Successful Blog

There is a Place Beyond Great Customer Service

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A Guest Post by Barry Moltz

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Customer Service is job number one. We have heard this rallying cry within companies forever. Ironically, few of them have been able to implement it. The level of service that most businesses offer is pathetic.

However, this has been changing. With the advent of social media, customer service is now the new marketing. It has become the only sustainable competitive advantage and the current way to keep loyal customers. Advertising and company directed public relations can no longer control the conversation on what people are saying about your company and products. Small businesses have turned to social media tools to monitor what is being said about them and to get involved in that conversation. There are many well known examples of companies that are good at this such as Southwest Airlines, Peachtree, and Lands End.

However, there is now a place beyond great customer service that can even bind the loyalty your customers even more closely to your business. That place is called community.

If you look at the mission or purpose of most companies, it inevitably talks about providing a great product and excellent customer service. For example, Domino’s Pizza’s mission is

“Exceptional People On A Mission To Be The Best Pizza Delivery Company In The World’. This is part of Domino’s ‘Vision and Guiding Principles’ including these statements:
* ‘We Demand Integrity
* Our People Come First.
* We Take Great Care Of Our Customers.
* We Make Perfect 10 Pizzas Every Day.
* We Operate With Smart Hustle and Positive Energy”

However, the starting point for any small business owner is to have a great product, people and service. In order to be successful today, the owner needs to go much further.

Nick Sarillo has been running his pizza restaurants, Nick’s Pizza and Pub in the suburbs of Chicago for over 15 years. When Nick started, he wanted to have a purpose to his small business beyond offering a great product with great service. So, Nick created “Pizza on Purpose”. The mission statement that he came up with 15 years ago for his restaurants was:

“Our Dedicated Family Provides This Community an unforgettable Place; to Connect with your Family and Friends, to Have Fun and to Feel at Home”.

Notice that his mission statement does not talk about having great food or friendly people to serve the customer. Nick set out to use his restaurants to create a community where people can connect. Isn’t this the goal that we have for our social media business efforts? Nick put this in practice 15 years ago. His restaurants now support over 40 organizations in his community through fund raisers.

Nick’s small business gives something beyond great customer service. He offers a community for his customers and a way for them to connect with each other. When they are at Nick’s, they feel good about themselves, their community and his business. As a result, there is no longer a dividing line between his company and his customers. With his business, Nick has created a community which just happens to be a pizza restaurant. This is similar to Zappos, where they are not a company that sells just shoes, but a company that delivers great service regardless of their product.

There is no way to create more loyal fans than for them to be part of your community and have them raving about you. Forget creative marketing. Forget great customer service. Go to the place called community and your business will have its most sustainable competitive advantage: The raving loyalty of its customers.

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Barry Moltz is a Author & Speaker who loves technology and writes about service and small business at Barry J. Moltz You’ll find him on Twitter as @barrymoltz

Thanks, Barry. Customer service with deep ties to the community is truly the competitive advantage. I’m so with you on that!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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It Won’t Be Competition that Will Beat You …

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You Can’t Do What I Do

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I’ve never been good about worrying about the competition. Sometimes I forget to even look at what they’re up to. I don’t want to be them.

I’ve finally learned that the best I can bring to the table is the best version of me. No one can compete with that. Folks can do things I can’t. Folks can make other other offers. But no one can do what I do better than I do. I am the best me that could possibly exist.

You can’t write my blog post and I can’t write yours.

No one else can see what I see as well as I do.

No one else can bring my experience.

No one else can put the Liz idea and the Liz twist into a Liz strategy quite the same way in the same short amount of time.

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I build elegant and irresistible strategies for incredible businesses and people. I put my heart and soul into my work weaving just the right nuance into each choice and action in order to project the most meaning and offer the most value. What my clients get are great relationships, great results, and great communities of loyal fans.

So instead worrying about the competition, I worry about the folks who are looking for exactly what I do. They are the people who count in my eyes. I want to make their lives easier, faster, and more meaningful.

If I looked at my competition too closely, I might start thinking I should be doing what they’re doing and I’d only become a bad facsimile of me or a bad facsimile of them.

Leaders find their own path.

So, it won’t be competition that will beat you.

It will be yourself. It will be you not investing the time and energy into what you want to become. It will be you forgetting who you are or trying to be someone else. It will be you giving into fear or you letting go of what has defined you since before you could talk.

What is it that you do better than anyone? People ask you do to do it often, so often you assume it’s easy, but it’s not. Who could compete with you, if you put your head, heart, and passion into serving the people who value that?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Thanks to Week 234 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

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incslingers
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They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

SOB Business Cafe 04-16-10

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

gaping void and Pam Slim
I was one powerful little girl. The Champion of the World.

My Dad smiled at me, squinting his eyes as he crouched behind the camera. I was safe, cherished and loved. He snapped the picture.

