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The ABCs of Customer Recovery This week I present 26 little ideas to help you respond to complaints and difficult customers with much more ease….the ABC’s of Customer Recovery.

Act as if every lost customer’s sales come out of your paycheck.

Believe the best of customers. Don’t make the mistake of assuming most customers are out to simply get something for nothing. The truth is, less than 1% of customers contact companies with ulterior motives in mind.

Communicate with diplomacy and tact when you final answer is “no” and when explaining company policy.

Don’t tell a customer she is wrong. Telling a customer they are wrong never makes them want to agree with you. It only pushes them more forcefully into their original position.

Empathize with unhappy customers and allow this empathy to season your responses.

Find a way to say “yes” to customers. Instead of saying “no” or telling the customer what you can’t do, think critically about what you actually can do.

Give a token item such a coupon as a concrete form of apology.

Have a sense of urgency. Demonstrate with your words and speed of response that getting to the bottom of the problem is just as important to you as it is to your customer.

Involve customers in the problem resolution process. Sometimes it’s very helpful to simply ask, “How do you see us resolving this?”

Jot down the customer’s name and details of the problem they are describing so you don’t have to ask the customer to repeat information.

Keep customers apprised of your timetable and progress toward resolving their problems.

Listen with the intent to truly understand your customer, not with the intent to interrupt, reply, or correct.

Monitor your customer service calls to ensure your tone is friendly, helpful and willing.

Negotiate resolutions that balance both the interests of your company and your customer.

Open the door with unhappy customers with open-ended questions. Make your questions demonstrate a sincere interest in better understanding the customer’s problem or experience.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. How would you feel if the exact same problem happened to you?

Quickly apologize. Apologize both when the company is at fault and even when the customer is responsible for the error. An apology goes a long way in creating calm, diffusing anger and regaining goodwill.

Recognize that the issue is not the issue. The way the issue is handled becomes the real issue.

Say “no” diplomatically and without causing resentment. The best way to do this is to start out by telling the customer what you can do.

Thank customers for their feedback.

Up-Service your customers by suggesting products or services that enhance the value of their current purchase.

View the customer as the reason for your work—not as an interruption to your work.

WOW customers.

Examine the root cause of problems and work to eliminating problems at the root.

You are the company to each customer. Never underestimate your power to influence the customer’s future buying decisions.

Zero in on the customer’s needs and wants.

For hundreds of ideas for customer service improvement for use in customer service training, visit the customer service training resource portal by going to www.totalcustomerservicetraining.com

About the Author
Myra Golden is an award-winning professional speaker and principal of Myra Golden Seminars, LLC, a customer service training firm serving clients in food and beverage, banking, healthcare, hospitality, and other industries. Her client list includes McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay, Michelin Tires, Pirelli, and Procter & Gamble, among many others.

With backend sales, you can be certain of continuous profits as long as you follow your customers ability to buy again.

Normally, backend refers to the revenue gained from the identical customer who has once purchased your product and continues to purchase other products again and again.

What most entrepreneurs do not know is that they will continuously earn additional money through backend sales. This is because once a businessman was able to get through the first sale, obtaining the succeeding sales will be so simple.

Most entrepreneurs are happy with getting a few or even with no profit on their first sale with a particular purchaser. They understand that they can earn more on the succeeding sales, better known as backend sales.

With backend, you can smoothly inform your clients about your different product or your new product and you will surely foresee a appreciable massive explosion of sales. Furthermore, most experts say that it is cheaper to put a sale for the second time on a returning client than to sell the same product to a new client. It will also take less effort to sell your products to your old clients than to your new ones.

Sounds good enough’ Guess again.

Earning additional money through backend does not occur so easily. It is not your traditional “get rich quick” scheme. You have to do something about it to obtain the profit that you want.

