Today, the Official Merchant Services Blog shines a light on a little known holiday that falls between Black Friday, and Cyber Monday called Small Business Saturday.
Since Host Merchant Services has many small businesses in its customer base, we wanted to take a moment to spotlight this newer day of shopping focus and frenzy. This is the third year that American Express is promoting Small Business Saturday, which encourages consumers to shop from small, local businesses on Nov. 24.
The Basics
First of all, what is Small Business Saturday? It is a shopping holiday created byAmerican Express, held on the Saturday after Thanksgiving during one of the busiest shopping periods of the year. It’s not that old. It was first celebrated on November 27, 2010. Small Business Saturday is designed to be a counterpart to Black Friday and Cyber Monday –– which featurebig box retail and e-commerce stores respectively. Small Business Saturday encourages holiday shoppers to patronize smaller, local retail businesses.
Benefits For Consumers
The most basic perk to the Small Business Saturday campaign is that it gives money back to consumers for shopping at local small businesses. As defined by American Express at their Small Business Saturday Page here: “You can receive a one-time $25 statement credit when you register any eligible American Express® Card and use that Card to make a purchase of $25 or more at a small business on November 24, 2012.”
Benefits For Merchants
A survey by American Express found 93% of consumers believe shopping at small businesses is important, and are backing that sentiment up by spending about a third of their discretionary income at local small businesses. This prompted AMEX to initiate the campaign in the first place. And if you are a small business merchant, AMEX is going the extra mile to get you involved in the perks and promotions of this holiday.
Even if you are a late-comer to this event, there is still quite a lot of value to be had from participating in Small Business Saturday. The $25 credit program applies no matter what else you do. But there’s also these amazing resources still available:
From AMEX you can get free in-store signage, and a free online marketing kit.
AMEX also offers a free personalized ad, which geo-targets potential customers
You can use AMEX’s Go Social app to create mobile-based deals for your American Express card-wielding customers.
A joint venture from Google and YouTube offers up My Business Story which lets you create custom videos using YouTube’s editing tool to entice your customers.
For inspiration, you can even view some Small Business Saturday Success Stories on American Express’s website.
Too Early To Tell?
So what do you think? Will Small Business Saturday catch on? Cyber Monday seems to be gaining some traction, fueled by the rapid growth in online shopping and e-commerce, and standing on the precipice of a predicted boom in mobile payment business. Black Friday is still going strong, with big chains like Toys”R”Usand BestBuy fueling it year in and year out. Is there room for Small Business Saturday? Are you a small business merchant and have you participated in this event last year? Will you be doing it this year? Feel free to share you thoughts and insights on this bold campaign from AMEX.
Certified Hosting, a leading web hosting services company, announced today a new partnership with Host Merchant Services that will enable webmasters to use merchant services with their web hosting plans. All Certified Hosting customers, including those on shared web hosting, virtual private servers (VPS hosting), and dedicated server hosting plans, are now able to apply for Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliant payment processing that is delivered to Certified Hosting’s high standards of customer service.
“Certified Hosting offers a range of ecommerce hosting services,” says Kacy Carlsen, co-founder and CEO of Certified Hosting. “We have made it easy for our customers to get up and running with an online store using the latest scripts and rock-solid hosting services. Quality merchant services are an essential part of a good ecommerce strategy for any business, and we are proud to announce Host Merchant Services as our chosen payment services partner. We are confident that Host Merchant Services will deliver the quality of service our customers have come to expect, at an affordable price.”
As a leading web hosting provider, Certified Hosting balances cost against quality of service. The company’s reliable web hosting services come with a 99.999% uptime, at a price that is affordable to new and growing businesses. Similarly, Host Merchant Services offers professional payment processing with fees that are clear, fair, and incredibly low. Typically, each type of credit or debit card transaction incurs a different fee, depending on the risk associated with it. Some merchant service providers charge merchants predetermined fees, meaning that merchants always pay the highest rate, regardless of which card has been used. Host Merchant Services charges merchants using a system known as Interchange Plus. Interchange Plus ensures that merchants only pay the fees that have actually been incurred, plus a small surcharge for administration. As a result, merchants using Host Merchant Services can reduce their payment processing expenses and more accurately project the cost of future transactions.
“There are no other industries where customers pay unnecessarily high charges,” says Carlsen. “Yet merchants routinely pay fixed fees for payment processing that do not reflect the actual transaction cost. At Certified Hosting, we provide fairly priced services thanks to Host Merchant Services. And now we can offer credit card processing to match. Even better, Host Merchant Services is – like Certified Hosting – an honest, upfront company that does not surprise merchants with hidden fees and charges.”
Another factor in Certified Hosting’s success is the company’s unlimited web hosting services, with no charges for customers who use a lot of disk space or bandwidth. The payment processing industry is full of complex terms and conditions, including additional charges buried deep in endless documentation. Host Merchant Services removes several common surcharges in the industry, with free applications, free setup, a free virtual terminal and an affordable payment gateway. Merchants are simply charged for the transactions they carry out, making accepting credit cards online more affordable and, crucially, more predictable.
“The most important thing about Host Merchant Services is that payment processing is made simple,” says Carlsen. “Host Merchant Services has no hidden charges, no expensive setup fees, and no unpredictable fees. With Host Merchant Services, our ecommerce hosting customers can quickly apply online, be approved in minutes, and begin taking payments in as little as 24 hours. We hope customers will take advantage of this new partnership so they can spend less on payment processing and maximize their profits.”
Certified Hosting has a proven record of excellent customer service, going the extra mile to help customers grow their online businesses. With this new partnership, Certified Hosting allows customers to get started right away with an affordable and efficient solution for payment processing.
