The Best Way to Find Out What Your Customers REALLY Think About You Saturday, Feb 21 2009

The Best Way to Find Out What Your Customers REALLY Think About You

 While I was reading Social Media Marketing – An Hour a Day by Dave Evans, I found this test that Dave presented that is designed to measure how well your company is performing when it comes to customer service.  I think that every major company would benefit from implementing this.

The Ultimate Customer Service Test

 

Create a list of your customers and go to www.randomizer.org/form.htm to generate a random list of numbers.  It’s important to make sure the numbers are completely random in order to get the most accurate results.  Pick up your phone and call the customers who match those numbers and ask them:

 

“On a scale from 1 to 10 (1 means “no way” and 10 means “absolutely, without hesitation”) how likely would you be to recommend our firm to your colleagues or others who you feel could use our product or service?”

 

Then, add up the numbers of customers who gave you a 9 or 10, and find out what percentage they are of the total number of customers you called.  These customers are called your promoters.

 

Next, add up all the customers who gave you a 6 or less.  Find out what percentage they are of the total number of customers you called.  These are called your detractors. 

 

Subtract your detractors % from your promoters % and the resulting % is called your Net Promoter Score.  If you come up with a negative number, it means that you have more detractors than promoters. 

 

Why don’t 7 or 8s count?  Because according to the book, people who give you that score, think you are “okay” but they wouldn’t give you a strong recommendation.  “In a world driven by recommendations, 7s and 8s don’t count!”.  If you get a score of 70% or higher, it means you are doing fantastic!  

 

Harley-Davidson scored 81% in this test.  This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone since their customers love enough to make them willing to tattoo the company’s name to their body. 

 

 

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3 Reasons Why I Like InsiderPages more than Yelp Friday, Feb 13 2009

 3 Reasons Why I Like InsiderPages more than Yelp

 

1.  Customer Service - Recently I broke a “rule” on both Yelp and InsiderPages by posting the same review (word-for-word) for two different businesses in the same industry.  The mistake was careless on my part and I honestly didn’t even realize that I accidentally did this. 

 

Yelp’s Response:  They sent me an email saying that they had shut down my account and I could no longer log in with that email address.  When I replied to the email stating that it was a mistake, they never responded.  Their tone in the email screamed “How dare you break our rules.  You can’t use our service anymore!”.  By deleting my entire Yelp account, they removed every review I had ever written for any business.

 

InsiderPages Response: They sent me email stating that a couple reviews didn’t comply with their regulations and that those 2 reviews are not currently showing, but the rest of my account is fine.  They then stated that I am a valued customer and that if I would like the reviews to display again, I should log into my account and adjust them so that they meet the guidelines. I did just that, and everything went back to normal.   

 

2. Google & Yahoo Reviews – When you post a review on InsiderPages.com, it almost always shows up on that business’ local listing on BOTH Google and Yahoo.  Yelp’s reviews most often only show up on MSN.

 

3.  Negative Press – I searched for blogs that talked about Yelp or InsiderPages and their service.  I wasn’t able to find anything written recently which commented on InsiderPages.  I was, however, able to find quite a few articles about Yelp.

 

I found this article about Yelp that was written in February 2008.  The most interesting thing I found about the article was that the CEO of Yelp was not too happy about the bad press and tried to discredit the author.  Every book or article I’ve ever read on social media says that you don’t respond to negative press by attacking the writer but by addressing what the issue is and trying to fix it.  I was shocked to see the CEO of a Social Media website not practicing this!

 

I also found this article about Yelp which was written November 17, 2008.  The article talked about a few business owners who claimed that Yelp representatives told them that they could “rearrange” reviews written about them if they signed up with the service.  Again, Yelp didn’t follow good Social Media rules because they didn’t “return calls seeking comment”.  If they had returned the calls, it might have changed the tone of the article.

 

This final article I found about Yelp also touches on the conspiracy that Yelp may be allowing paid business owners the right to “manipulate” the reviews written about them.

 

Traffic Comparison for Yelp, InsiderPages, and CitySearch

 

Although Yelp seems to be getting more traffic these days, I will continue to prefer InsiderPages due mainly to the 3 reasons listed above.  I also think InsiderPages has the potential to increase their traffic if they expanded more on their partnership with CitySearch.  Currently, Yelp has an Alexa rank of 573, InsiderPages has a rank of 4,057, and CitySearch has a rank of 868.

 

 

 

 

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Review: StumbleUpon – A More Sophisticated Type of Search Engine Wednesday, Dec 10 2008

 

I’m going to start my reviews with a great, well-known company – www.stumbleupon.com.  Basically, StumbleUpon is this great toolbar that you can install into your internet browser.  When you first set up an account, you tell StumbleUpon what your interests and hobbies are.  Based on that, they will display different websites to you that have bene given a high rating by other users with the same interests.

For example, let’s say you find ancient history very facinating.  You can set “ancient history” as an interest of yours, and when you hit the “stumble” button, they will show you a website related to ancient history.  If you like the website, you give it a “thumbs up”.  If you don’t, you can give it a “thumbs down”.  If you’re not sure of your opinion, you don’t have to give one.  Your ratings will affect what future viewers will see because obviously they are only going to show the best rated websites first.

The reason why this toolbar is so effective is because it can literally track every site that the user visits, and use it to help individuals with similar interests.  For me particularly, SEO is something that I have recently wanted to learn a lot about.  When I do a search on Google or Yahoo, i’ll get some results that are similar, but it’s based on a mathematical algorithm.  When I do this search on StumbleUpon, math has nothing to do with it – it’s all about recommendations from other users.  To me, they’re like a very sophisticated search engine that helps you find the good sites that “you’ve always been looking for”.

For the individuals who hate downloading toolbars because of the fear of “spyware”, StumbleUpon can still offer the same service if you set up an account and log in directly on their website.  You can still hit the “stumble” button, make recommendations, and have it all stored in your profile without having to install anything on your computer.  For me, this is very helpful for when I’m at work, since I can’t install the toolbar there.

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