Archives For phone

Your customer service starts with the person that answers the phone

April 29, 2011 — Leave a comment

While I’m certainly not a big fan of the phone, I still use it quite often.  As you’ve probably noticed, while businesses love their fancy programs and mission statements, their front line workers define who they are.  Here’s two quick examples:

The unhelpful church

A few months back, Ali and I were giving a social media presentation to a group of local businesses.  There was a mix-up about who was bringing the projector, and it looked for a little while that it might be a big problem.  We knew there was a church right next door, and most churches have projectors around.  Being mid-day on Tuesday, it seemed likely to be available.

I know some people that attend there, but had never had any interaction with the church before.  I knew it’d be interesting to see what happened when we called.

We were hoping for the best, but felt it would be understandable if they had said “no”.  We would have been willing to put up collateral, but it’s still a tricky thing to loan out valuable equipment to a stranger.  But we didn’t get a “no” — we basically got a “we don’t care”.  The precise response was something like “no one is here to take care of that now, we can’t call them, they might show up later or they might not.   Good-bye”.  Blech.  Fortunately, we were able to get a projector in time, and I’ve since purchased my own to avoid that kind of problem in the future.

I now have one experience with that church, and it isn’t great.

The awesome dentist

A few weeks back, I had to have my wisdom teeth pulled.  My dentist doesn’t do that kind of work, so he gave me four local oral surgeons to call.  I called them all.

The winner, quiet easily, was East Cobb Oral Surgery.  The other three places sounded very annoyed that I called.  Not downright rude, but you could tell they didn’t want to be on the phone.

When I called ECOS, the woman was very friendly, very polite and very patient.  The call only lasted about 45 seconds, but she was MINE for those 45 seconds.  It made all the difference in the world.  One receptionist spent 45 seconds being helpful, and the company earned $1300.  Not a bad return on the time she invested with me.

ROI?

People often want to know the ROI of being on Twitter or Facebook, and it’s quite difficult to measure.  It’s similar to the ROI of answering the phone, since it’s all about connecting with people.  That receptionist earned ECOS $1300 in 45 seconds, which is on pace for nearly $100,000/hour.  Is that her value?  Obviously not.

For another example, I mentioned a few years ago how a single tweet earned an HVAC company $700.  Is their Twitter account worth $700/tweet? Not so much.

When it comes to social media, don’t worry too much about trying to calculate ROI.  Build relationships and the return will come.

Thanks?

One weird thing, though.  After the surgery, which went very well, I emailed my primary dentist and ECOS to express my thanks for their quality work.  Neither ever replied.  Not a big deal, but kinda weak.

Have you ever had a similar experience, where a single interaction (phone, Twitter, etc) created/lost a lot of income for a business?

In Companies, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter , , , , , ,
permalink

Are unscheduled phone calls rude?

March 24, 2011 — 4 Comments

I’m not a big fan of phone calls.  I certainly use it as needed, but it’s gradually becoming less and less often.  Google Voice helps quite a bit, since it rids me of the pain of voicemail, but phone calls still often (but not always) seem to be a waste of time.  For example, a 20 minute phone call with a client usually could have been resolved with a 2 minute email exchange.

Two articles have come out in the last week that support that view.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt wrote an entry titled “Phone Calls Are So Last Century“.  Among other things, he argues that:

In the past, when most people didn’t have mobile phones, such random calls were more common. And you might assume that our greater access to telephony would mean greater desire to make calls. Now, obviously, a big part of the reason for making calls has been replaced by (mostly text-based) alternative means, such as email, text messaging and social networks. But, I’d argue that the greater access also makes us more wary in general. For example, I was thinking about calling a friend recently, who I hadn’t spoken to in a while, but realized it would be his mobile phone, and what if he was out with his wife and kids, and I didn’t want to interrupt that.

The other article is from Pamela Paul in the New York Times, with “Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You“.  Her main point is that phone calls are becoming rare enough that they can almost be alarming:

It’s at the point where when the phone does ring — and it’s not my mom, dad, husband or baby sitter — my first thought is: “What’s happened? What’s wrong?” My second thought is: “Isn’t it weird to just call like that? Out of the blue? With no e-mailed warning?”

For me, a big part of it is the lack of a paper trail.  When I’m on a phone call, I usually need to take notes (often directly into Evernote) so I can remember exactly what was said: “edit xx file”, “invoice for $xx”, etc.  Communicating via email, sms, Facebook, etc, generates an automatic record of what was said.