Here how to do it:

1. Use autoresponders

With autoresponders, you can automatically build a follow-up sale on your customers who have recently purchased products from you. This is known as upselling. There are numerous autoresponding services available in the market today. Just be prudent in selecting your autoresponder Provider because not all autoresponder services are created equal. Many autoresponding services will give you the services that you need like quality customer assistance and easy to use control panel. Several autoresponding services will give you a free assessment type that will let you use and access to every feature of the program without being obliged to pay anything. Just keep in mind that it is best to provide your autoresponder with the right list of customers from which you will derive your backend revenue. The main premise why businesspeople should get autoresponders is to guarantee that backend sales will be achieved. This is because autoresponders will let individuals subscribe to your product willingly. Hence, it would be easier to present them your other products because you do not have to persuade them that your product is good. And since they have agreed to subscribe in your mailing list, it is automatically understood that they have agreed to be given promotions and special offers. The point here is that with autoresponders, you already have them on the hook. All you need to do is to present them what you have.

2. Create your own product

Creating your own product will let you earn additional money than what you have expected. In reality, it is the only way for you to profit from your backend. The idea is to create your own product, sell them at cheaper prices, and profit from your backend by selling your other items at more expensive prices.

3. Create your target niche market

In order to profit from your backend, it is necessary that you know your target market. You will never produce backend sales if you have your product sold in a wrong customer in the first place. The point here is that you should be capable to sell your product on the right person and make an upsell with the right pitch. For example, if you are trying to sell several toys to teenagers, you will never get the backend that you need. The bottom line is that backend sales will never happen with just one click. It is important that you understand everything about backend sales before considering them.

Once you put those Idea in action, I guarantee you will be amazed with the extra profits backend sales will produce.

About the Author
Cedric Aubry is a online marketer from Montreal,Quebec. Click HERE to visit My blog and read more article and learn more about me.

Customers are the lifeline of any business. Letting your customers know that they are important and that their concerns and fears are your own can make you their trusted confidante. How better to bond with others than by being a confidante?

Listen well Try to pay attention to what your customer is telling you without being distracted. If there is something that urgently needs your attention, asking your customer to excuse you will do wonders and make them know that you value their time. Try to remember certain details about each customer in the hope that they may become your long-term clients.

Know your customers by name A person’s name is music to their ears. Make your customers’ day by calling them by name and trying to remember personal details they have shared with you.

Let your enthusiasm to help your visitor overpower your enthusiasm to convert them to a customer. When you are genuinely interested in helping your customers, and putting their wants and needs before your own, it shows and customers grow to love dealing with you. They automatically want to buy from you and they just can’t keep from telling your friends how great your service is.

Treat your customers like your friends When your customers buy from your web site, ask them to optionally enter their joyous occasions that occur on a regular basis such as their birthdays or wedding anniversaries. Have a program to collect these dates and automatically send them an e-card or a personalized newsletter wishing them for the occasion and offering them a discount that can be claimed within a specified time period.

Offer to personalize gift baskets for customers You might offer to get a particular item that your customer knows that the recipient of their gift cherishes. That might mean going out of your way to acquire that special something. And, even though you might have to spend a little more on printing or getting pre-printed ribbons and the like, the extra touch that this personalization service does is one that will be remembered, appreciated, and talked about. There you go–advertising will be done for you!

Reward your customers Especially when there are perishable items that could go bad, make little gift baskets well before their expiry date and give them as complimentary items when someone buys a gift over a certain dollar value. Your customers will love the unexpected gift and will think of your gift basket service the next time they are shopping for a gift.

Thank your customers Sometimes “Thank you” is a forgotten word. And, in a hectic retail environment, it sometimes inadvertently gets the slip. Thank them and they will thank you thousand-fold–the many times they come back and are served by you.

About the Author
Wendy Wood is the owner of an online gift basket directory. Sign up for free Gift Basket Business Tips http://www.seekgiftbaskets.com/gift-business-tips.htm

As much as I can get! This would be the answer readily shouted out by most entrepreneurs. The fact is though, both over and underestimating the amount of capital needed to fund a business can have serious negative consequences.