One constant struggle that we’ve seen with our customers is the ability to perform credit card transactions on their website. While there are plenty of credit card processing companies in the market, it always seems like you need a degree in finance in order to understand all the fees involved, not to mention the plethora of documentation to go through.
It may also seem that a lot of the times, the credit card providers’ interests are not aligned with those of the merchant. While a business has to operate with the interest of making profits through offering a service, however, it is important to draw the line and understand the limit of what a company should charge for to maintain a good relationship with their customers.
As a company, we were extremely happy to partner and work with Host Merchant Services. When we were initially approached and presented with the opportunity that Host Merchant Services presents for their customers, it was undeniable that HMS works with their customer’s best interests.
All of our existing and new web hosting customers are now eligible for a $75 voucher that will cover their credit card processing fees, which means that all of VEXXHOST customers can now get started and offer payments via credit card either on their online e-commerce website or even in their store, as Host Merchant Services is not limited to online credit card processing.
From small things like having no contracts or any hidden fees up to the important details such as a locked-in lifetime rate that will never change and free equipment (such as terminals and supplies) for customers that do offline credit card processing. Host Merchant Services always goes to make sure that the customer is getting the best treatment they can possibly get.
We really hope that this partnership is equally beneficial, allowing our customers to leverage HostMerchantServices to process their credit cards online, if not start offering it now. VEXXHOST customers can get started by simply clicking the “Merchant Account” icon from their cPanel control panel to get started!
The Official Merchant Services Blog finishes its titanic trilogy on the affect Customer Service can have on a business. In our first blog we discussed anecdotal evidence and how it pertains to the perception of service and what can be learned from those anecdotes. In our second blog we took at look at the numbers, examining charts of data to determine a measured impact that customer service has on a business. The combination of strong anecdotal evidence and detailed charts demonstrated how integral quality customer service can be to a business’ financial success. Today we’re going to delve into the tips that get offered regarding inferior customer service — both tips on how customers can deal with customer service they find lacking and tips on how businesses can improve customer service that their customers find lacking.
I got onto this topic recently because of an online discussion that suggested that customers weren’t worth the effort of listening to their complaints. That discussion was sparked from The story of Jennifer Hepler found on The Mary Sue. It brought up the concept of gamer entitlement and video game customers going too far in their negative complaints to video game developers. Added to that was this Forbes article about The Myth of Gamer Entitlement. This really created a framework where customer complaints were presented as too much hassle for game companies to listen to. So the game companies would place customer service extremely low on their priority list.
I really have issues with that concept. It makes no sense to me. Customers and quality customer service are extremely valuable to long-term business. So I set about to prove how valuable customer service can be for a business. After seeing the anecdotal evidence and the numerical data stack up, it’s quite clear that quality customer service has an impact on a business’ bottom line. Good customer service helps retain customers. Happy customers also give a business good word of mouth advertising — the most powerful and effective advertising a business can receive. Good customer service leads to high customer loyalty. High customer loyalty gives your business higher sales and a stronger brand identity.
What to Do if All is Not Well?
So let’s bring this back around to what started me on this line of thinking: Difficult Customers. The strategy that some video game companies are using to “deal” with the difficult customers was to launch a bit of an online campaign through gaming sites and other avenues to paint those difficult customers as unreasonable, and set the company up as a victim of their irrationality. From what I’ve seen and read of that option, the negativity has simply bred more negativity. Making the customers even more difficult and a lot of bad word of mouth has started to seep into the reputation of the company hurting their brand. So instead of creating an antagonistic atmosphere with difficult customers, I did a little research and found some tips and advice on how to deal with difficult customers and turn it into a positive.
The Customer’s Side
To get a handle on difficult customers I think it’s important to understand the perspective of the customer. This article by Mind Your Decisionsis amazing at giving us insight into that perspective — and it gives consumers a series of tips on how to get the service they desire from bad customer service situations. It hinges on the premise that for customers to get what they want from a business’ customer service department, their strategy should be reasonably unreasonable.
It states that being reasonable with bad customer service usually leads to the customer not getting what they want as they let the business continue to ignore their issue. It then states that being unreasonable with bad customer service also misses the mark as making a ruckus may get you what you want, but may leave you feeling like you made a mountain out of a molehill. So it advocates a strategy of being reasonably unreasonable: Holding firm, continually going after what it is you want from the company but not raising a ruckus while you follow that path.
The article is focused on giving customers advice on how to get businesses to respond to your desire for customer service: “When dealing with bad service, one of the easiest ways to be reasonably unreasonable is to explain you are a frequent customer and that you would like a full cash refund. Cash, unlike in-store discounts, can be used at competitors. This small request quickly gets the attention of managers who scramble to keep you happy. You may end up accepting an in-store discount, but it will likely be much larger because you started asking for cash.”
Articles like this are important to be aware of when you’re planning your own customer service protocols. You find again and again that the advice offered to consumers is to not back down. To continue to push for service. To be difficult. Sure, there are always going to be a tiny selection of customers that are the exceptions to the rule — ones that are difficult to be difficult, ones that thrive off of confrontation, and ones that simply want to try and take advantage of your customer service to get something for nothing.
But these are the rare exceptions. Most of the time you are dealing with a customer that feels like they got a defective product or did not get the value of their purchase. They are seeking some sort of compensation, some understanding and some assistance. And because they feel justified in their crusade, they are going to feel entitled to service. They aren’t the unreasonable villains that the “gamer entitlement” tag suggests they are.
The moral of this story is a customer that wants a refund can be difficult about it. But can be turned back into a loyal customer if they receive understanding and compensation. It doesn’t even have to be in the form of a refund. But ignoring them or antagonizing them is only going to do more damage to your business and its reputation than the refund is usually worth. Most difficult customers aren’t that difficult once you initiate customer service that actually addresses their issues and their concerns.
