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15 Keys to Providing Customer Service Through Social Media

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Hosting

The post 15 Keys to Providing Customer Service Through Social Media appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . Social media is great for connecting your business to your customers, and allowing them to have direct close access to you can be a boon for your brand image. However, unfettered access also means that more customers feel free to complain either directly or indirectly about companies through social media. In this media climate, it’s important to leverage your PR skills to positive effect, and here’s how.   Respond quickly Your customer turned to social media to complain because they are looking for an immediate response, and while you may be busy with product development meetings or vendor calls, these seemingly-small, Facebook-born comments should receive similar attention. Make sure that you get back to them as soon as you see the complaint.   Have a dedicate twitter account for issues Social media is all about context, which is why big corporations create accounts specifically for reporting and responding to issues, decluttering their primary social feed and filtering the important messages from the fluff. Nike and Comcast are two examples of companies that have dedicated accounts on twitter for customers experiencing issues for precisely these reasons. If your company is big enough, create a dedicated account where customers can reach you when something has gone amiss.   Be responsive around the clock Know your business well and when your customers will be using your services. If you are a restaurant, for example, you can expect to hear from customers late in to the evening if they have had a bad dinner experience. Monitor your account around the clock as best you can or, better yet, dedicate staff to the task so that you can respond quickly.   Address the issue and offer a solution In your response, be sure to restate the problem so it is clear you understand it, and give your customer a solution if one is available. Communication requires empathy and efficiency, and this approach will achieve both.   Offer new information they might not have access to Airlines can frequently update the customer as to the status of cancelled or delayed flights quickly before that information is disseminated at the gate. Give the customer all the information you have as they might not have access to it. This will also show that you are paying close attention to their particular circumstances.   If no solution is available offer empathy Sometimes no immediate solution is available, but it is important to respond as fast you can. A simple “We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. That sounds like an awful time/situation/experience. We are working on it and will get back to you soon” can calm an angry customer while you work on a solution.   Direct them to resources where answers or solutions may be found When you can’t provide the solution over social media, let them know where they can go to receive resolution, be it an email address they need to contact or a store manager they need to talk to directly. Keep in mind that social media channels aren’t the most appropriate avenue for obtaining things like account numbers or private information, so be sure to direct them to someone offline that can help them.   Be aware of your twitter account and follow your tags and hashtags Someone on your staff needs to have alerts set for any tags or hashtags customers might utilize to try and reach you. Pay attention to them, particularly if you intend to use them for support purposes.   Answer all of the questions asked (not just the easy one) When writing your response go back and look at the original complaint. It may be easy to address just one issue but they may have had several questions or concerns. Address each and every one, clearly and effectively.   Rectify what you can Make the situation right as fast as you can. You can’t fix every aspect of their problem but whatever issue you can fix, do so quickly. Remedying even a portion of the customer’s problem will be seen as progress and improve your image as a result.   Follow through with the issue Chances are you won’t solve the problem on the first go around so go back and check in with your customer. Did they get a new flight? Was the broken item replaced? Etc etc. Follow up with the customer and demonstrate compassion, empathy, and dedication to their needs in the process. Do not wait to be asked for additional assistance!   Show customer appreciation Proactively reach out to customers who are mentioning your company in a positive way. If someone takes a picture at your business and tags you, repost/retweet it! If you get a positive review on Facebook contact the customer and say thank you. These small actions will show that you are listening, potentially turning one time reviewers into brand evangelists.   Provide a real world solution The coffee was cold? Offer to replace their cup free of charge. Car wasn’t repaired properly? Have them bring it back in. If it was a tangible problem offer a tangible solution, and remember that generosity is remembered, blogged about, rewarded, and retweeted.   Don’t remove complaints It can be tempting to remove a complaint after you have addressed the concern, but leaving them alone should be standard practice for your business. Make sure that your responses and solutions are in the comments section or your direct reply to the tweet. New customers will see the complaint but also see that you were responsive and accommodating to customer needs.   Be professional Above all reply and act in a professional manner. Your customer might be rude or upset but it is your job to maintain your calm and mitigate the situation as fast as you can. Remember: a crabby customer is an issue, but a positive response is an asset, and your customers will notice that. In an age of ubiquitous social media, communication comes from many inboxes. Tend to your Twitter and Facebook accounts and exercise professionalism, and your wall will become a testament to your dedication to your customers. web hosting Continue reading →