Things blew up after that, rather quickly.

Jonathan Fields, Awake at the Wheel
Rather than focusing all of your energy on fixing what’s wrong with your life, he asked:

What might happen if you focused instead on the sole quest to identify, then grow what was right?

Ramblings from a Glass Half Full
It happens the moment I step on a plane. That loss of control. Someone else is behind the wheel and taking me somewhere.

When control is lost, I get nervous. Edgy. Unsure. I need something to calm me down.

That something is information.

Art of Nonconformity
On the ride down I replayed the classic “time/money/no object” game in my head. You know, the one where you ask: “If time and money were no object, what would I do today?”

Social Media Explorer
It doesn’t matter which social media monitoring service you use. None of them do what you want them to do. They’re good at doing part of the job, but not all of it. And sadly, they probably won’t ever be good at doing all of the job because you have to do it.

Altitude Branding
Sometimes, you just outgrow things.

When you first learned to read, Dr. Seuss was awesome. Simple, rhyme-y, easy to grasp and remember. When you were little, you likely read those books over and over and never got tired of them.

Until you did. Until you needed something more to challenge you,

Related ala carte selections include

4/16 is Foursquare Day
Are you already the “Mayor McCheese” of your local McDonald’s on Foursquare? Get excited because this Friday the 16th could be your lucky day. We are very proud to announce that McDonald’s are joining the celebration of Foursquare Day by offering special deals for Foursquare users on April 16th 2010. That’s right folks, ALL 17,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the USA will become Foursquare Day venues.

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

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Cool Small Biz Tools: PollDaddy – Need a Poll on Taxes?

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Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Small Business

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Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in a small business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Survey Says . . . Polldaddy
A Reveiw by Todd Hoskins

Ask for feedback. Ask for feedback. Ask for feedback.

It’s so important, I wrote it three times. I was reminded of this wisdom recently when I asked a circle of friends for some input regarding transitions in my personal life. The responses I received were surprising, and multiple people thanked me for the invitation to share what been unspoken for months or years.

Not every customer will volunteer his or her opinions on your service, product, or brand experience. A simple, “How are we doing?” or “What could we do better?” can yield a library of rich information.

So, Problem #1 is getting the feedback. Problem #2 is dealing with the data. PollDaddy can provide assistance on both fronts.

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Most people love to share their perspective, some openly, some anonymously. Also, they love to compare themselves to everyone else. This is what ESPN learned when they created a poll at ESPN.com. This led to a featured tab, additional interactive programming, and widespread promotion on television as well as radio. The polling was driving traffic. When they promoted their polls, visitors flocked to vote and compare.

I have used SurveyMonkey in the past to systematically gather feedback. It’s a great tool as well. What I love about PollDaddy is the ability to do email surveys, plus polls embedded in a blog, distributed via Twitter, or within social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, or Ning. For both SurveyMonkey and PollDaddy, the service is free for up to 100 responses. Annual subscriptions are very affordable at $15 to $75 a month. When the responses have been collected, PollDaddy provides reports that can be easily downloaded into a number of formats.

Polls are valuable for getting a quick read on more of a day-to-day basis. You can adjust your tactics based on questions like, “Was this helpful?” (PollDaddy also has a ratings feature for this). For bloggers, it’s insightful to poll your readers’ intentions for reading your blog: Inspiration? Community? Information? Get a feel for their background – professions, demographics, and interests.

The non-intrusive and entertaining aspect of a poll also makes it a great way to inject humor into your brand. A balance of asking questions to learn, and asking to be creative, silly, or human will win points with customers and readers. Don’t take it too seriously.

Surveys can provide more in-depth assistance for developing your strategy. I have asked customers to rank strengths and weaknesses of a client’s service, and asked them where clients should expand their products and businesses. It is important to keep the surveys brief (under 15 questions usually), and minimize the number of open-ended questions. While providing the most unbiased responses, too many open ends will result in a low response rate.

Polls and surveys are no substitute for real, natural dialogue. They are imperfect, but they both show that you care and give you valuable data to make decisions. This leads us to the final issue.

Problem #3 is being responsive to the data. PollDaddy can’t help you with that. When you ask people for input, their expectations increase. It doesn’t mean you need a redesign, a new feature, or more promotions. But your customers will expect you to respond – either with actions or words. Thank them for their participation. Send a note to the responders who were most impassioned. And, when possible, make public what you learned.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 4/5 – continuous feedback is as important as large-scale research

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – cheap, easy, and brings you closer to your customers

Personal Value: 2/5 – if you want to raise your geek flag, go for it

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Thanks, Todd! You can find Todd on Twitter @ToddHoskins

Thanks, Todd, I think it might be time for a poll around here.

What do you find polls useful for in the work that you do?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

Register Now!! for sobcon-vmc