Customer Service Tips
This article from Customer Service Manager offers five tips for dealing positively with difficult customers. Those five tips all hinge on engaging the customer’s emotions. As the article states in its conclusion: “Make no mistake about it; customers, be they internal or external, are primarily driven by their emotions. It’s therefore important to use human responses in any interaction particularly when a customer is upset or angry. If customers like you and feel that you care, then they’re more likely to accept what you say and forgive your mistakes.”
The tips break down to:
Have a thick skin. Be aware the customer is going to be angry and upset and don’t let that get to you.
Listen. Listen to what they have to say.
Don’t use the word sorry. Sorry, the article says is overused and has little impact with difficult customers.
Show empathy. The customer is upset and empathy will help mollify their anger.
Build a rapport. While empathizing with the customer opens the door for you, building a rapport gets you to your destination — customer service.
Most other lists I’ve found on how to deal with difficult customers breaks down to a similar set of tips. The important tips that I repeatedly ran into were all a variation on listening to the customer, showing them understanding and not letting their anger get to you. It all comes back to giving the customer your time, your ear and your energy. Giving them the attention they need to service them and address their issues. You do this and most of the customer service complaints you get are defused. You turn many of these customers into loyal fans of your business who will turn around and spread the news that you give excellent service. You attract more business and build a reputation for your business.
For me, the bottom line of customer service is this: There’s no such thing as gamer entitlement. Those gamers are customers who purchased your product and they are entitled to quality customer service. If you run a video game company you should beat the pants off of your competitors by being one that gives quality customer service. You’ll set yourself apart from the ones that are painting their own customers as the villains and themselves as the victim of a group of people who simply want what they paid for.
The Official Merchant Services Blog continues its epic masterpiece on the impact Customer Service can have on a business. In our previous blog we discussed anecdotal evidence and how it pertains to the perception of service and what can be learned from those anecdotes. The stories usually revolved around nightmarish tales of difficult customers and how those experiences can be applied to improving Customer Serviceand turning those customers into loyal return customers.
But anecdotes really only go so far. Numbers are required to help quantify the importance of customer service. Especially in the context of the things I’ve been reading lately around the internet in terms of video game companies, their development standards and some buzzwords about customer entitlement or gamer entitlement. You’ll remember the article that originally got me involved in a discussion about customer service came from The story of Jennifer Hepler found on The Mary Sue. Add to that this Forbes article about The Myth of Gamer Entitlement. The trend I see happening is video game companies are taking part in a subtle marketing push through their web 2.0 tools to essentially justify letting their customer service lag. By furthering the Gamer Entitlement cause, they paint their own customers as villains, and themselves as victims of irrational customer whims.
Which as I said last time, baffles me. The goal of a business is to be successful and to nurture the development of healthy long-term business relationships. Quality customer service. A business wants happy customers. Loyal customers. Even difficult customers, the kind that complain a lot, the kind that prompt the Gamer Entitlement mythology I’ve been reading about, are valuable in your business. And I’ve found some data — some cold hard numbers — to help us analyze exactly how important customer service is. Hopefully these numbers will help even the victimized game development companies see how it is bad business to ignore customer service.
The Basics
We start off with Customer Loyalty. Customer loyalty isn’t just satisfaction. Loyalty to your business, your brand, your services goes well beyond just satisfaction with a purchase. Customer Loyalty directly impacts business results. The Loyal Customer will continue to buy from your business and will promote it to others. This is the basic foundation for promoting and making sure you maintain quality customer service. This is why Host Merchant Services prioritizes its customer service so high — the motto being “You stay with us because you are happy with us.” It is the catalyst of customer loyalty. And reading what I have about Gamer Entitlement, I feel the most basic core of the concept has been lost. The companies that push this idea of gamer entitlement have forgotten how large an impact customer loyalty has on business. Here’s a graphic defining Customer Loyalty:
Now what to do with the concept of Customer Loyalty? Well Osman Khan delves into a fascinating look at the outcome that different states of customer loyalty can have on your business in this blog. Let’s look at the two charts:
The obvious contrast this chart shows is that the typical business has the smaller percentage of fiercely loyal customers at the top of their pyramid, while sports clubs and entertainers tend to have those zealous “fans.” These are the preferred loyal customers. These fans will stick with your business over the long haul and promote your business to anyone who listens the entire time. This chart may help explain some of my confusion over the gamer entitlement issue. I approach customer service with the typical state of customer loyalty in my mind. But video game companies are a bit more toward the entertainer part of the spectrum. Their pyramid has more rabid fans at the top than the norm. So they may be able to get away with poor customer service.
However, the Gamer Entitlement debate/issue still brings me back to the basic idea of customer loyalty. Video Game companies are not the Boston Red Sox or the New York Yankees. They’re not Bruce Springsteen. So they can’t get away with quite as much in terms of poor customer service. They do run the risk of angering those loyal customers. And losing them. To put it simply … Rockstar Games is not a Rock Star itself. Customer Service should still be a very key element of the business plan.
Marketing, Testimonials, Customers
The power of customer loyalty is typically harnessed in the form of Testimonials — happy customers rave about your business and endorse it. These are extremely effective marketing tools. Here’s a graphic from TechValidate demonstrating how effective Testimonials are compared to other forms of marketing:
This shows what a lot of people already say about testimonials: They work. People listen to other people when they recommend a business. This means that it is potentially a very bad move to alienate customers in the way developers are with the Gamer Entitlement tag. This is what really strikes me as the craziest part of what I’ve been reading about in terms of video game companies. They take a lot of liberties with their loyal customers — their rabid fans. But unlike diehard Yankees fans, video gamers don’t have a high tolerance for that type of action from their beloved video game company. And that’s why the internet is filled with negative word of mouth about the games that these loyal customers should instead be giving testimonials for.