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Infographic: The Digital Renaissance

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Hosting

The post Infographic: The Digital Renaissance appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . Are we in the midst of a new type of renaissance, a digital renaissance?  Given not only the sheer availability of information, but also the ability to immediately share new thoughts with a wide audience, things do seem ripe for the evolution of ideas in ways never before possible.  The following infographic addresses this, comparing the present day to the renaissance of the 14th century:     The Digital Renaissance via HostGator web hosting Continue reading →

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How Outlines Improve Your Content

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Hosting

The post How Outlines Improve Your Content appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . There are few among us that take delight in organization. The process of planning something instead of building it requires a great deal of patience. When it comes to content, however, everything from your process to your impact can benefit from an organizational outline. By enabling writing, reading, focus, and memory, outlines are a powerful tool for any business blog, improving perception and enabling your commercial goals.   They Facilitate the Writing Process Writing is a unique skill set, endowed in only a few. Unfortunately for those of us without that gift, our companies need content, and that content must be of prime quality to build a readership. Fortunately, outlines help ease the process of writing, imbuing the kind of quality required of published content for even those with meager writing skill. By creating a structure around which ideas are formed, the mind naturally constructs ideas in a coherent manner, allowing you to easily articulate one element of your piece after another, unburdened by concerns of flow and formation. Furthermore, they help provide inspiration. When writing content paragraph by paragraph without understanding the “geography” of your work, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees, so to speak. By understanding your work from a top-down perspective, filling in the prompts with coherent paragraphs becomes a much less arduous task.   They Make Reading Easier The writer isn’t the only party that benefits from outlines. The ever-important reader reaps the fruits of organizational effort as well. Our minds are eased by structure. Traffic lights, lines at grocery stores, and chapters in books all help us understand the boundaries of our actions and attention, working to help guide our cognitive resources in one, simple direction. Outlines are much like the road signs that lead us to highways and points of interest, constructing a narrative and helping set expectations for what’s to come. In addition, well-crafted headings help summon the resources needed to finish reading. If your reader is forced to determine whether they should continue with each passing paragraph, the cognitive burden involved is likely to lead to page abandonment. Attention grabbing headings help remedy this decision-making process by piquing their interests and guiding them forward.   They Provides Focus If you’ve ever had a conversation with a pedantic acquaintance, then you know how difficult unfocused conversation can be. If your conversation partner is offering compelling information or engaging you on an active basis, then your attention is held, identifying value in the experience. In the case of the talkative friend, however, your mind wanders, wondering when the toil will end, and when your next important task can begin. Poorly structured pieces are like wordy cohorts: they amble, providing value, but only among meandering sentences. Outlines help remedy this situation by setting reader expectations and then delivering on them in an efficient manner. An article entitled “The Ultimate Guide to Product Pages” makes a lofty promise, but by breaking the writing process into manageable chunks, the reader develops an understanding of the aspects of product pages that a cursory discussion could not deliver, perceiving value and continuing through to the final paragraph.   They Make Your Message More Memorable Your content delivers value, but that’s not its only purpose. In helping your customers, your ultimate goal is to strengthen your brand and facilitate sales conversion through an engaging conversation. Without the mental association between your content and your company, these efforts fall short. Outlines, through their multiple benefits, help build this desired association. By allowing writers to write more effectively, easing the readers burden, and providing focused value, readers inherently recognize the value of your efforts. The end result is an enhancement of brand image that will have a synergistic effect on commercial success. With content gaining importance in the marketplace, it’s tempting to prioritize pace over organization, but savvy writers know that outlines facilitate both rate of production and ROI. By unburdening your writing process, improving reader experience, adding focused value to your content, and leaving an impression in the minds of customers, outlines represent one of the most valuable tools in your blogging and marketing toolkit. web hosting Continue reading →

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So You Want To Start A Business? Start Here