Underestimating what you need can cause problems ranging from having to go through the whole time consuming fund raising process again, to having to shut down the company because funds have run dry. Having to go back to the original investors and ask for more money often undermines the entrepreneur’s credibility with the investors and can cause a significant dilution in the founder’s ownership.

Obtaining more than enough capital may seem like a blessing at first, but it can breed a lax attitude toward expense control. “If you have it, spend it,” is not an advisable motto for a new company. If the investment takes the form of equity, raising too much money means that the founder’s share of the business was reduced more than was necessary–and this violates one of the maxims of entrepreneurship: hold on to those equity points!

Typical advice given to entrepreneurs is to do a cash flow projection, or cash budget, and then add 10%, 20% or even 50% to this amount, for “contingencies.” These contingencies are all the things that can go wrong in a start-up venture, all the unfavorable events that can negatively affect results.

Contingency planning is a skill that does not come easily to all entrepreneurs–even those with a finance background. How do you get the cockeyed optimist (what you absolutely must be to even conceive of the idea of the starting a company), who expects the best, to plan for the worst?

To stimulate contingency planning, it helps to look at the reasons why entrepreneurs so consistently run out of money; among these are:

Not realizing how expensive it is to introduce a new product, especially consumer products, on a national basis.

Not realizing how long it takes to introduce a new product, or for the market to truly accept the product.

Delays in regulatory approval, municipal zoning, or patent approval.

Assuming that a small start-up company will get the same forbearance on payments and favorable terms that a large one will.

An entrepreneur with an early stage company must be prepared for one or more of these situations to occur. Contingency planning doesn’t mean simply adding a percentage or dollar “cushion’ to the amount of capital being sought from investor or lenders. It is a way of thinking–a recognition that the entrepreneurial road is always rocky. Envisioning what might go wrong does not equate to entrepreneurs losing faith in their product or their company; it means they accept these difficulties as steps on the path to prosperity.

About the Author
Dee Power and Brian Hill are the authors of “Inside Secrets To Venture Capital,” and “Attracting Capital From Angels,” both published by John Wiley & sons. Subscribe to their complimentary newsletter. Send an email to newsletter@capital-connection.com with subscribe in the subject. The website for enterpreneurs http://www.Capital-Connection.com

Failure is not an end point. It is a signal for course correction.

Despite the avalanche of material on system’s theory and many excellent works that compare the mind to a cybernetic system, similar to that of a heat-seeking guidance missile, everybody, regardless of how well educated they are about the operations of subconscious mechanisms, has the instinctive feeling to respond to failure as a massive upset to their plans.

Behind good information processed by the neocortex we still operate a mammalian brain, and it is this that kicks in when we experience a collapse of our ideal.

It takes deliberate effort to realign with our goals, respond to negative feedback as feedback, and begin to upgrade information to craft a slightly different trajectory.

All entrepreneurial ventures are flawed from the beginning because we simply cannot foresee all possible variations.

It is, therefore, inevitable to get feedback, both negative and positive, and it is important to process and comprehend these rather than treat them as mere noise.

Despite the sophistication of the human brain, goal achievement is always considered an arduous achievement.

This is due to not understanding the emotional structure of our brain, responding to information inappropriately, and short-circuiting hope, which in turn drains the vitality necessary to move forward.

What truly creates a spirit of defeat is failure to acknowledge the sheer genius of our own subconscious minds and rely almost completely on conscious processing.

Our subconscious mind is a teleological and parallel processing mechanisms whose computing power rivals and even exceeds that of the most advanced supercomputer on this planet.

It is this schism between conscious deliberation and subconscious operations that causes people to give up too quickly.

Failure, then, is feedback on two levels.

On the overt level, it is failure to achieve an objective because of a misapplied or poorly understood technique.

On the covert level, it is failure for the conscious and subconscious mind to speak the same language and move congruently toward the same goal.

Responding to the failure on both these levels and stimulating course correction, results in success, sometimes in the most amazing fashion, where seemingly miraculous experiences appear to rescue the situation and deliver the desired outcome.

