RatePoint

MassNetComms names RatePoint Enterprise Video, Search and Social Media Sector Product of the Year

We were thrilled to find out last week that the Massachusetts Network Communications Council named RatePoint Enterprise as its category winner for video, search and social media sector product of the year. (MassHighTech has the full list of winners.)

The Product of the Year winner is determined by a vote of the MassNetComms membership and recognizes an innovative product, released in 2008.  Winners were announced at the awards ceremony on April 14 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge.

Reputation management is really starting to generate a lot of interest from businesses and the media. However, RatePoint has been concentrating on developing this category for several years because we know that the reputation economy is here. For businesses, this means that you not only need to know what’s being said about you online, you also need the tools to act when necessary and promote positive feedback when the opportunity arises.

We’re thrilled… and energized. A lot goes into developing a great product - the hard work of our employees and the relationships we hold with our board, investors and our customers! Keep watching for more great things to come from RatePoint.

And if you’re interested, here’s a bit about our award-winning enterprise product (oh, and of course we have solutions for you, the small business - too.) RatePoint Enterprise includes the online reputation management and customer feedback features already well known in RatePoint’s small- and medium-sized businesses solution, and expands on existing features to broaden support for companies that need scalable dispute resolution, advanced user management and additional reporting features. RatePoint Enterprise’s platform scales to handle massive customer inquiry and disputes while enabling customer service departments to respond effectively and efficiently. The multi-user environment provides pre-defined roles and role-based access to varying levels of data and customer records.

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Best and Worst SMB Customer Service

The Wall Street Journal recently published a list of the “Small Businesses with the Best (and Worst) Customer Service” as reported by consumer review site Angie’s List. Piano tuners and music instructors had the best ratings while home warranty companies and home builders ranked the worst.

Lists like these prove these types of discussions are happening. Small businesses have the option not to participate and let it spiral out of their control - or take a more proactive approach to their online reputation.
This Sunday, our co-founder and CEO, Neal Creighton, will be featured on KKOB in Albuquerque talking about how small businesses can proactively approach customer feedback and their online reputation.

Do you have a story of how an online review negatively impacted your brand?

I encourage you to share it with me at ygaudette@ratepoint.com

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RatePoint’s Small Business Survival Kit

In the current economic environment, a solid business reputation is critical to ensure repeat business and customer loyalty. Customers want to know businesses care about their experience.

RatePoint’s co-founder and CEO, Neal Creighton, was recently quoted by bMighty offering tips for small businesses to manage their online reputation to increase customer retention and create attention from potential customers.
Here are the tips from Neal:

1.    Move From Reactive To Proactive — It’s impossible to track everything that’s being said about your business or products online. Even small businesses without a Web presence — the local pizza shop or hardware store — find themselves being talked about on review sites. Until now, the strategy has been to chase after the latest negative review to either put out the fire or pursue the most recent positive review to encourage additional dialogue. Small businesses should change their mentality from being reactive to proactive when it comes to customer reviews. This means proactively soliciting feedback from your customers at every opportunity and in a timely manner while the experience is still fresh. The majority of feedback that is proactively solicited is positive.

2.    Don’t Be Afraid Of Negative Feedback — To know what customers are thinking, businesses have to ask. Many small businesses fear negative feedback, but failing to recognize and fix negative customer experiences can harm your business, its reputation, and its future sales. A negative experience is an opportunity to display superb customer service and personify a brand as being in-touch with its customer base. Customers want to know businesses care about their experience. By proactively asking for feedback and proactively responding, a business can significantly enhance its brand.

3.    Make It Easy To Collect (And Ultimately Promote) Feedback — A suggestion box or a standalone survey doesn’t create communication between a customer and a retailer, nor does it fix a problem that may have just happened. Traditional brick and mortar businesses can also leverage new online tools to collect and promote customer feedback and reviews. Customer feedback request tools can be used not only on Web sites, but also on receipts, invoices, e-mails, and at point of purchase.

Read more about how your business can stay ahead of the competition.

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Turning a negative into a positive

There are plenty of clichés about how negativity impacts everything around it. This concept is especially true in small business, where reputation is vital.