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Hosting

The post So You Want To Start A Business? Start Here appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . Ambitious minds take ambitious action, and few actions are more ambitious than starting a business. If you find yourself in possession of a killer idea, or wish to grow a fledgling enterprise, it’s important to know what you’re in for. Here’s how to build your idea from the ground up, and turn your ideas and resources into something rewarding.   Start with Your Motivations To begin with, ask yourself why you would want to start a business. The success of many businesses has a lot to do with our motivations for starting it in the first place. A business can become your annual salary, while also fulfilling your desire to do work that’s more meaningful. Having your own business means finally getting to be the boss, and constructing a schedule that is optimal to your lifestyle. Perhaps you’ve finally realized that what you’re best at can provide immense value to others and would constitute a firm foundation for entrepreneurship. Many are simply exhausted from sitting behind a desk and would love to monetize the thing they’re passionate about. Whatever your motivations may be, identify them, and use them as fuel going forward.   Turn Your General Idea Into Something Specific Next, it’s important to identify what your product will be. Let’s say you want to help the earth by selling items that are sustainable and environmentally friendly. Rather than becoming overwhelmed by the possibilities, spend some time researching what’s already out there, and begin to hone in on a niche that means the most to you. The easiest way to become successful is by doing something better than what already exists, or by doing it differently. Ask yourself these questions: • Who is going to buy my product or service? • How will you be getting paid? • Is my service going to be sustainable over the next decade? The best businesses aim to solve a problem, and will survive by making a difference. Don’t be afraid to start small and simple, there will always be room for growth.   Take Out A Loan, Or Start Saving Money It’d be unfair to tell you the average cost of starting a business when it is entirely dependent on what product or service you intend to offer. However, whether you’ll need $100 or $30,000, you’re going to have to develop a business plan. A major component to that plan will be the cost of starting up, as well as money necessary to keep you going until your first sales start rolling in. To estimate your costs of starting up, make two lists: one for your assets and the other for startup expenses. • Assets – Also known as capital expenditures, these will be the one-time costs. Think of property, equipment, and certain inventory as things you’ll only buy at the beginning, or again down the road. • Expenses – These are the recurring costs that will be a part of the startup costs and continue throughout the life of the business. Things like rent, supplies, marketing materials, gas, and how much you will pay potential employees. Once you have a firm business model, it may be a good time to consider taking out the loan. If loans aren’t your style, by all means proceed with the planning and set a goal for how much to save.   Make It Official If you’ve made it this far, then you should be proud. Making your business official means you have a direction, are likely ready to invest in its growth. To prepare for this, here a few legal and financial steps to consider. 1. Determine the Legal Structure • What form of ownership is best for you? This will determine which income tax form you will file. 2. Register Your Business Name • This will be registered with your State Government if you do business as anything but your legal name. 3. Set Up a Tax I.D. • This will be used to identify your business as an entity. 4. Register For State And Local Taxes • In addition to taxes required by the federal government you will have to pay some state and local taxes. 5. Acquire Licenses and Permits • To run your business legally there are certain federal and state licenses you need to obtain.   Breathe It may seem overwhelming, but the more you educate yourself the easier it will become. An important thing to remember is if you’ve chosen to go into business for the right reasons, eventually you’re going to make it happen. Foreknowledge, structure, and a calm mind will do a great deal when building a sound financial future through entrepreneurship. web hosting Continue reading →

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The Ultimate Guide to Building and Using Personas