What do you think? I’m not quite at that point yet (I still dial and receive “random” calls quite often), but it certainly seems to be heading that direction.  Where do you stand?

In Mobile, Productivity , , , , , , , ,
permalink

Organize Your Digital Life 1 – Get Control of Your Email

December 7, 2009 — 8 Comments

This is the first in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Email is becoming an overwhelming problem for a lot of people.  Many clients I visit have thousands of emails in their inbox, and getting a grip on it seems completely hopeless.  There are two things that you can do to help tame your inbox: Change your methods and change your tools.

:: Change your methods

We’ll start with how to change your methods.  Many of you may be tied into specific tools (email at work, for example), but anyone can tweak their methods.

The biggest thing you can do is treat your inbox the way it was intended — for INcoming messages.  Don’t store them there.  Let them come in, deal with them, and move on.  So how do you do that?

Stop “checking” your email – “process” it instead.  When you read an email, do something with it immediately.  A popular list of what can be done to any message is:

  • Delete/Archive: So many messages can just be trashed.  Be liberal with the delete button.
  • Do: If the email can be dealt with quickly, do it.  I get an email every morning with a report from another site I manage. I open it up, grab the data I need, toss it in the spreadsheet, then get rid of the message.  Takes about 30 seconds.  Another example is when clients send me FTP info for a site I’ll be working on in a few weeks.  I grab the info, store it in that client’s file and then move on.
  • Delegate: If a message needs to be processed by someone else, get it off your plate and onto theirs.
  • Respond: If someone sends me an email that is missing a key piece of information, I reply with a request for the info and move on. By the same note, many emails just need a simple response — “where do you want to have dinner?”, “how do I access Analytics?”, etc.  Answer the question, get rid of the email, and move on.
  • Defer: This is a tricky one for a lot of folks.  If you get an email that you need to deal with, but you don’t have time for it right now, what do you do?  If you’re like most folks, you leave it in your inbox.  Since our goal is to keep the inbox clean, you need to get it out of there.  If it’s a file you’ll need later, save it (see my “Organize Your Files” post).  If it’s a big task you need to do, then add it to your do-do list (see my “Organize your tasks” post).

Please note that when I say to remove it from your inbox, I don’t necessarily mean to delete it.  Gmail has a killer “archive” feature, and Outlook allows you to create folders to store them in (but don’t use too many).  Use those features to keep your inbox clean, but with a copy of the email safely tucked away in case you ever need it again.

Merlin Mann covers “Inbox Zero” in this excellent video from a few years back.  It’s quite long (nearly an hour), but rather entertaining and very informative.  If you haven’t watched it before, I highly recommend it:

:: Change your tools

If you are stuck in Outlook in a work environment, I feel for you.  :)   Some of these tips can still be applied, though. If you have the ability to change things up, though, here’s what I’d recommend:

  • Combine your accounts into a single system. This doesn’t need to be a single address, but it needs to be a single program from which to access it.  Most systems support this (Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, etc), so figure out how it’s done and make it happen.
  • Switch to web-based mail, probably Gmail. Here’s why:
    • You’re not tied to a particular computer. All of your email is available on any computer.
    • It’s all backed up. If your computer crashes, you lose zero email.
    • It’s all synced. I talk to people that check their email through the web (or on their phone), but then it still pulls it into Outlook when they get home.  This means they have to deal with every message twice.  Do you really want to double your email workload?
    • Your computer will probably run faster. Outlook is a huge resource hog, and being able to simply open one extra website in a lightweight browser (like Firefox or Chrome) will be far easier on your system.
  • Make sure you can access it from your phone. Being able to deal with email on the road is huge.  I can’t do everything from my phone, but I can delete, delegate and respond pretty easily.  If I get 25 emails while I’m out, it’s nice to come home and only have four sitting in my inbox.
    • You can’t afford an email capable phone? You can’t afford not to.  Let’s assume that having email access on your phone would save you 30 minutes/day.  Figure out what your time is worth per hour, then multiply by 180 (hours saved per year).  If you’re worth $20/hour, then a phone with email will save $3600 worth of your time each year.  And $99 is too much to spend?

If you switch to Gmail (or if you use it already), be sure to spend some time looking at the options they have in the “Labs” section.  I personally think “Send & Archive” is the best thing ever created, but there are plenty of others that may help as well.

Matt Cutts (a well-known Google employee) created a few videos that are worth watching if you use Gmail: Gmail Power Tips and his favorite items in Gmail Labs.

What other email tips do you have?

This is the first in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

In Productivity, Videos , , , , , , ,
permalink