more risky bet to run an ad in the Superbowl.

At MeasuredUp we think many companies that advertised in the SuperBowl could have spent their moeny better by investing it in customer service programs, social networking and reputation management.  These efforts in many cases would have increase revenue more then an ad in the SuperBowl.

Having said that we think a few companies spent their money wisely and put together effective ads in the SuperBowl.

Winners:

Hyundai – New products, good prices and an implosion by Toyota could help Hyundai step up to the big time.

Cars.com – Smart ad, good message, well executed.  A great way to take leadership in the category.

Google.com – The first ad from google is distinctive, smart and clear.  Not sure who does not use google already but if they saw the ad they do now.

Why bother:

Bud Light – Keeping your brand top of mind is one thing. Dumb commercials dont sell more beer.  Try creating a quality message.

Sketchers – No idea why this brand is here.

Bridgestone – No message.

Total waste of money:

Boost Mobil – Might have well given phones away to customers with the money to build usership.

GoDaddy.com – Reliably running the worst ad each year.  Too stupid to comment more.

Vizeo – Garbage ad. Totally useless.

Each year advertisers as a group largely miss on this event.  While blame to ad agencies is clear it also takes a supremely stupid client to buy off on many of these ideas.

The shame is that too many of these agencies and clients are trying to win a popularity contest that means nothing.  What they should be doing is creating a smart ad on message that pays off on what their brand does.

From Media Post

by Laurie Sullivan,

Search technology: Some companies will license it, while others build it from scratch. It depends on the egos of executives working at the company. Real-time search and social media have pushed technology to the forefront. Companies need sophisticated algorithms that can sort and index structured and unstructured data.

A recent Accenture report titled “Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service” ties it all together. Joe Hughes, senior executive from Accenture’s customer service and support business, confirms that enterprise companies have begun to build search engine technology that will integrate into software applications and consumer hardware to help marketers, advertisers, agencies and others sort through the mounds of data created by social media.

Hughes defines social CRM as the conversation data from social media networks. And as marketers continue to try and make sense of the mounds of data flooding in from real-time search, Twitter streams, Facebook status updates, and behavioral targeting tags, they will need a faster method to sort, index and access data. Wow, are you overwhelmed yet?

Marketers need technology that can move feedback from customers and call center agents between channels with as much automation as possible. That will become the only way to analyze the data. Natural language query processing will also become a focus, to search through documents of unstructured and structured data as the mounds of social media data continues to mount.

Last year, tools measuring buzz metrics in social networks emerged. This year, the focus turns toward integrating the social data into traditional CRM platforms from companies like software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Salesforce, which late last year integrated the feature, allowing people to search on that data in real time.

Until now, CRM packages did not allow marketers to view data collected on Twitter alongside traditional queries. But the real-time search movement has sent companies looking to improve search results back to the drawing board to build engines that can process structured and unstructured data, as well as sentiment analysis, taxonomy, classification and entity extractions, according to Hughes. “The strategy of combining structured and unstructured data will become more important,” he tells me.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=121505

Jan 13, 2010

Elena Malykhina from Marketing Daily

Barnes & Noble is the No. 1 brand when it comes to customer experience, according to a survey released this week by Forrester Research.

Forrester asked more than 4,600 U.S. consumers about their interactions with companies across various industries as part of the “Customer Experience Index, 2010.” Participants rated the usefulness, ease of use, and enjoyability of their experiences. Forrester calculated the results for 133 companies in 14 different industries and found that retailers, hotels, and
parcel shipping firms ranked the highest for all categories, while health insurance plans, TV service providers, and Internet service providers ranked the lowest.

The second and third highest-rated companies behind Barnes & Noble were Marriott Hotels & Resorts, and Hampton Inn/Suites, respectively. Amazon.com and Holiday Inn Express rounded out the top 5. On the other hand, Charter Communications, United Healthcare, and Citigroup, among others, were at the bottom of the list.

