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In this final piece of a four part article series on customer service we look at one of the key components of a successful Internet business - a good customer support person.

If you have been following along this journey you will remember how Starbucks taught us the importance of good customer service as a powerful tool for reputation management, which can lead to a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

We then switched to the Internet business world and followed along the typical path of a solo entrepreneur growing an online empire. With success comes pressure to continue to deliver personalized support, despite less time available to do so. In the end one person can only do so much, and customer service suffers.

In the most recent article I went back in time and reviewed my own personal experience developing various Internet projects and how I evolved the system I use to interact with my constituents. The major conclusion of this piece was the importance of Angela, my customer service person.

Now let’s take a look how you can take the next step with your business and outsource your customer service role.

Start With A System

It’s likely you will begin by providing customer support yourself, especially if you work your way up as an independent operator. Along the way you can install a help desk or set up a customer support email account. You may go as far as replicating the ReplytoYaro.com support system I use.

The previous article looked at a several technology options available to you to implement a system for online customer support. I suggest you use my story as inspiration to build your own support system, and while you do, think about how eventually another person (or people) can run it for you.

Most help desk scripts are built for multiple users and as I explained in the prior article, a Gmail email is a great basic solution to get started and can also handle multiple users through the use of message flagging.

Once you have something set up, your next task is to find a customer support officer.

How I Find Good People

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This is the third part in a four part series of articles on customer service.

In part one we looked at a example from Starbucks customer service, where a simple free beverage voucher left a lasting positive impression on me. You can read this article here - Reputation Management: Starbucks Offers A Simple Lesson In Good Customer Service.

In part two I walked you through the typical “growing pains” of a solo entrepreneur running an Internet business attempting to deliver personal customer service and how often as a result of success, things start to fall apart. You can read this article here - Growing Pains: How To Manage Customer Service As A One Person Enterprise.

In this next part of the series, as promised, I’m going to give you a behind the scenes tour of how I handled customer service through various different Internet projects I’ve owned in the past eight years. My system today is far from perfect, but it’s definitely much better than what it was. My current set-up allows me to have time freedoms and still look after my most important constituents (most of the time anyway!).

Starting From The Beginning

To fully put this into perspective we have to take a trip down memory lane way back to the beginning of my Internet business timeline (still one of the most popular article series on this blog and overdue for an update to add the last couple of years).

My first true success online was my popular Magic card game site, MTGParadise.com started in the late nineties. I created that site as a true newbie. I learned how to FTP, code HTML, create basic graphics and spent countless nights changing my website.

To start with I wrote content for the website myself and learned some basic Internet marketing techniques to bring in traffic, which pretty much amounted to link exchanges and regular participation in popular Magic newsgroups (this was a LONG time ago, back in the Usenet heyday when newsgroups were the Internet).

My site grew slowly, but with no benchmarks to really compare against I was happy enough with my few hundred daily visitors, adding another ten or twenty new readers per month, treating the project purely as a hobby.

Eventually I started to receive guest articles from other people who played the card game, which helped lesson my writing load. I spent most of my time back then struggling to make HTML do what I wanted to do and did not write nearly as much as I do now as a blogger and information product creator.

My Magic site didn’t become a big success until I added a forum to it. I made the decision on a whim because Magic players, at least in Australia, were used to using email newsgroups to communicate with and spent the rest of their time reading static websites. There wasn’t a forum out there at the time for Australia magic players because they were content with newsgroups, which had a critical mass of users.

I didn’t exactly see this as a business opportunity at the time. What I was interested in was playing with the forum script and seeing if I could get it to work (I was a real glutton for punishment back then, wasting time trying to make technology work when I wasn’t a coder). I certainly did not expect what would happen next.

My First Taste of Success

One of the reasons I enjoyed Magic had nothing to do with playing the game. What I loved was to trade cards. As an entrepreneur at heart, sometimes I preferred the act of performing commerce rather than playing the game, so I did see the potential for my forum to become a hub for card trading. I just didn’t expect it to become THE card trading site for Australian Magic game players - but it did.

Within a few months the forums began to really take off thanks to the increasingly active card trading community.

If you can create a site that is based on user generated content fueled by a strong hook - a reason for people to come back to the site every day - well, then you have struck gold in Internet business terms. Many multi-million dollar web business today are based on this principle (think eBay, Facebook, YouTube).

My Magic site did not become a multi-million dollar business, but it did carve out it’s own little corner in a very specific niche. As a result my traffic grew to over a thousand visitors a day, which I joked was probably the entire online population of Magic players in Australia (it’s a popular card game, but Australia doesn’t have a large population). I made my first real online income thanks to advertising sponsors on MTGParadise.com.

If you are interested to learn more about how I made money with my Magic site, see - How to make money from your website using advertising.

