Customer Support and your Reputation

The best seller is always personal referrals. If a friend comes up to you and says “I’ve tried this company, and it’s great”, you’ll be more likely to try it out then seeing a TV commercial saying “Our company is great”.

The key to having people tell others, is customer support. If word spreads about bad customer support, you’re company can get hurt for LONG periods of time. Some companys have a bad reputation even though they have since cleaned up their act.

You can ask any of my clients, and they’ll probably tell you that I’ve let them down at one point. But I always try to resolve any issue as best I can, as fast as I can.

You don’t even have to be perfect at it. I’ve had so many people come to me telling me who told them to come to me, and I know I get backlogged pretty easily.

So what are ways you can boost your customer service? Sometimes you just have to do things that are out of your “job description”. If you work online, there are many opportunities to do this, because there are many people that are new to the whole online thing.

If someone asks you a question, do you answer the question or give advice? If someone says they are new and have a question, do you answer the question or answer it and give them links to good tutorials?

I recently had someone tell me they were new to Traffic Exchanges and Search Engine Optimization, and they were trying to get their website known. They wanted to get listed in my directory, but they were using some not so good SEO techniques that are easily figured out by search engines. I sent them a link to my traffic exchange articles, pointed out a few things they could change on their exchange, and told them better ways to spread the word than SEO tricks.

I could have easily not said anything, but do you think my helping them out will somehow make me benefit later? I’m not sure, but I bet if that person comes across my sites again, or my name comes up in a conversation, they’ll think highly of me. A simple “yeah that guy helped me out” to a friend can build a good reputation!