Cutting Your Own Throat

It was the best of customer service times, it was the worst of customer service times.

In the last two months I have observed companies that are polar opposites in handle their customer enquiries and issues.

The Good (In fact I Would Say GREAT)

The team over at Noble Samurai offer the very pinnacle of customer service. Their product is new, it was launched at the same time that Google made some hefty changes to their data serving (that Market Samurai the application uses) and the user base the product was being offered to was 90% complete and utter newbies in using the tool (and in some cases the INTERNET).

Brent, Eugene and Andrew have a mature outlook when it comes to dealing with customer frustrations. They recognise that the frustration that users are showing when they vent is a “good” thing. It means that their customers are passionate people who really, really want their product.

The Samurai guys do not get flustered or angry at a user who is being less than civil (which by the way was 99.9% of the time is user error in the first place), respond in calm and measured ways. They go out of their way to not only service, but delight their customers with the response they get. It is very obvious that Noble Samurai has a great customer service policy that they ensure is front and centre with any transaction with their customers.

The Bad

In chatting with some of my IM colleagues a conversation came up regarding the affiliate commissions being paid by a membership site. They suddenly said something that rang a bell with me, although they KNEW they were referring new members who were signing up, no commission was being recorded or paid.

Me being me, had not said anything about that because I had automatically assumed I had done something wrong with linking (after all 99,9% of faults are user error), popped it in the too hard basket and went off to do soemthing else. Yet my colleagues HAD done something and placed help desk tickets (no answer), PMd people who ran the course (no answer) and in the end started fuming behind closed doors that they were being ripped off by something they felt was a worthwhile course to recommend.

The Ugly (or You Gotta Be Kidding me?!?!)

One of my IM girl friends had signed up during the 30DC with one of the recommended services.  Where there was the opportunity to take a “free” option, she actually took advantage of one of the special discount monthly continuity plans. While she doesn’t have much cash, she recognised the benefit of the product and the value of the offer.

Come her first bill she realises that she is being billed for $10 a month more (the non-special amount). Like I said, money is tight so she gets onto customer service to ask what is going on and her account to be adjusted. The customer service response to her was, NO, you signed up for the higher amount.

This comapny has just cut its own throat for the sake of $120 a year.

Not only that, the referrals that would have come from my friend would have made them a bucketload MORE money than the $120 they just chose to quibble over.

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Moral of the story here: Great customer service should be the FIRST thing you think of when setting up a business, not the last…

My 30 Day Challenge Business Plan

After clarifying with Wordpress Direct their affiliate program rules I have changed my business plan around what I was going to do with the blogs/business I created.

While the Thirty Day Challenge is pitched at the complete and absolute newbie, and this year these guys are going to be pumping out gold value sites (compared to previous years where they may have been silver or copper), I am not sure in the remaining days Ed Dale and Dan Raine are going to then teach an “exit plan”.

It’s cool if they don’t, the audience after all wants to START not finish, but for anyone in business you really should have a plan on where you are going and what you will do after you have got there.

At the end of the 30 Day Challenge I will have a cluster of 5 related blogs, all of which will be in high Google rankings and will be valuable as an advertising platform for those in that niche, as well as for any product I wish to push. I know the Challenge this year is going to go on into the product creation stuff which is GREAT, thing is I might give that a miss on most of my sites.

Why?

Well my business plan is going to be different for the whole cluster. I plan to sell the lot WITH an attached WPD gold account. This will be a test for me to get more into the internet real-estate side of things. Usually though, once you have sold a property that’s it… no more income from the site. Attaching a WPD gold account though means i will get ongoing monthly payments from those sites from the WPD commission.

It would be smarter to sell each site individually with an account on each one to get the returns from many WPD accounts, and maybe that is what will happen if I cannot sell as a cluster.

…. more to come

Remember Me?

Yeah me….the annoying one. The one that promised some kind of regular posting since the beginning of the month but did not quite make it heh.

So the story so far.

Market Samurai ILOVE this tool. You can expect me to be posting more about what it does, shows and why if you are into website building, you should buy it.

Pros

• easy to use
• looks great
• gets information from various sources
• very versatile in what information it provides
• more features still to come

Cons

• Everyone will be using it and making SEO that much more competitive

Ed Dale Mankini as I mentioned on the Ed Dale Mankini Terapad blog I have stopped posting there for the time being due to focussing on the 30DC.  If you are following on with the 30Dc you will know NEVER to try and break into a search phrase that looks like this

The BLP and BLEG will be the decider in this one; but like I said, i am busy for this month

Wordpress Direct is the blogging tool that is being used by the 30DC and to be honest I am still not sure about this one yet as I have not had enough time with it.  One day of use and I can see the great benefits it will add to those who want to set up blog clusters around various niches.

At this stage for me

Pros

• removes the need the manual searching for relevant content
• Can be used to set and forget to keep blogs fresh

Cons

• Site looks god awful (geeze guys surely you could have grabbed a better theme for yourself)
• Blog templates still need to be edited to remove backlink links and crud from them
• Still waiting to be cached (but I am spoiled by Terapad’s 2-8 hour ranking)

Still in this business test, test, test is the mantra and that is what I will be doing.