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Hosting

The post The Ultimate Guide to Building and Using Personas appeared first on HostGator Web Hosting Blog | Gator Crossing . The local bakery down the street has a unique opportunity. By interacting with customers on a daily basis, the owners gain a deeper understanding of what their most valued patrons want. However, when you move from Main Street to the World Wide Web, the picture becomes blurrier as that one-on-one time becomes scarce. Fortunately, one tool is offering the opportunity to turn broad customer insight into a tailored approach that improves conversion, service, and satisfaction for businesses of all shapes and sizes.   Researching Your Audience Buyer personas are a sophisticated approach to introducing the individual perspective back into broad-based demographic analysis. However, this approach requires that you start with a broad-based perspective in order to obtain an accurate understanding of buyer behavior. For this reason, personas begin with audience research. This research can come in a number of forms, including: Analytics Surveys Focus groups Direct-mail responses Interviews Comments   Each of these formats provides its own insight. For example, analytics and high-volume surveys provide overarching trends for your audience that can be used to help narrow your focus. Focus groups and interviews, on the other hand, provide a more conversational opportunity to discover specific buyer behaviors and mentalities. Blog and social media comments are more informal, but contribute a fair degree of information that connects demographics with attitudes and values. This initial step should focus on drawing the “boundaries” of your audience; essentially the broad characteristics of your regular customers. This way, you’ll understand who falls outside the boundaries of your audience and better comprehend the specific behaviors of your unique following.   Breaking it Down With this broad cross-sectional data in hand, the next step is to break it down. As mentioned, the benefit of overarching data is that it frames the kind of personalities that fall within your target audience. Breaking this information down into individual personalities is what turns audience research into high-conversion personas. Begin by looking at the characteristics that fall into the majority of responses. If most of your site hits occur around lunch and just after working hours, it’s likely that your audience is of employment age. If the majority of your audience falls into a below-average income bracket, then it is possible that your deals are what attract an audience. Look at each trend in your data as a piece of a puzzle. If your comment-to-follower ratio is higher on Facebook than on Twitter, then this points to a demographic that is likely just out of college or older, since younger generations are trending toward Twitter. This one element becomes noteworthy due to its connection to audience behavior. For now, simply focus on collecting the pieces of your buyer profiles through data and interviews and leave the actual assembly for later.   Understanding Personas At this juncture, it is important to understand precisely what a buyer persona is. Knowing this will render assembly of your data-driven “pieces” easier, and provide insight into how they can be used. If your marketing team uses broad audience research to design advertising materials, certain results occur. For example, if your business finds that your customer base is overwhelmingly female, ads and content may be created to appeal to females. If you’re looking to expand into your reach, additional materials may be crafted to appeal to males. In either instance, business decisions are made on the basis of characteristics. What this approach fails to understand is that behavior and characteristics are not so easily correlated. Buyer personas attempt to introduce the concept of buyer behavior to the equation, informing marketing efforts and product development with the user in mind. A buyer persona focuses on the daily life, habits, values, beliefs, and goals of customers instead of their raw demographic information, constructing a picture of their average day that can be utilized to great effect.   Building Personas It is with this mentality that you should then approach assembling your data. Two mechanisms should influence your construction process: social trends and observation. Pinterest, for example is largely slanted toward females , indicating that activity on that account is likely linked to the female portion of your audience. This kind of analysis should then be balanced by observational data, i.e. focus group discussions that specifically indicate buyer behavior and predilections. In this step, it is much easier to understand the concept through example. Here are some insights that may contribute to a buyer persona: John Q checks Facebook in the morning and browses news sites at night Tina H values safety for her family David M watches product reviews on YouTube and CNET before making a purchase on our online shop   The names are, of course, fictitious, but the behaviors are not. Your data should outline behaviors such as these, providing insight into the day-to-day life of customers and identifying patterns in purchasing processes and consistent habits.   Putting them to Use With this understanding of buyer behavior, it is now possible to put it to use. From advertising to product pages, everything about your operations can be influenced and improved using this powerful tool. Marketing efforts stand to gain a great deal of insight from these profiles. Ads can be targeted toward relevant social media sites using keywords and schedules designed around customer habits. The content of ads and blog posts can be tailored to reflect the hobbies or interests of your customers. Finally, innovative engagement opportunities can be developed around specific knowledge of your customer base, helping lead to higher participation and conversion rates. Next, product development can be influenced by this understanding of customer characteristics. If your eReader is mostly used at night after a long day at work, it should possess a backlight that makes text readable without straining the eyes. If you find that your software is used by an older generation, buttons and text can be made bigger to allow for easier interface and navigation. Finally, sales can become more focused and targeted based on customer values. If a bargain is important, priority may be placed on offering deep discounts to help get your foot in the door. If family is important to your customers, then mentioning how your product can help them find more time with their loved ones is a great way to increase conversion rates.   From top to bottom, buyer personas provide an intimate portrait of your patrons that can influence all aspects of operations. Begin by understanding your audience at large and drill down to the specific behaviors that make them tick. Inform your efforts with this insight and your product, pitch, and website can all become a little more effective and a little more profitable. web hosting Continue reading →

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