About the Author
Saleem Rana would love to share his inspiring ideas with you. Hunting everywhere for a life worth living? Discover the life of your dreams. His book, Never Ever Give Up is offered at no cost to stimulate your success. http://www.theempoweredsoul.com/enter.html

VOIP is a hot topic these days, but what exacty is VOIP and VOIP service? It is a method of using the internet to carry phone calls. The term, “VOIP”, stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol.

Why use a VOIP service? Probably cost is one of the main considerations as VOIP is less expensive than many other telephone service options. The cost of VOIP service is similar to the cost of sending email. You must pay to have an internet service, but after that, your usage is free. In some instances, savings of up to 90% over regular long distance and other telephone services can be recognized.

Can my business use VOIP service? Anybody with an internet connection has the basic capability to use a VOIP service, and benefit from the cost savings associated with VOIP.

Can VOIP be used for long distance calls, and how about international long distance? Certainly. In fact, that is one of the primary arguments in favor of any VOIP service. The savings can be quite significant when a VOIP service is used for business or personal long distance calls. If you are now making international long distance calls for businesss or personal reasons, you should see immediate savings on your long distance telephone charges.

Is VOIP legal? Yes, it is a legal and acceptable alternative to standard telephone and long distance calling systems.

Will DSL or Broadband access enhance my VOIP service? Absoulutely. high speed internet services, such as DSL or Broadband, allow the use of multiple phone lines. This would be of particular importance to a business user.

Would VOIP work for an internal business network? As a matter of fact, many businesses have used it successfully for exactly that purpose, in addition to using it for external business contacts.

Is VoIP portable? One of the advantages of VoIP is its portability. You can make and receive phone calls wherever there is a broadband connection simply by signing in to your VoIP account. This makes VoIP as convenient as e-mail - if you are travelling, simply pack a headset or Internet phone and you can talk to your family or business associates for almost nothing.

Can I fax with VoIP? Ah! There’s the rub! Sending and receiving faxes over VoIP is one of the technical difficulties that hasn’t been completely solved yet. Although not as serious as emergency calls and power supplies during blackouts, a reliable method for sending faxes would help in the wider acceptance of VoIP. However, with the way technology advances, this problem may have been ironed out by the time this article appears.

What can we expect to see with VoIP in the future? With all the advantages of VoIP there is still one drawback — it cannot give you total wireless phone communication the way that cell phones do. Industry analysts, however, predict this kind of service will be widespread within the next five years. Cellular phone companies will have no choice but to offer plans which combine VoIP and cellular otherwise they will lose business to companies that step in to fill the void.

Is VoIP secure? Since VoIP data is travelling through the Internet the same as any other kind of data, it is vulnerable to the same kind of attacks. There are many software tools available to hackers who wish to retrieve information that is being transmitted over the Internet, and these tools are just as effective with voice data as with any other kind of data. While this may not be a concern when you are making personal calls, it is a big concern for businesses that may routinely use telephone communication for discussing sensitive business information. Due to the increasing popularity of VoIP, security is a big concern and is receiving a lot of attention.

All in all, VoIP is here, and it is growing. Whether or not it is for you will involve research and decision-making on your part. Rest assured, however, VoIP is a permanent part of the communications landscape.

About the Author
Donovan Baldwin. Retired from the Army, the author has worked as an accountant, purchasing agent, optical lab manager, restaurant manager, instructor and long-haul truck driver. An active internet marketer since 2000, he now makes his living online. He has more information on Voip at http://my-telecom-store.com/voip/ .

A single industry of any type is far to large for any individual business to tackle all on its own. Even the largest corporations cannot cover a whole market by themselves. This is where niche marketing becomes a businessperson’s best friend for making potential much more manageable. If you develop your own niche marketing strategy, then your business will offer specialized goods and services, and you will be able to target specific niche groups of prospective clients.

But what does niche marketing actually mean for your own unique business? By understanding your own business niche, it means that you gain the capability for mastering your own special corner of the marketplace. Your niche marketing strategy will bring about a better ability for catering to specific customer interest so that you can capitalize upon it. You’ll have your own unique niche in the business world in which you will stand out the most.