The Empire Starts To Grow

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In my previous post about Starbucks reputation management we looked at how a few good customer service systems can be used as a marketing strategy to encourage word of mouth and result in a competitive advantage.

In the case of people like me and many of you, my readers, we operate Internet businesses that largely are a product of our own personal brand. We are entrepreneurs, bloggers, consultants, contractors or freelancers, and much of the customer service responsibility rests on our shoulders.

Being an independent operator or small business owner does not mean you can let the ball drop on good customer service. In this case reputation management is just as important since your business lives and dies on your ability to deliver what you promise and leave a lasting impression.

For a small business with a limited marketing budget, good customer service resulting in an above average reputation in the market, can result in acquiring new customers through existing client referrals - a “free” form of marketing.

During the start-up phase you have limited funds and one of the best strategies to survive this period of business growth is to use your existing clients as a marketing tool to bring in new clients (actually - this is a good strategy at any stage of business growth).

The cornerstone of achieving that outcome is good customer service, since your existing clients will not be willing to help you, nor will they feel compelled to talk about you and refer you to others, if they are not significantly impressed by - and benefit from - their interaction with your business.

Good customer service combined with a superior product can evoke a sense of reciprocity from your customers. They genuinely want your business to succeed, so much so that they go out of their way to endorse you. People like to spread things they consider valuable because in turn they enjoy the perception of being valuable as well. Most humans desire recognition from other humans - it’s a core human drive - and if you can loop your business into this motivation you have tapped the secret of word of mouth marketing.

Growing Pains As A Solo Business Owner or Blogger

I’ve worked independently all my life. Most of the first five years of my business experience were completely solo because I had the mentality that I needed to do things myself in order to save money.

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I was traveling around Queen Street West in downtown Toronto this week and as always I popped into a Chapters bookshop (like a Borders). In Canada most bookshops have either a Starbucks or a Second Cup coffee shop. Many of the posts in this blog were created in cafes inside bookshops around the world.

I ordered a tea and an oat brownie from Starbucks. The brownie was delivered instantly, but the tea wasn’t, so I walked over to the delivery end of the cafe and waited.

The customers just before me received their order and I expected mine next. The customers who ordered after me then walked up and collected their coffees. Then the next customer. Clearly my tea wasn’t coming.

I walked back around to the cashier section and spoke to the barista who took my order. He immediately realized that he had forgotten about the tea and in two seconds flat, made my tea and then blurted out something about a free tea and handed me a piece of cardboard that looked like this -

In case you can’t read the print, here’s the bit that matters…

Besides the funky design of this free beverage voucher, there’s nothing too groundbreaking about offering something for free when you don’t get good service, but let’s look at this a little deeper.

I waited about an extra minute longer for my tea than I should have. That is definitely not long enough for me to get angry and I was served very quickly once I notified them that my tea was missing.

Yet, despite this, the Starbucks policy is to offer a complimentary beverage even if their system is slightly out of whack. I walked away impressed that I scored a free beverage voucher, but not really because of the beverage itself, I was impressed with the customer service policy I just witnessed (hence I’m writing a blog post about it!).

Starbucks did not diminish in my eyes as a result of this incident. In fact they impressed me, so much so that I’m now writing a blog post that will be read by thousands of people proclaiming good things about Starbucks service (that’s some good word of mouth). Of course not every Starbucks customer has a blog they can rave to when something happens, but every person has friends and people they talk to, and this one policy of Starbucks will encourage word of mouth through normal social interaction too.

Standing Out In A Crowded Marketplace

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I’m living in a new rental in Toronto for the first time on my own in this fair city, as opposed to living with family as I usually do when in anada. So far I have opted not to have a television since cable access seems to be the only way to get any good channels here and I don’t see the need to pay for something that ultimately makes me less productive. At least that is the theory, but I am having major entertainment withdrawals and not laughing nearly as much without the Simpsons, Family Guy, Seinfeld and my new favorite, Robot Chicken, in my life.

In particular there is one time I usually have the TV turned on where I am missing it the most - when I eat. It’s hard to use a mouse and the web when you are eating, so the computer hasn’t been an apt replacement for the good old tube during meals. Since I work at home I often cook myself a fresh lunch and have a “lunch break” with my friend the television, and frankly I miss this ritual, though I’m not sure how much of this problem is merely a bad habit I’ve formed over the years (very likely).

What is a television addict to do?

I turned to my best friend, the Internet, and started looking for movies and TV online. I’ve never been much of a YouTube casual movie watcher looking for giggles - I want full length episodes of sitcoms, dramas, movies - basically television online, on demand - heck I’d even pay a dollar or two for some movies or television shows if I could download and watch them instantly. I’m not a torrent downloader because I’m trying to avoid any somewhat “suspect” activities, so I’ve been looking for legitimate solutions.