“If you step back and look, a lot of the industries at the bottom haven’t had the need for competition in terms of consumers—including health insurance providers who traditionally competed for employees. Other organizations just haven’t grown up in terms of being customer-centric,” said Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin, who worked on the survey.

According to Forrester, only 13 firms had an “excellent” customer experience rating; 35 received a “good” rating, 40 got “okay” ratings, and 45 received either a “poor” or “very poor” rating. (See the complete survey results here.)

Read entire article here – http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/direct/e3i5b45383f2cd3f8b3848cb4869a779206

From article in Mediapost. By Sarah Mahoney

Customers of L.L. Bean aren’t just wearing their duck boots, they’re feeling the love.

The Freeport, Maine-based retailer once again landed in the No. 1 spot in the National Retail Federation/American Express Customers’ Choice survey, followed by Overstock.com, Zappos.com and Amazon.com. (All four ranked in precisely the same order as last year’s survey.)

QVC jumped into No. 5, followed by Coldwater Creek; HSN; Lands’ End, a division of Sears, and JCPenney. Nordstrom and Kohl’s tied for the 10th spot.

Read the article here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=120495&nid=109870

By Laurie Sullivan from Mediapost

Marketers will need to start justifying social marketing plans with business cases, objectives and metrics, as the medium moves out of the test phase. In 2009, marketers could brag they had a Facebook fan page or Twitter account, but analysts predict that social media will become a strategic part of marketing efforts next year.

Forrester Research released a list Monday of social computing prediction for 2010. The report suggests that companies that create social councils — cross-functional teams aimed at sharing ideas about social media — will begin to get serious about budgets and structure for these groups. Expect the teams to become strategists. Efforts will likely include policies.

The report also suggests that an increasing number of marketers will adopt listening platforms to monitor social media, Twitter will become more profitable or get acquired, Facebook will take a hands-on approach to protecting members, and incompatible mobile devices in siloed application will shatter the social experience.

Forrester Analyst Augie Ray says in 2010, those who hold the purse strings for budgets will want to see results. “It’s the year social marketing gets serious,” he says.

But rather than knowing how to set up a fan page on Facebook or gain a following on Twitter, marketers must realize that it requires more than recognizing the importance of social media.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=119493

Allen Adamson, 08.11.09, 05:30 PM EDT

In a virtual marketplace, brands that add a personal touch will stand out–and win.

One of the best parts of vacationing in a small town is visiting the local video store, where the proprietor–a scruffy guy who loves everything related to movies–will recommend films that he thinks you’ll love. There’s no scientific algorithm to his suggestions, no data analysis or statistical assessment. The owner makes his recommendations based on bits and pieces of casual conversation with customers.

I was thinking about that video store as I read about the contest hosted by Netflix ( NFLX - news - people ), which offered a $1 million prize to anyone who could significantly improve its recommendation system and ended in July. While digital technology has made our lives more convenient in many ways, especially in the way it helps people make buying decisions, smart companies realize that there are some things even the most sophisticated digital applications can’t do. Above all, they can’t replace the personal touch that often helps consumers distinguish one brand from another. In a tough economic climate, real customer care–not virtual–can be the differentiating factor between two competing brands.

Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/11/allen-adamson-marketing-cmo-network-adamson.html?feed=rss_leadership_cmonetwork

The old adage is that a satisfied customer will tell three people and an unsatisfied customer will tell 10. However, with the advent of blogs, Twitter and YouTube, disgruntled customers can now share their rant about a company for the whole world to hear. Consumers are taking their complaints online. The Better Business Bureau advises that responding to complaints is necessary if a company wants to maintain a reputation for great customer service.

“The Internet empowers customers to air their grievances like a megaphone to the world which can be a scary prospect for a business owner,” said Kathy Barrett, BBB president. “Instead of being scared, companies should view the Internet as a great tool to work directly with disgruntled customers, fix the issue and hopefully turn them into a repeat customer.”