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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 have a couple of quick updates for you today as I have to run away from the house with the cleaning lady here.

Help! My Business Sucks!

Andrew Lock who I refer to as the eBay expert with the cool British accent, has recently started producing a web based television show called Help! My Business Sucks!.

The show focuses on entrepreneurship and Internet marketing, with Andrew as the host. If you are looking for another example of a new way to use Video online to spread your message, educate and entertain, take a look at what Andrew is up to.

The show can be found at - http://helpmybusiness.com/

Perry Marshall AdWords Update

Next, some important advice from Perry Marshall - the only AdWords expert I follow. I’ve been on his newsletter for years now, it was one of the very first I subscribed to and one of the only ones I remain a subscriber.

Perry sends out actual advice to his newsletter and rarely promotes any other products than his own. I’ve never seen him participate in an Internet marketing product launch, so if you are sick of “launch emails” and you are looking for a great newsletter covering Google AdWords, general Internet business, lead generation and conversion advice, you can’t go wrong with Perry’s Newsletter.

You can join his free AdWords e-course, which is great, and that will get you on to his newsletter too.

Google AdWords New Feature: Automatic Matching

Perry recently sent through something I thought was critical for anyone currently running a Google AdWords campaign, regarding a new feature called Automatic Matching. Perry presented a warning regarding this feature, so if you have never heard of Automatic Matching, here’s some advice you need to read…

Google is phasing a MAJOR feature into the AdWords
program. If you log into your account you’ll see a notice
that says,

“New! Automatic matching has been enabled in your
account. Your ads will now show for additional relevant
search queries based on the keywords, ad text, and landing
pages in your ad groups. You can opt out by visiting a
keyword-targeted campaign, and then clicking on edit
campaign settings.”

If you edit your campaign settings, you’ll see a check box
that says:

“Automatic matching: Show ads on more search queries
without adding keywords.”

And in your ad groups at the bottom of your keyword list,
you’ll see a new column labeled “Automatic matching total.”

What this means is, if you’re bidding on a keyword like
“dog grooming”, Google may show your ad for a keyword
like “pet grooming brush” even though you’re not bidding
on it at all.

The question is, do you want this?

First of all, there’s no way to know for sure unless you’re
using conversion tracking.

In fact, you should disable this feature immediately unless
you have conversion tracking enabled and hold Google
accountable for the quality of traffic they’re sending you.

***DO NOT USE THIS FEATURE UNLESS YOU TRACK
THE CONVERSIONS FROM ‘AUTOMATIC MATCHING’
TRAFFIC.***

Automatic Matching traffic will seldom be better traffic,
except maybe for people who simply do not know what
they’re doing in AdWords.

AdWords advertisers who learn this game from me are
always control freaks. They don’t want to just take what Google
gives ‘em. (Hey, that’s how you gain an advantage that Google
doesn’t have.) The ideal way to do this would be to use
the bootstrapping technique I’ve taught for years, which is:

-Campaign 1 has bids set at, say, $1.00 with Automatic Matching OFF
-Campaign 2 has bids set at, say, $0.75, with Automatic Matching ON

This will shift all the Automatic Matching traffic into Campaign
2 and you’ll have complete control of it.

Source: Perry Marshall Newsletter

Perry went into more detail than the above excerpt, but I don’t feel right publishing his entire newsletter here (although I almost did!).

Unfortunately I’m not sure if you can get back-issues of Perry’s newsletter, but if you want more info along the lines of the above, take his free e-course and you will never miss another newsletter.

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This is video number four in my live product launch case study. I recorded this yesterday, a day that was quite tiring but a ton of fun because I got to speak to six people who had all taken part in Blog Mastermind and listen to them recount their experiences in my program.

It was wonderful to meet everyone in a more personal format and thanks to all who I talked to (you know who you are).

Each of the conversations were recorded and as long as they come out okay from a technical standpoint, I will be using them on the Blog Mastermind coaching page as testimonials when the program re-launches.

In this video I explain why testimonials are important and then provide a visual tutorial on how I record video interview testimonials using Skype, Call Recorder for mac or Pamela for windows.

As you will hear in the video, it’s critical when conducting a product launch that you have people who can offer genuine feedback after using your product, especially from “normal” people that others can relate to.

It’s great to have expert recommendations that can raise your credibility in the market, however it’s also important to have feedback from someone who just came “off the street”, who tries your product, enjoys the experience and is willing to talk about it.

In today’s world we are more likely to trust someone “just like us” rather than someone claiming expert status, so the average person testimonial has become critical, which is why I’m so grateful to the people who volunteered to do the video testimonials.

In case you missed the previous videos in this case study, here they are…

• How To Recruit Affiliates
• What System Should Run Your Affiliate Program?
• The Sales Page

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