Good Customer Service = More Sales
And the last graphic I offer today is from Brickstream, showing results from a survey they did about customer service. In it, their respondents demonstrate a distinct belief that improving or raising the quality and standards of customer service will directly increase sales and store traffic. The survey results:
That survey backs up what I’ve been thinking. Plain and simple — customer service enhances business. To recap, Customer Loyalty will give your business an edge and naturally increase marketing. Testimonials from loyal customers have a high impact in getting your business new customers and loyal customers stick with your business through the long haul. Loyal Customers are groomed and maintained by quality customer service. And businesses believe that quality customer service directly leads to more sales.
In our next installment on this epic saga of customer service and its impact in business, we’ll be looking at tips that are offered to consumers for dealing with bad customer service, as well as tips offered to businesses on how to improve customer service. Perhaps some of those video game companies will stop thinking their customers are too entitled, and use these tips to improve their sales and their word-of-mouth advertising?
The Official Merchant Services Blog returns to one of its favorite topics today — Customer Service. We can’t stress enough how important customer service is to every aspect of this industry. So we’re going to do a multi-part epic underscoring the value customer service has to your business. This is drawn on the foundation of Host Merchant Services — Superior Customer Service. In addition to the savings on processing fees that the company guarantees, its motto is “You stay with us because you’re happy.”
The HMS Guarantee
Part of this is reflected in the transparency that HMS offers. The company works against the grain in the Payment Processing Industry, shining light on hidden fees and showing customers where they can save money in their statement through the free statement analysis offer. The company backs that up with 24x7x365 customer and technical support. HMS makes sure there is someone available to handle any problems or issues its merchants have. Host Merchant Services states “If you have a problem we will make it right, guaranteed.”
Working in this environment, I’ve come to accept these standards of customer service as the norm. I recently got involved in a discussion online revolving around customer service and it shocked me how willingly some customers not only accept terrible service but defend the practices. I work under the idea that quality customer service is something to be valued. And that delivering a high level of service is something a business places priority on because service has an impact on the success of that business. So it was very surprising to find myself involved in a discussion that spent a lot of time defending bad service.
Internet Drama
The discussion began, as most internet discussions begin, with something tangential: The story of Jennifer Hepler found on The Mary Sue. Hepler, a developer for the video game company Bioware — known for the popular Mass Effect series and Star Wars: The Old Republic game — was interviewed about her job in 2006. Some of the answers she gave in that interview garnered the attention of video game players and Bioware customers in 2012. Those customers became very irate and then launched a scathing internet assault chock full of personal attacks against Hepler and the company. I’m not going to go into the details of the internet attack. It’s really tangential and fits everything you might think would happen in an internet environment where anonymous people have no inhibitions in what they say.
The topic did lead me into a discussion about customer service from video game companies — or more to the point, how video game players are so willing to accept terrible customer service from video game companies. This came up because many people felt that the customers, who were upset with Bioware, were crossing the line and becoming a detriment to the entire video game industry.
To me I saw the attack as pretty standard for the internet and easy to clean up. All it really told me is that Bioware attracted some difficult customers — some very negative and difficult to deal with customers. And that got me thinking about the way the story evolved. How Bioware became the victim and the villainous customers were to blame for their over the top anger. I felt the core issue of customer service got lost in the telling of this story.
The Bigger Picture
Businesses in every industry have difficult customers. And businesses recognized for excellent customer service have standards and protocols for dealing with these difficult customers. These practices help the business move past the difficulty and get to the core issue — assisting a customer who is unhappy with something in an effort to retain that customer in a long-term business relationship.
And this is what I have noticed is getting lost in some instances these days. Businesses seem to be cutting down on customer service as if the customer simply isn’t valuable enough to go the extra mile for.
That makes no sense to me. Customers and quality customer service are extremely valuable to long-term business.
So I did some research, looking for some data and stats on the value of customer service. I also looked for any information I could find on the impact customer service has on the bottom line. And I looked for tips on how to deal effectively with difficult customers. A lot of the information I found was anecdotal. That type of data has its good side and its bad side. The best part about anecdotal evidence is it shares experience with the person reading it. You’re getting a story and you’re getting the benefit of learning from their story without having to go through the same situation yourself. The downside of anecdotal evidence is that it’s a single instance. You can’t chart, analyze or track trends from one story. It only goes so far in trying to define the impact that bad customer service, or conversely difficult customers, can have on your bottom line.
Anecdotal Evidence
One of the more fascinating anecdotes I’ve found in my research was presented by Electrical Wholesaling in their “guide” to dealing with difficult customers from April, 2006. The story they present is: “The customer leaned across the counter. “You mean I spend thousands of dollars in here, and I can’t return a defective tool?” he said.
“Well, the tool isn’t really defective,” replied the counter salesperson.
“So you’re calling me a liar?”
The customer now had everyone’s attention. His loud voice and aggressive manner caused some of the other customers to look at one another and roll their eyes as if to convey the silent message, Oh, one of those difficult people.
It was my first week at the counter, and I was leaning toward the customer’s point of view.
My colleague continued the fight. “No, I’m not calling you a liar. This is simply normal wear of the tool. It’s against the manufacturer’s policy to refund for normal wear and tear.”
I was now completely on the customer’s side.
The customer didn’t reply immediately, and a silence fell across the room. He straightened up, slowly scanned the other customers, and said in a clear voice said, “People only come here as a last resort.”
