Do Business Well

Demand high standards from your service representatives

Make people smarter! The abilities of real people delivering service to the e-customer services person will need to increase so they can add value to what the system already provides. If service representatives are left innumerate and illiterate, unable to organize, disaffected and reluctant, they will probably not add anything positive to the service experience. The bar is raised for those able to justify their involvement in the process. It has already started to happen.

Is there a future where we will go to one man to buy everything? A man who is wired into the complete network and is fantastically adept at manipulating the available tools to get us what we need. He may be able to serve and support thousands of e-customers because each needs personal involvement so seldom. Continue Reading »

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Service organizations will grow up that will enable demand for ordering and delivery to be met continually. Production will be the only variable. Let me explain. There is a relatively finite amount of purchasing power in the world at any one time. There is also a finite amount of time to view and order products. This means that if there was only one shop to order from it would be relatively easy to build a process and an infrastructure that could cope with the total demand for dealing with orders, complaints, payments, deliveries and returns.

This is how postal delivery services work. They know how many homes there are and organize delivery men to deliver each day to a certain percentage based on the general level of demand. Most of the time there is sufficient slack built into the system to cope with demand blips. This may just mean the delivery people working a little faster or longer occasionally. Continue Reading »

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1. Keep your employees informed

Don’t keep everyone totally in the dark — people like to know how the company is doing. If they know enough of the facts they will respond to the challenge of the company’s policies.

2. Publicise financial targets

Whatever your business you will have to work within certain financial constraints and towards some financial targets. Let the relevant employees down the line understand clearly what part they have to play in containing the business within these constraints. Continue Reading »

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A number of different providers can help you solve your email customer communications and marketing needs.

Email Marketing Service Providers

Over the past few years a new breed of company has grown up to meet the demand for complete solutions to companies‘ email marketing needs. Providers offer a wide variety of marketing services, technical capabilities, and focus. The services these companies (the three leading players are Post Communications, Message Media, and Digital Impact) provide range from customized email marketing programs and high-volume email delivery to one-off direct email campaign execution. Naturally, prices vary considerably. Most still charge based on the old direct marketing model of cost per email sent, while others have introduced new pricing models that are based on managing the customer database and optimizing the value of the client’s customer relationships. What they have in common is that they allow you to out- source all—or at least a large part—of your email marketing solution. Continue Reading »

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As I write this at the beginning of the year, there are ten taxicabs in San Francisco that are painted bright purple and yellow and sport a big Yahoo! logo. Each has a computer onboard that offers customers wireless Internet access. For no extra charge you can browse the Web, check your email, trade stocks, order your groceries, look up directions to a restaurant or bar you’ll be patronizing that evening, and so on. Within a couple of years, every cab in San Francisco will have Internet access.

Otis Elevators recently announced that it would begin equipping elevators with Internet access. As passengers ride up and down to their offices, hotel rooms, or meetings, they will be able to read the latest news, check the stock market, or take a quick look at the web- site of the company they’re about to visit. Continue Reading »

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“Employees now feel they can get a square deal,” says William Blake. “Before, they felt the deck was stacked against them.” What has made the difference at the Borg-Warner plant in Bellwood, IL, where Blake was human resources manager before his retirement, is a peer review system for handling employee grievances.

Under this system, a disgruntled employee takes a complaint to a panel composed of other employees plus members of management. The panels are usually made up of three to six people, with the peers always in the majority. A complainant may bring a fellow employee or someone from personnel to help at a hearing, but not an outside attorney. After listening to the employee and his or her supervisor, the panel votes by secret ballot, and its decision is binding. Continue Reading »

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You can also use the Internet and commercial online services to launch your BBS. For example, you can put the connection software for your BBS on a Web site. If someone is interested in joining the BBS, they download the software from your site and install it on their computer. This saves you the trouble and cost of mailing a disk to new subscribers.

In general, the proactive approach is the best way to get a BBS started. If you want people to connect electronically to your company, go to their home or office and set up the system on their computer. You need to be proactive because many people do not have the motivation or the inclination to install new capabilities on their computer. But once the software is set up, they will use the BBS to communicate with your company. So get out there and be proactive.

The Ongoing Process

Following the successful launch of your program, keep it exciting and vibrant by constantly changing the content, and look for new _opportunities. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is an ongoing interactive process. Continue Reading »

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A basic part of managing lists involves facilitating subscriptions entry of customer profile details and also unsubscribe. This facility will typically be set up to occur automatically via the web site. It should also enable adding e-mail and other profile details collected offline, such as by phone and events. You should assess the package to see whether it enables you to import these details readily from other packages such as Excel. This is a basic capability, and most packages will enable you to tailor profile fields you add into the database.

You will need to decide whether to collect e-mail addresses and profile data via your web- site content management system or customer database management system, or through a data collection module which is part of your e-mail package. Continue Reading »

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Onstar has been developed by General Motors to provide functions that guide drivers and summon help in case of an emergency. Using cellular technology and a receiver that picks up signals from the satellites of the Global Positioning System, a subscriber’s car can report its location to a command centre, and the driver can communicate with an operator or with a voice-recognition system through a hands-free microphone and the car’s speakers. Additional services are built around small screens on the dashboard that display maps and other information.

General Motors ran a successful television advertising campaign in 2000 for its Onstar service that generated worldwide publicity and curiosity about the increasingly diverse applications of wireless technology. The commercials focused on Onstar’s capability to help stranded motorists or provide directions to the service’s 1.5 million subscribers. As Onstar equipment makes it technically possible for the system to know a car’s location at any time, information could be used to deliver highly specific advertisements pointing the driver to a convenient local restaurant or store. The dangers centre upon distracted drivers compromising road safety and the Onstar brand being damaged by a barrage of marketing ploys that outweigh the benefits of the system to e driver. (The wireless phone industry will soon confront the same dilemma, as the S government pushes it to add tracking features to phones for safety reasons.) Continue Reading »

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