Think about your business niche carefully before deciding upon it, as you will dedicate yourself to it rather exclusively from that point on. You’ll need to make sure that it is a niche marketing strategy that is indeed achievable.

Once you’ve chosen how you will be niche marketing, you will need to ask yourself certain questions about how you will develop this into a niche marketing strategy. These questions should include:
How is my business most effective? What are my special skills and strengths? When answering this question, go over both your own abilities, and the abilities of your company as a whole. List your strengths and skills. You may find this process to be quite enlightening. It includes things that you’ve always known, but may not have actually recognized for their full potential.

What do you and your other team members enjoy doing? The more you like what you’re doing, the more you’ll naturally be able to dedicate to its success. If you don’t like your business niche, there may not even be profit available, because you’ll be held back on a subconscious level. To begin answering this question, one of the best places to look is at your hobbies and the things that you already do for enjoyment. Instead of only working with your dreams – which may or not be what they expect them to be in reality – look at what you’ve already tried and already liked. These are the tried, tested, and true activities for you, and are those to which you’re most likely to motivate you the most. This passion can only translate to added profit. Not only will this make your company a more enjoyable venture, but it will give you endurance and focus that you may never have known you had. This level of stamina and motivation is vital to starting up a fresh company, or changing a business that already exists.

What do you need to make this niche work? It’s all well and good to choose a niche marketing strategy, but it’s another to recognize what is involved to make the theory a reality. You’ve identified your strengths and what you enjoy, now it’s time to assess them with customers in mind. How can you use this information in a way that will make customers buy something? To answer this question, look at your potential customers. What do they already buy, and what are they likely to buy in the future?

Now you’re ready to come up with your niche marketing plan. The last step is to make certain that it doesn’t interfere or conflict with any business plan that you already have in place. The niche marketing strategy is only valuable if it can be made to function within your own company’s potential.

Niche marketing is among the best things you can do to maximize your success potential in a staggeringly large marketplace. Begin today and reap the rewards that are so close to being yours.

by Mark Nenadic
Mark is the director and face behind FifteenDegrees-North http://www.15dn.com , where you will find articles and resources to help with SEO, marketing and Web design.

The way to create a partnering goal is to construct a partner prospecting list. Take out a piece of paper and write down the next 12 months on the year on there. Start with this month and finish 12 months from now. For each month, either put down one of the following: the name of a person the name of a company the type of role they play

Now if you knew 12 people that you wanted to partner with, you’d probably be doing it already, but you surely know a couple of people to put down in some of those slots. For example, if you know three non-competing technology providers in your area that you’ve met through training or other meetings, those are good people to sit down with and talk about partnering over the next couple months.

How To Fill Your Partnering Slots

Start defining your business and figure out what it is that you want to do and that you’re capable of doing. Think about the gaps in your business. Think about the types of things that a small business client has asked you for in the past or you think will ask you for in the future that you don’t think you’re going to be able to fulfill in-house. That’s what you should put down on the remaining lines.

What Can’t You Do? Consider Partnering With Someone Who Can

You might realize that you could really use a partner who has very high-end wireless expertise; the kind of partner who can go in and install the long-range antennas on the top of the building that can go 20 or 30 miles that replace T3, T1, or the private line. Or maybe you have a lot of expertise in bread and butter LAN infrastructure but not a lot of expertise in Citrix and terminal services, and you want to partner with someone who does.

Perhaps you could really use someone who knows how to do IP telephony. So you put down on the slot “I want to meet a potential partner in “whatever month” who does IP telephony.

The Bottom Line about Partnering Whatever it is, you want to think of 12 people that you can get together with one a month over the next year, and it makes it a lot more manageable to think about growing your partnering relationships like that.
About the Author
Joshua Feinberg helps computer consultant business owners get steady, high-paying clients. Sign-up now for Joshua’s free audio training that shows you how to use field-tested, proven Small Biz Tech Talk tools at http://www.SmallBizTechTalk.com/blog

Very few businesses can claim to be prepared for the loss of key staff. Quite often it is an unexpected and unplanned for event that causes quite a bit of disruption to business as usual.