He turned on the heels of his work boots and marched out of the store. As soon as the door closed, you could feel the air come back into the room. People chuckled rather nervously. Someone said, “Guess it takes all kinds.”
“That guy’s always a pain,” said my co-worker.
And that was the real issue. A different customer would have received a new tool, no questions asked, but because this particular customer wore the “difficult” label, it became his self-fulfilling prophecy to get bad customer service.”
The guide went on to point out the value a business can gain from a difficult customer. It suggested the experience can teach a business how to deliver the quality customer service it promises. A business can learn more from the difficult customer than it could ever learn from your most loyal customers. Difficult customers tell a business where it hurts. Listen closely and these customers will tell you what is missing from your business. They might even suggest what can be done about the problem areas. Their feedback can be the most brutal and the most honest gauge of your success.
The guide then goes on to give tips on interacting with difficult customers — ideas such as listening to the customer, refraining from arguing with the customer, and telling the customer what you can do for them instead of focusing on what you can’t do for them. These are all really basic tips and accentuate how to deal positively with angry customers.
A lot of the tips I found on dealing with difficult customers revolved around that basic advice. Multiple sites suggest the same things over and over again. Don’t argue. Stay calm. Listen. Let the customer vent. And then find a solution for them. If you’re calm, and you don’t antagonize the customer while showing them what you can do for them you increase the chance to resolve the issue where the customer is happy. And those customers are the ones that rave about your customer service. They remember that you helped them even when they were angry. They remember your company was able to work out a solution for their problem.
In our next installment of this series, we are going to look at some of the statistics and data I found — hopefully demonstrating that going the extra mile even with difficult customers helps increase the value of your business.
In what will likely be the last blog of 2011, The Official Merchant Services Blog is going right back to the basics. We’re going to give our readers a recap of a story that’s been the buzz of the internet for the past couple of days and which illustrates why customer service is so very very important for a business — good old fashioned and extremely basic customer service.
The Story, So Far
Penny Arcade, an extremely popular webcomic focused on video games and video game culture, written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik, also has a regular blog. On that blog artist Krahulik posted the entire transcript of a dialog between a customer– named only as “Dave” in the coverage of the event — and the marketing/customer service person representing the Avenger Controller. This device was originally designed by David Kotkin, an art teacher, to help one of his pupils, who suffered from epidermolysis bullosa, to play games for prolonged periods without irritation.
You can read the entire transcript of the dialog at Penny Arcade here.
The recap is pretty simple. Dave went through the contact information given on the web for the product, and asked their customer service department when the product would arrive because it was late. The controller was advertised as being available in early December, and by December 16, Dave had not received the item that he had paid for in advance.
As seen in the transcript, the initial responses from Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing, the PR contact for iControl (the manufacturers and distributors of Kotkin’s design), were short and still vague. But then tempers flared, and Christoforo stepped over the line, attacking his own customer: “put on your big boy hat and wait it out like everyone else. The benefit is a token of our appreaciation for everyone no one is special including you or any first time buyer . Feel free to cancel we need the units were back ordered 11,000 units so your 2 will be gone fast. Maybe I’ll put them on eBay for 150.00 myself. Have a good day Dan.”
That sparked the entire fiasco. Christoforo continued to be rude and flippant in correspondence with Dave, as well as others, including Krahulik.
The Internet Intervenes
Christoforo was nonplussed by Dave’s contacts in the e-mails. Even when Krahulik himself got involved, Christoforo did not believe Krahulik was who he said he was, and laughed at the idea that this negative publicity was going to impact his marketing. The conversation sort of soars from that point as Christoforo has it out with Krahulik. Christoforo threatens to initiate a smear campaign against the comic strip and Krahulik just posts the entirety of the e-mails, along with Christoforo’s information. With battle lines drawn, and sides chosen, the internet steps in — since Penny Arcade is indeed a very widely read web comic, it gets a lot of attention, especially from gamers who would all be potential customers for the product Christoforo is marketing.
First Round Knockout
The results of the smear campaign vs. Krahulik’s blog post and eventual comic strip?
This investigation, originally posted on Reddit, and later preserved as a .jpg
Christoforo shuts down his twitter account
Christoforo apologizes and asks for the spam to stop
Controller-N drops Ocean Marketing
So in essence, the internet retorted against the terrible customer service offered by Ocean Marketing and Paul Christoforo. The smear campaign he threatened against Penny Arcade never got off the ground. Ocean Marketing got slammed by a legion of video game players and Penny Arcade fans. Bad PR ruined Christoforo’s marketing business in mere days.
Captain Obvious to the Rescue
Without going too deep into the details of this internet battle between the forces of good gamers and misguided or misanthropic marketers — you can follow the fascinating set of links as this story is still picking up steam — Host Merchant Services is just going to cut to the chase.
Customer Service is a vital component of a business. Any business. That includes those doing marketing for video game controllers.
Host Merchant Services has provided some tips in the past on how to get into good customer service habits. You can read the blog post here. Customer Service is part of the core philosophy of Host Merchant Services. You can read CEO Lou Honick’s blog about customer service at the Web Host Industry Review here. It’s just The Official Merchant Services Blog didn’t think it would ever have to post a series of tips that included: “Do not curse at your customers, and do not call them stupid — especially in writing.”
Every customer is important. And as the person handling customer service, it’s definitely in your best interest to treat those customers with respect. Lashing out or trying to bully a customer is going to, at the very least, lose you that business. In this case, it lost the person more than just one customer. The whole entire exchange blew up in their face.
All of this could have been avoided with some very basic customer service strategies:
Do not argue with your customers.
Do not talk down to or insult your customers.
Listen to them and give their feedback or complaints your time and understanding.
