Blog Entries tagged 'customer'

How Not To Do Reputation Management

Don — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I heard a story from a friend the other day that I've seen played out on the Internet dozens of times. A blogger who writes about restaurants wrote a post that was critical of the restaurant.

The restaurant owner's lawyer sent a cease and desist letter, claiming libel. In this case the blogger just folded and took down the post, but put up a copy of the lawyer letter with [...]

More Great Business Advice Having Nothing to do With SEO

admin — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Today's article at Bruce Clay was about avoiding a PR nightmare. He rightly suggests that the easiest way is to be smart and not get into one in the first place, which is easy advice, but then he knocks one out of the park by giving a 1-2 punch to the most human of impulses, retaliation:

Refrain from personal attacks. At all costs. There are no exceptions.Refrain from responding to [...]

SEO Puts $31,752 Additional Profit in Man's Pocket

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

At least. Which is a pretty good piece of pocket money. I suspect even Warren Buffet would slow down to pick that up.

I attribute this to SEO because even thought it was a change in business process coupled with good SEO that made it happen it could not have happened without SEO.

Fair warning to people looking for "advanced" techniques - they ain't here. [...]

Redbox Gets Customer Service Right

admin — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I've given Cari.net a hard time about giving almost good customer service and TracFone for looking like they just don't care about their image. So here is an example of an excellent proactive response to a potentially serious problem. We use Redbox (automated DVD vending jukebox) a lot for kid and probably-do-not-want-to-own (ex: I am Legend) films. It's not perfect, and their online [...]

Entrecard and Almost VC Money

admin — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I was over on Mixed Martial Arts and saw the best google ad in a long time:

It'd take a long time to make a million bucks at $20K/month!

But, for some reason, it seemed very apropos given that the topic was Entrecard taking $112K on a pre-money valuation of $998K. It wasn't the odd numbers that caught my attention because that sort of thi [...]

More Almost Good Cari.Net Customer Service

admin — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Sigh. Once again they almost avoid being the rotten apple of my eye. My not so snarky comments in red.

This evening Cari.net will conduct an emergency maintenance window to provide additional protection and redundancy for the C2 Data Center. [Planned emergency maintence window. Nice!] Every attempt is made to provide advance notice of these windows; however, in the inter [...]

TracFone Almost Gets It Right

admin — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

We use a TracFone for our "on call" phone. We used to just rotate phone numbers but then you have to keep track of everyone's number and every once in a while someone will blow through their plan because of a support call and that is both annoying and expensive.

TracFone Is A Great Deal

Someone did some research and found that for under $100 we could get a simp [...]

Speaking Of Needing A Utility To See if Your Site is Down

admin — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:00:00 +0100

Well, when I wrote about this handy utility to see if your site was really down, little did I know that I'd really need to know it right away:

Hmmm, could it be the hosting company:

Well, yes it is. I am soooo disappointed in cari.net right now - year [...]

Funny Walk Customer Service

admin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:00:00 +0100

Apropos of my earlier post on customer service, we just *enjoyed* a brief outage from our generally excellent hosting company, cari.net. Ok, these things happen, it was for an hour or so, and life moves on. And then they send us the post-incident report:

Broadcast storm of undetermined origin caused link flapping which in turn caused HSRP and spanning tree fa [...]

Offshoring Customer Service

admin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:00:00 +0100

I've been travelling with my family up in French speaking Canada so, of course, customer service and communication are in the forefront of my mind. For those of you who look North and see a mirror, let me assure you that in the central right hand part of Canada you'll get a chance to practice your French. Your 18th century French, but still. So, to summarize, [...]

SEOs Tend to Click more Ads Than Any Other Group

admin — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Don’t they? Good golly, are you telling me you don’t click ads? I click ALL sorts of ads on SEO sites. So maybe I should just say: SEO type folks click ads on SEO sites.

Honestly, that is what I thought this article about 6% of Users Click 50% of Ads was all about. Actually, it turn out that fifty rednecks in TN clicked 2.45M ads last month.

Do YOU Click Ads?

Do you? I was not kidding that I do. When I hit an SEO site (calm down, John Chow!) t [...]

SEO Customer Service

admin — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0100

I recently went on a bit of an SEO testing and shopping spree - you've probably read some of the reviews here. And one of the comments I kept making was that nobody would return my emails.

Customer Service Matters

Look, I've been hanging onto that hilarious customer service certificate for a year, knowing that I would use it someday. Because, while [...]