A survey conducted by The National Association of Retail Marketing Services revealed the impact of a negative experience on a brand - for every one customer that complains, businesses will lose 10 customers. Also, 13 percent of those surveyed indicated they tell more than 20 people about their negative experiences.

We’ve all seen examples of how the Internet makes it much easier to tell others quickly what we think. It’s up to the business to be proactive in seeking customer feedback and responding to negative comments. RatePoint customer, BuyMMOAccounts.com, has proactively been able to address information online about its reputation by pointing to its collection of customer reviews on RatePoint.

As we wrote earlier this month, the lawsuits surrounding reviews left on Yelp have highlighted the importance of managing reputation online before it turns into a larger issue. It’s great to see businesses becoming proactive about reputation to minimize the impact on the brand.

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Resolving customer review disputes before they turn into lawsuits

Small businesses have long been on the receiving end of negative reviews on third-party site and generally are left with little to no recourse. Recently, a chiropractor sued a patient over a review on Yelp, and the case was just settled out of court. Those that sue to clear a business name are often labeled as bad businesses that are trying to squash any feedback.

So what’s a small-business owner to do? Instead of taking a backseat to building customer trust, business owners have the opportunity to strengthen customer relationships with proactive reviews.

When small- and medium-sized businesses proactively request feedback and reviews from consumers, it also creates an opportunity to mediate and resolve any potential disputes before those consumers take their complaints to another Web site. For example, if a business requests feedback after a purchase and the customer reports a shipping issue, the business can take steps to resolve the problem, which creates a satisfied customer and dispels the need for negative feedback elsewhere.

In an economy where reputation is essential, small businesses have the opportunity to harness the power of reviews and resolve any issues before consumers take their feedback elsewhere – and before a war of words turns into a court battle.

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Building trust for small-business reputation

I’ve been seeing an increasing amount of articles and blog posts about the negative side of business reputation, rehashing what small business should do if they have negative reviews on Yelp, Angie’s List or the blog of an angry customer.

Online reputation is important, and companies of any size should be looking for what their customers are saying about them – and what potential customers are seeing.

However, rather than concentrating on earning customer trust after the fact, businesses have an opportunity to become proactive and seek out reviews from their customers, build a positive reputation and turn positive feedback into measurable marketing and sales tools.

Customer feedback is always important to the bottom line, especially when marketing budgets are tight.

We’ll be talking about this regularly here on the RatePoint blog and highlighting some of our customer success stories. It’s time that someone represents reputation from the business point of view. Small businesses need to take control of their online reputations.

Drop us a line or ask us a question.

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RatePoint Services Now Available in Spanish, French and German

With our most recent updates to RatePoint, we’re pleased to announce that RatePoint is now available in Spanish, French and German languages.

To switch languages you can click on the appropriate flag on our home page or in our Business Center. If your browser has one of these languages set as preferred, then RatePoint automatically detects this and will display your preferred language.

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Admit it. You’re wrong. Why admitting mistakes can help your business.

Improving customer service takes effort from all employees and departments within an organization. Many businesses want to see customer satisfaction increase, but forget a critical piece of the puzzle in improving their business:

Admitting that you’re wrong is not a bad thing. In fact, it can be a very good thing.

As you can imagine, businesses and employees don’t like to admit mistakes for many reasons. Employees may fear losing their jobs, or looking incompetent in front of both the customer and their boss.  Businesses don’t want to give back money that’s already been taken in, they fear admitting a mistake will lose them a customer.

So why is admitting a mistake so important?

The goal of a business that is trying to improve should be analyzing problems, and understanding why they occurred. Admitting a mistake is a crucial part of kicking off this process. It puts it out in the open for everyone to see. As a company, the goal should be to reduce the number of mistakes made. Hiding or ignoring mistakes can lull a business into believing they’re much better than they really are.

Admitting a mistake disarms the customer, and turns a combative situation into one where they believe (and rightfully so) that your goal is to help them. The tone of the conversation usually changes, and the exchange can even become friendly. It gives you the opportunity to turn the problem into a learning experience full of valuable information that can prevent future issues, and it gives you a shot at turning an unhappy customer into a satisfied one.