Be honest with your customers. No one likes to hear that their product is late, but they’ll be much more willing to deal with you and your company if you’re honest with them and do not try to lie your way around the issue.
Honey, not Vinegar
After seeing the entirety of the mess Christoforo made, don’t you think the entire thing could have been avoided if Christoforo had been honest and polite? And if he had offered some form of compensation for the obvious mistake in shipping the company he represented had made? A discount? A rebate? A gift card? If Christoforo had spent just half the time performing actual customer service instead of writing insults and snark back to his customer, none of this would have happened.
That’s the lesson here. Customer Service needs to embrace the goal of long-term customer relationship building. As cathartic as the initial insults may have been for Christoforo, giving in to his frustration ultimately backfired for him and his business. Taking a hit on one customer due to having to be polite, and maybe even offer compensation for the mistake in shipping, would have saved Christoforo a lot of trouble.
This is a cautionary tale. Customer Service is important. Especially in the world of e-commerce where if things line up just right — you tick off a customer who has an open channel to one of the most widely read web comics — you could face the full force wrath of the internet.
Today The Official Merchant Services Blog continues its special two-part series on Customer Service. We can’t stress enough how essential it is to focus on Customer Service –– especially now during the holiday shopping season when your business may be barraged with a lot more customers who have a lot more questions.
Yesterday, we shared with you a blog from Lauren Carlson at Software Advice. The blog gave detailed tips on how to prepare business and its customer support team for the holiday shopping season. Today we bring you the second half of Carlson’s customer service saga which focuses on utilizing the holiday season as a way to stress test your help desk.
Carlson suggests that “the holiday season represents a perfect laboratory for examining your business, as well as your performance at each point of customer contact.”
This is a compelling concept. As Carlson says, the holiday season gives you a chance to analyze your business –– especially the customer support side of it –– at super speed. Doing so lets merchants identify high performance areas that are effective under the added stress of the holiday season, as well as get some insight into areas that may need some improvement. To get merchants in the mindset of how the microcosm of the holiday season can fuel some quick on the spot analytics Carlson asks: “So you had 72 percent first-call resolution rates in August. Great. What about the day after Christmas?”
Carlson keys in on five areas of support that companies should examine during their holiday season to gauge their help desk.
How Effective is That Training?
Many merchants add seasonal help for the holiday shopping rush. It’s a tried and true method for the retail industry, for example, to take on some extra help at the end of the year to push through all that added hours and increase in customers. Carlson suggests this can be a catalyst for analyzing employee onboarding –– and get a good look at how effective your company’s system is for training and preparing new support staff.
She says “Companies should use this opportunity to examine the success of their training techniques, as well as the usability of their system.”
It’s really sound advice to keep track of your support staff’s effectiveness, and the holiday season definitely gives a merchant a focused period of time to quickly measure the staff’s performance.
How Well Do You Deal With Surprises?
The next area in help desk performance that Carlson says a company should measure during the holiday shopping season is something called The Collaboration Period. Carlson describes the first nine months of the year as a build-up or preparation period for a business. Mitch Lieberman, of Sword Ciboodle, calls that period the Coordination Period in Carlson’s blog. But, according to Lieberman, the holiday rush shifts into the Collaboration Period. Carlson quotes Lieberman as saying “Collaboration is when something is outside what could or should have been easily coordinated. Are you ready to collaborate on these emergency issues that you didn’t predict?”
Essentially, merchants can use this time to study how well support staff deals with surprises. How well can they go off script? How effectively can they cope with issues that crop up that weren’t prepared for and which aren’t on an FAQ or a PDF or a Guidelines e-mail.
Where Do the Problems Get Handled?
The next area of help desk effectiveness that Carlson suggests merchants should look at is peak load management. Businesses that bulk up with some seasonal help during the holiday rush tend to train those new employees on the basic level of support. They get training to help them stick to a script, deal with the first tier of issues in a protocol, or use the FAQ that was designed for the holiday season –– all really basic stuff. The intent being to keep the easy stuff out of the way of the veteran support team members, who are then expected to effectively handle the harder issues.
Carlson says some interesting statistics can be gathered through this dynamic: “Measuring the percentage of first-call resolutions compared to the percent of calls escalated will help to inform your peak load strategy. “
What’s Your Worst Case Scenario?
The next area Carlson says companies should analyze harkens back to the boy scouts mantra of “Be Prepared.” Carslon says “assume something bad is going to happen. It’s not pessimism. It’s good business. If you assume disaster will strike, you will have an emergency response system in place that’s ready to manage the disaster on all channels.”
It’s never good when disaster strikes. But it’s a much heavier burden on a merchant when disaster strikes during the high pressure holiday shopping period. So this is a good time period to gauge what a company’s emergency response process is. And, if things do go bad, get an up front look at how effective that protocol is. Being proactive, Carlson suggests, is the best approach. Use this time period to analyze your emergency procedures and tweak them to be the most effective they can be. As Carlson puts it, “having proactive procedures mapped out for unforeseen emergencies will not prevent call spikes, but it can lower the spikes to a manageable amount.”
Are the Customers Satisfied?
The core element of your customer support team, and your help desk, is customer satisfaction. Is the customer happy? That’s what it all comes down to. Companies should be measuring customer satisfaction year-round. And Carlson’s blog concedes that point. But Carlson points out that the holiday shopping season heightens the importance of customer satisfaction. This is something The Official Merchant Services Bloghas discussed during our series on holiday shopping as well. The stakes are higher during the focused frenzy that happens after Black Friday, so you need to make sure you’re keeping even the most basic tenets of customer service in mind at all times.
Carlson asks the question, “you might have great satisfaction rates during low-volume times of year, but is your support team still on par when things get hectic?”