Unfortunately the era of digital delivery of television entertainment online has not yet arrived in 2006. The options are few and far between and frankly stink, so I gave up looking.

Instead I’ve discovered the joys of public domain entertainment, otherwise known as movies and television that are no longer copyrighted and can be distributed freely without risk of legal retribution. I’ll be honest with you - the selection is minimal and most of the stuff is old, but it’s getting me through my addiction and I usually finish eating and get back to doing productive things anyway.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

That little background story was a segue into my business lesson for today’s blog post (yes it had to be in there somewhere!).

I watched an old 1951 black and white sci-fi movie called The Day The Earth Stood Still, which while not being the most amazing piece of cinematic glory, has it’s moments and certainly makes me laugh now and then. Nostalgia is always fun.

At one point in the movie the main character, an alien, causes all the power in the world to stop working for thirty minutes. So nothing works at all and the earth basically “stands still”. However he pulled this little trick with the proviso that he would not cause any harm to anyone. While I was watching all these cut scenes of places around the world with no cars moving and all these people mulling around wondering what happened, it dawned on me -

“What about the hospitals? What about the planes that were flying in the air?!?”

I think shutting down hospitals and planes mid-flight would surely cause some harm to people?

Five minutes later the plot continues with a bunch of important men sitting around a table talking about what happened. One man explains the situation based on reports coming in from around the world and it appears that not everything had been shut down:

The hospitals and planes in mid-flight were still working. Nice.

My question had been answered and I didn’t have quite as much scorn for the movie as I may have had previously. It just became that little bit more legitimate in my eyes because they had adequately answered my question - in fact specifically addressed the two areas of concern I had.

Predict What Your Client Will Ask You

So what on earth does all that have to do with Internet business you ask? Aha! Remember everything is the same, and everything has a lesson for us relevant to business hidden away somewhere. Here’s what I am getting at…

One of the very first lessons I learnt from professional copywriters was to ensure your copy answers the questions that a prospect has going through their head as they read your sales page.

This technique was developed originally by face-to-face salespeople who would manipulate a prospect by answering questions on-the-fly based on how the potential customer reacted. A good salesperson removes all buying barriers by carefully guiding the conversation and knows the right triggers to use based on verbal and non-verbal communication.

This principle translated to the online world resulted in the long sales copy page. The long sales page attempts to answer all potential questions - points of resistance - that a prospect has before making a purchase. Since you can’t respond dynamically to a prospect’s communication cues online, the sales page must anticipate the most vital questions that the whole potential marketplace of customers may go through.

Imagine how powerful it is when a person is somewhat interested in your product and is reading the sales page and a question forms in their head, and then a paragraph or two later that specific question is answered.

Prospects may have concerns about whether the product is right for a certain type of business or person, whether there is a guarantee, can the product be used to solve a specific problem, how about size, shape, color, endurance, relevance, timeliness, applicability, quality, compatibility, ease of use, etc. All of these characteristics may relate to questions or concerns your potential new customer has about your product and when your sales copy directly answers their question a feeling of satisfaction will wash over them.

Yes, this is the right product for me because they know what I want and what situation I am in. I now have justification to buy.

That’s the feeling you want to elicit in a person when they read your sales page. If you can anticipate all of the common questions asked by a typical consumer of your product you will increase your conversion rate.

How To Anticipate Questions

If you are very close to your product and know your market well initially you should be able to come up with a handful of typical questions and roadblocks that prospects may go through in their head before buying. You must address these questions in your sales copy.

There are also standard responses or triggers - questions that the majority of consumers ask themselves before buying that sales copy can address, which professional copywriters will include in almost every sales page. Things like the money back guarantee, examples/case studies/testimonials from other people just like you who have had great results with your product, help to remove psychological barriers to making the purchase. I’m not a professional copywriter though, so if you want more assistance you might want to try Michael Fortin or Dan Kennedy or John Carlton.

A good copywriter can step into any industry and anticipate the questions that people will ask about a product after spending time researching the market. It’s something that is not easy to do. Personally I know the industries I work and play in well enough because I do it every day but there is no way I could write effective sales copy for different industries without first researching a lot about the needs and intricacies of the client-base in that industry. That’s one of the distinguishing factors that separates the good copywriters from the average - their innate (and refined through research) ability to understand the marketplace.

In your case you should at least know your market well enough to brainstorm potential questions to get yourself started. All you need to do is step into the shoes of your customer and think about what they may be concerned with before buying. If you can’t do this, put a survey out and ask - get the data straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. If you can anticipate the concerns of your prospects and address them during the sales process you will increase your conversion rate. It’s as simple as that - but of course, test it to be sure ;-).

Yaro Starak
Copywriting Drone

Learn more about Internet business in Yaro’s Forums.

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