By the way, we see people all the time try to tell a customer that they’re wrong. Unsurprisingly this is a recipe for disaster, especially when the customer is absolutely right. Even if the customer is wrong, there is likely another variable that can be discovered. Perhaps the pricing is misleading, or the policies are too complicated. Perhaps a competitor filled your customer’s head with misinformation. Don’t dismiss your customer’s instincts, they’re upset for a reason.

Take any opportunity to communicate with your customers, and turn it into something valuable. Regardless of who is right and who is wrong, even apologizing to the consumer about the problem (even if it isn’t your fault), can begin to diffuse a difficult situation and turn it into a learning experience.

Lastly, and this is for all of your business owners and managers out there. Coming down on your employees whenever there is the slightest customer issue, or having a zero-tolerance policy regarding mistakes IS a mistake. Attitudes like this not only destroy morale, it squelches open communication within your organization. It prevents you from what needs to be done to improve your business, ultimately keeps your business maintaining status quo, and provides every opportunity for your competition to pass you up.

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Are you a Customer Feedback Professional?

If you’re one of the members of your organization who is focused on the customer feedback efforts of your organization (and if you’re a RatePoint member, it’s probably you!) we invite you to join the Customer Feedback Professionals group on LinkedIn.

This group is a place where you can connect with professionals from other organizations who are tasked with the collecting, managing and promoting of customer feedback in an effort to improve their business.

For those of you unfamiliar with LinkedIn, LinkedIn is a popular social networking tool for business professionals. Using LinkedIn you can connect with other professionals and expand your network, seek and provide advice to your networks, recruit new employees and discover new companies.

LinkedIn has recently added functionality for businesses that allow you to create and update company pages. If you haven’t created an account on LinkedIn, and added your business information, you may be missing out on an opportunity to gain more visibility for your business and to connect with potential clients.

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Survey Tools: Tips for Designing a Great Online Survey

If done correctly, using RatePoint’s survey tools to create online surveys can be a valuable customer feedback asset.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad surveys out there.  The good news is that a lot of the mistakes can be avoided by following a few simple guidelines.

Before you get started:

Don’t jump in feet first and don’t copy any existing snail mail surveys or telephone surveys. The online medium is unique.  You want to ask yourself three questions about your online survey:

-    What is the purpose of your survey?
-    What kind of information do you need to make your decisions?
-    Which of your customers can give you that information?

Designing the Survey:
Set expectations at the beginning of your survey.  Let people know how long it will take, what you’re looking for, and why you chose them (and if appropriate, what they will get out of it!).  Start off with very simple yes/no questions and build to the harder questions later in the survey.  You don’t want your recipients to abandon the survey by putting a time consuming ranking questions right at the beginning!

A few other tips:
-    Avoid industry jargon (keep it simple!)
-    Be interesting and engaging, but limit the number of questions (keep it short!)
-    Ask one question at a time and avoid bias for particular answers (keep it direct!)

There are two types of questions that many people over-utilize: “open ended” and “ranking and rating” questions.  Open-ended questions take a lot of time, so you want to use them wisely and you also want to always make them optional.  Ranking and rating questions are sometimes good types of questions to ask, but don’t go overboard in the number of choices you make people rank or rate.  Keep it simple by making people choose the “top three” or “bottom three” of a carefully chosen list (general rule of thumb is a list of 10 or less).

Also, on multiple choice questions, always provide an “other” or a “don’t know” option so you don’t force people to pick an answer they don’t understand.

Getting Responses:
We get asked a lot about providing incentives.  Think carefully about your audience and the length of your survey, and decide if you even need an incentive.  If you decide you need one, remember the bigger the incentive, the greater chance you are going to get bad results.  Try to find a middle ground when choosing your incentive and don’t go overboard!

Another helpful strategy is to try splitting your survey recipients into different groups and testing out different introductory emails and/or incentives.  See what works with your customers!

Remember, Keep it Short! Keep it Simple! Keep it Direct!  Follow these rules and you’ll be sending out quality surveys in no time.

Posted in Advice, Customer Feedback, Features, Survey Tools, Tips & Tricks | 1 Comment »