She suggests something as simple as a survey of your customers asking how you did during the holidays –– basic feedback.
Host Merchant Services likes the idea of reaching out to the customers for feedback. It’s an effective way to continue to maintain the long-term relationship building goal of customer support. Or, simply put, it’s a nice way to let your customers know you value them and their input. HMS suggests utilizing your social media tools for a survey like this, as you can quickly interact with your customers through those tools and they can help you track and analyze the responses.
Conclusion
This is an effective checklist of ideas for merchants to monitor their customer support capabilities. There are some concrete suggestions here on ways to collect data that will help shape a company’s goals for delivering quality customer service. Carlson gives a lot of good tips in both parts of her series. The Official Merchant Services Blog is glad she shared these with us and hopes you find them useful too.
If anyone else has some tips or suggestions on how to improve customer service now in the holiday shopping season or any other time of the year, feel free to share in the comments section.
Today The Official Merchant Services Blog begins a special two-part series on Customer Service. A previous blog focused on how important Customer Service is for a business during the holiday shopping season. We are currently in the midst of one of the busiest holiday shopping seasons on record, according to the early sales data that has been reported. So to bolster your efforts, we’re going to highlight information and advice brought to our attention from our friends over at Software Advice.
Fellow industry blogger Lauren Carlson ran a two-part series at Software Advice dealing specifically with customer service and the holidays. It’s an insightful series that begins with offering advice on how to prepare your customer service department –– namely your help desk –– for the rigors of increased business from holiday shopping.
And What Are Those Tips?
Carlson’s article was timed for the lead up to Black Friday, but much of its advice is still extremely relevant to merchants facing the rest of the season. After all, the questions that get asked at your help desk aren’t going to subside until after the holidays. Or as Carlson says, the guidelines she gives “if done, can prevent potential chaos and better prepare your agents to handle the spike. This translates to happier customers during the holidays, who will turn into repeat customers once the wrapping paper has settled.”
The first tip given is to create a holiday specific FAQ list. Carlson states that the types of questions a lot of help desks get hit with during the holiday season can vary from the normal questions that get asked the rest of the year and as such, suggests brainstorming and coming up with a list ahead of time to prepare. Due to timeliness, that may no longer be a viable option for a lot of merchants. But by now, you may have a pretty good handle on the varying questions that you were hit with on Black Friday and all through Cyber Week. Which brings us to the best advice found in the first tip: “Post the simpler questions up on your site to avoid spending time on those calls.”
This can be done to enhance the e-commerce experience, getting it out to your customers and providing them with both information that they need, and a click through into your site. Or this can be done just for your own help desk’s internal sanity, having a quick reference guide on hand for when they are barraged with these questions that make your list. As Carlson states, this type of list “will enable agents to resolve a majority of issues on the first call.” And it will be useful for the duration of the season, preventing your staff from having to scramble to find answers even as it gets to be late into the shopping season.
Cross-training to Stay Prepared
The next tip Carlson offers is to cross-train your staff. She cites Matt Trifiro, Senior VP of Marketing at Assistly who explains that cross-training your employees can help you reduce the need for hiring seasonal staff. Carlson says of cross-training: “Much like athletes cross-train to improve the whole body, companies can train every employee – from receptionists to accountants – to be a support agent, improving support across the entire organization.”
This is a great tip for merchants looking to weather the holiday shopping blitz but not go through the process of training seasonal help that they have to let go a short time later. It’s also a quick way to deal with support issues that may have just now cropped up well after Black Friday. Host Merchant Services itself utilizes that same philosophy in its own customer support structure and finds that it does help a business be more responsive and more effective at handling support issues year-round.
Carlson maps out the plan for cross-training your staff, suggesting that a merchant should equip all their employees to answer basic questions customers may have. Then Carlson says merchants should set up an escalation procedure for situations that require additional steps or expertise. This will create a smoother flow for service during the high traffic times of the holiday shopping season.
Communication Has Many Channels
The next tip Carlson gives revolves around communicating when your business is on its own holiday. A lot of Merchants, such as restaurants, have a different set of hours as the actual holidays approach. Carlson suggests merchants should communicate clearly and consistently with their customers about any downtime or time where the business is unavailable during the holiday shopping season. And in 2011, there are quite a lot of avenues in which to communicate this information: “Alert customers on every possible medium (website, Facebook, blog, Twitter, voicemail) of your seasonal hours and availability. Communicating this clearly will help avoid confusion and, more importantly, dissatisfaction.”
This information also applies to any other Merchant needing to reach out to its customers –– including adding extra service hours during holiday shopping like a lot of retailers do. Social media sites like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are amazing tools available for customer interaction and can help you keep your customers up to date on all the latest developments your business goes through during the holiday shopping season.
Support Your Support Agents
The final tip Carlson gives for merchants to prepare their customer support help desk for the holiday shopping rush is to have a plan in place that will offer support for those who are your support agents. Carlson states: ” Help desk and support center employees will be very busy and likely very stressed during the holidays. Savvy companies will invest a lot of energy into supporting their agents via rewards, bonuses, in-office R&R, etc.”
Having something concrete in place that defuses stress and gives your support team some focus or incentive can help your business navigate through the increased stress and tension that holiday shopping can place on a business. This falls in line with Host Merchant Services’ own partnership protocols in the e-commerce section of its services –– where the company’s goal is to take the stress and burden of merchant services off of the business and onto the the merchant services provider. This enhances the overall partnership by making it less stressful for both partners. The same applies to customer service, especially during a time when the increase in business can exponentially increase stress.