It is quite a gut wrenching experience to see someone you have worked with over a period of time leaving your business. Even if the parting of ways is on good terms with a period of handover, you just know that there is so much information walking out the door with your former employee and there is nothing you can do about it.

And this is only just the beginning…

While labouring through a period of being understaffed and overworked you are then faced with the task of recruiting a new employee to fill the vacant position. This is followed by the inevitable probation and training period where, hopefully the new recruit comes up to speed and is able to pick up where the former employee left off.

The problem is: What exactly was it that the former employee really did? They always seemed to be busy and on the rare occasion that they were absent due to illness, there were those problems that arose that were only truly resolved when they returned and took control and ‘cleaned things up’.

There has to be a better way…

Fortunately quite a bit can be done to minimize the impact of situations like this in our businesses. And like most truly worthwhile solutions the steps required to complete this part of your businesses development do take some effort on your part.

There is an established path that you can follow to get your business in order and the benefits to you and your people are much farther reaching than just minimizing the impact of key staff leaving you.

The following is by no means a definitive list of what is required. But it does give you some idea of the steps required.

• Create a flexible forward thinking Organization Chart defining the positions you require in your business.
• Determine what the responsibilities are for the positions in your business.
• Document key information that is critical to your business and make it available to your employees.
• Work with your people to define what it is they do, how they do it and most importantly how it could be done better. Record, optimize then implement the business systems you have identified.
• Assign the business systems to the relevant positions and monitor their use.

By consistently following these steps for all positions in your business you will insulate yourself from some of the problems that occur when key employees leave your business.

About the Author

By Justin Woolich
Start a Free Trial of http://www.BusinessSystemsManager.com today and find out additional ways we can help you to free yourself from the concerns of loosing your key staff.

So now that you are systematically collecting opt-in emails from your customers (if you are not see www.promoterz.com) how effectively are you using email to build the relationship with your customers? Do you see email as just a cheap replacement for traditional print, radio, or TV advertising? If so, you are leaving opportunities on the table.

The other day I saw a “Graduation-Wedding-Mother’s Day” sale advertised on television. I was a little surprised that they left out Memorial Day, but it highlights a few of the draw backs of the medium. First, it is shotgun meaning that everybody sees the same thing so you are tempted to provide something for everybody in the same ad. Second, it is expensive and takes time to create ads, so the inclination is to make them either very generic or, again, cover all your bases.

Email doesn’t have those problems. You know exactly who you are sending to (and with your opt-in list you know they want it) and you can put an email together in a few minutes and send it out (if you can’t, check out www.promoterz.com). With these strengths, if you are using email just to say what the other guys are saying on TV you are shooting air balls.

Think of the email you get from your friends. Do they send you “Happy Graduation-Wedding-Mother’s Day” emails? No, chances are they talk about last night’s game, what happened over the weekend, or a great place they visited. Email allows you to be immediate and to be current. Use it that way.

Here is an example. The Suns just lost game 4 of the first round of the NBA playoffs to the Lakers. If you’ve got a business in Phoenix how about a “Beat the Lakers Special” in preparation for game 5? Throw in a blurb about how many teams have come back from 1 and 3 in the first round and sign off with “Go Suns!”

Customers not sports fans? No problem, find another local or regional event to mention. The point is that there are thousands of businesses out there throwing millions of dollars at generic ads. With email you now have a way to cut through all that chaos and capture your customers’ imagination and enthusiasm with some thing that is uniquely you and your business. So use it.

Hey, if you got a big guy inside–get him the ball!

About the Author
Dave Free is president of Zeryn, makers of PromoterZ(tm) (http://promoterz.com), a customer care system for small business growth. Mr. Free received an MBA from BYU and has worked as an Intel executive domestically and internationally, at a Washington think tank, and entrepreneur. You can read more of Mr. Free’s commentary in his Seeds of Growth blog.