Even though Black Friday has passed, this increased stress will continue to build. So it’s definitely not too late to consider implementing some sort of program or incentive to give your support staff both a tip of the hat for its hard work and a goal to strive for that will keep them going through the rest of the holiday rush.
Conclusion
Lauren Carlson offers some rock solid advice for customer support during the holiday shopping season. Many of the tips are easy to implement and do not take a lot of added time investment to get working. Host Merchant Services is always looking for useful insight on customer service to pass along to merchants. Quality customer service helps build long-term relationships with your customers, and can keep them coming back to you long after the holiday shopping season is over. Tomorrow The Official Merchant Services Blog will take a look at part two of Carlson’s series.
As we close in on the Holiday Shopping Season, customer service becomes more and more important. That’s not to say customer service was unimportant prior to now; it’s just that most businesses –– e-commerce ventures as well as brick and mortar stores –– see a large increase in consumer activity during the Holiday Shopping Season. Any customer service mistakes that get made in this time period end up being magnified due to the time of year.
As part of its ongoing series about Holiday Shopping, The Official Merchant Services Blog wanted to take a moment to examine customer service.
By The Numbers
It’s important to not let customer service fall to the wayside in favor of more direct methods of obtaining profits. While marketing campaigns and aggressive sales techniques can see quick results in black and white numbers, customer service is the foundation for maintaining a long-term sales relationship. The old adage about how it costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an old one is what’s at work here. A 2010 MediaPost report indicated that U.S. businesses lose approximately $83 billon each year as a result of poor customer service. The report also indicated that 71 percent of U.S. customers have ended a business relationship based on poor customer service. The report also noted that poor customer service has an impact on a business’ competition –– the study cited by MediaPost found that 61 percent of customers surveyed said that they take their business to a competitor when they end a relationship with a company due to poor customer service.
Do Not Panic
While those numbers from that survey are compelling, our first bit of advice is: Do Not Panic. Just like Customer Service is a long-term relationship building tool, it’s also an aspect of your business that you can take your time building. So even if you hit a few customer service snags on Black Friday, or there’s some pitfalls for your e-commerce business’ customer service on Cyber Monday, it’s not time to panic. Take it easy, and keep the focus on the long-term goal of quality customer service.
Anecdotes and Analysis
We’ve all experienced horror stories that back up the numbers cited above. It could be something as simple as walking into a store looking to purchase a specific product and not receiving any assistance. I’ve had this happen to me quite a lot when walking into a specific retail chain near where I live. I’ve gone there multiple times looking to purchase printer cartridges. And each time I have trouble finding the specific type I’m looking for and it seems I can never get an employee to even ask me if I need help. It’s made me stop going there and I now buy my printer supplies online instead.
What horror stories have you experienced? What’s the worst customer service incident you’ve encountered? Has it affected your approach to your own business and the customer service you provide?
Make Good Customer Service a Habit
Host Merchant Services makes customer service a part of their core business philosophy. It’s part of the Payment Network Provider’s overall goal to bring trust to the payment industry. And it’s part of why this merchant services blog exists. The company wants to share information with customers as well as potential customers, and take the time to explain the confusing aspects of the payment processing industry. Customer Service defines the approach to the customer relationship; it’s why Host Merchant Services makes guarantees such as no contracts and no termination fees; it’s the basis for how Host Merchant Services offers free terminals to our merchants.
Defining Good Customer Service
Using that background in customer service focus, Host Merchant Services offers some easy tips to help you enhance your customer service:
Make a Good First Impression
A customer’s first contact with your business should be a positive experience, no matter if that contact is a telephone call, an internet click through or face to face.
Real People Over Automated Responses
Contact between customers and potential customers hinges on interaction between real people. This applies mainly to the way your business takes phone calls or handles internet contact. Try to cut down on phone trees and automated telephone recordings with confusing menus. For your e-commerce businsess, make sure your website is designed well and easy to navigate. Give your visitors a convenient hub to continue to visit. And make sure you clearly mark how to contact you for customer service related issues.
Be honest, Offer Facts
Do not sugarcoat things when dealing with your customers. While it may be uncomfortable to deliver bad news, customers and potential customers prefer honest and factual information. Trying to sugarcoat things makes them feel like you are being manipulative and will have a negative impact.
Get Back To People
Follow up with people who contact you. Delays in returning voicemails, neglecting e-mails, not responding to posts to your twitter, are all negatives in customer service. If someone takes the time to try to contact you, the best thing you can do to maintain good customer service is to get back to them promptly.
Work With Your Customers
When you do interact with your customers via phone calls, e-mails or face to face, remember to work with them –– not against them. Listen to what they are telling you. They contacted you with a concern, so take in their information. Be polite. Most customer service issues revolve around customer complaints. But if you listen to them and are polite with them, you take a huge step forward toward getting their issue resolved. Customers want to be heard, and they want you take action on their behalf. Even if you can’t do exactly what they want, the process is there for you to help them feel like they are valuable to your business.
Stick To Your Plan
That’s the basics of it. It’s really just a process that involves you interacting with your customers on a human level. Getting back to them promptly. Giving them your focused attention. And doing what you can to make them feel like they are valuable to your business. This is all about building a long-term business relationship. So while you may experience an increase in the static you get from irate customers through November and December, if you stick to a plan that focuses on customer service and relationship building, you will navigate through the storm of the Holiday Shopping Season.
We want to hear from you. What does good customer service mean to you? Better yet, what does it mean to your customers? When they define good customer service, does your business immediately come to their minds? What are some tips you would offer for obtaining excellent customer service?
Even if you are a late-comer to this event, there is still quite a lot of value to be had from participating in Small Business Saturday. The $25 credit program applies no matter what else you do. But there’s also these amazing resources still available:
Lauren Carlson offers some rock solid advice for 