Establish Customer Service Parameters

Being a business owner for a few years, I’ve found that customers are becoming significantly less satisfied with generic solutions. We can no longer direct customers to the FAQ page they neglected to read, or spout a “tough luck” response without pushback. Customers will often request that we break our longstanding rules to accommodate their mistakes. We try to side with our fans 99% of the time, but not every situation is workable. In our business, because customers make transactions with each other, righting one side of the situation often means wronging the other. So when dealing with the type of customer who doesn’t agree with our company rules and requires more than meeting them halfway, it’s important to maintain integrity and establish customer service parameters for the long run.

If we’ve done something wrong on our end, we provide a full refund and a promo code for future use. When customers are at all unhappy with their experience, we’re willing to forfeit our 10% commission on the transaction. If at the venue, customers run into problems, we work up until the event time to right the situation. These few, yet strict parameters have gotten us through hundreds of seemingly unworkable situations. In most cases, our team can lean on these guidelines to provide consistent and attentive service.

Nonetheless, customers expect more tailored approaches to their problems, believing businesses can afford to make exceptions without realizing how many customers are desirous of the same “special treatment.” When customers feel they are being cared for, they advocate for businesses. But if they aren’t, they use the power of social media at their disposal.

Create a Checks and Balances System for Social Media 

Social media is both a blessing and a curse. For as much positive publicity your company elicits, the customer is in the real driver’s seat when it comes to public brand perception. When someone directs a comment to us on public social media platforms, we handle it like we do emails. Responding to customer concerns via social media has been an effective way to show how fast and attentive our customer support is. Since social media is an open channel for the whole world to see, we respond to all of the customer comments we receive.

Despite our efforts to amend all situations peacefully and tactfully, we’ve had customers threaten to blast us on Twitter, write scathing Google reviews, or simply “tell everyone they know” to steer clear of our business. Because we’re still paving a reputation in this industry, we don’t take these threats lightly. When customers try to wield this power, it’s in your best interest to maintain a level head and hope they won’t cross the line. Our customer service agents first tackle situations individually, but if they feel exhausted by a customer, will pass them onto another agent for further guidance and perspective, creating a checks-and-balances type of system. Support for each other helps us achieve an end, and provides customers the opportunity to take a breather between one agent and the next. With power spread out amongst a team, customers can be assured they’re being handled with rationale and care.

Keep Customers in Their Comfort Zones

Most customers prefer one method of communication. If a customer contacts us on Twitter, they likely want communication contained to Twitter. If they engage in email correspondence, they may not warm up to the idea of a phone call. We’ve had customers completely shut down during phone calls because they didn’t expect to communicate with us verbally. If a customer service agent can’t reach a virtual understanding and wishes to switch methods of communication, they should first seek the customer’s permission. Most customers reach out in ways they are comfortable with; they should never feel caught off guard. After watching our customer service agents further complicate situations by surprising customers, it seems keeping customers in their comfort zones is the best thing to do, even if they’re in the wrong.

With an educated customer support team, we can more carefully walk the fine line between serving our customers’ needs and being trampled by those who try to take advantage of us. We strive to side with the fans who have given our small company a chance and believe in what we do. Above all, I believe companies have to treat customers as human beings. But at the same time, if your employees are being treated as extensions of the company rather than people, should you give a courtesy might not be returned?

Ninety-nine percent of the time, yes. But as a boss, you have the responsibility of making sure your employees are being spoken for and feel supported by the company they work so hard to represent. So when a customer in the wrong comes our way and crosses the line despite all efforts to defuse the situation, I feel it’s better to take care of our customer service agents who wrestle that fine line every day. Because when it comes down to it, human decency isn’t something you are entitled to. It’s something you give in order to deserve.

Three months earlier, we had built a five-touchpoint system to engage current clients and drive referrals. This consisted of various lunches, gifts, and casual phone calls or sharing content. I’ve seen plans like this double existing client revenues in the past. While this salesman had experienced some great wins using a few of the tactics, not everyone had responded with a referral. While there was never an expectation of a 100 percent response rate, he was losing interest because he only had a few wins so far. The program wasn’t being executed to its full potential.

An outsider could easily look at this situation and say, “Clearly, if he’d just stick to his plan, he’d hit his numbers,” and in large part they would be right. But how many of us have not stuck to our plan, not completed our tasks, and then not been happy with the results? Willpower is about sticking to the process even when your mind tells you to quit. Sticking to a process is hard, but so is being great. Successful people execute day in and day out. They perform at a higher level because their willpower is stronger than others.

At our company, we build a marketing plan each year that includes the amount of content we are going to write, events we are going to host, influencers we are going to meet, customer touchpoints we will execute, and all other sorts of marketing initiatives. This year was the first year we hit virtually 95 percent of the activities we planned out, and it’s the first year our cash flow grew by 40 percent. 

Sales and marketing isn’t a “put one out, get one back” game. Rather, it’s about performing needed actions consistently according to a system that generates predictable results over a long period of time. It takes willpower to stick to these actions every day. I’ve found that the secret to developing willpower is to build systems that remove mental blocks. This focus on execution allows me to get out of my own head and just do the tasks. Here are a few of the habits I’ve built that strengthen my willpower and generate the results I’m chasing:

1. Find a group of like-minded people pursuing similar goals to meet with on a regular basis. This could be a mastermind group you set up with people who sell to the same audience you do, a networking group of an organization you belong to, a nonprofit organization, or a leads sharing group. All that matters is that the people in the room have similar goals and meet on a recurring basis, no more than two-to-four weeks apart. The more often you meet, the faster you’ll get results. The regularity of meeting will produce more opportunities and make it easier to stick to a consistent marketing plan, as you’ll be put in front of people who can both introduce you to those you want to meet, and hold you accountable to doing what you say you’re going to do.
2. Block out certain times for reading and generating content. I’ve always struggled to read just a few business books and write a couple articles a year. This year, I began blocking time off in the morning for reading, and time on the weekend for writing. To date, I’m averaging about two-to-three books/month and two-to-four articles/month. This has helped me hit goals in ways I didn’t even think were possible before. If, like me, you are new to writing, set up Google Alerts for key terms in your industry. Read the articles that Google sends you, write an opinion piece about that article, and cite it in your writing. I’ve found it’s often much easier to respond to something that was already written than to just conceive something out of thin air.
3. Set weekly goals for people met, leads generated, and proposals given. It’s amazing, but we see what we look for. The more we look for opportunity, like networking groups that cater to our target market, the more we find it. It’s hard to see an opportunity without meeting with people. And without looking for an angle on how you can serve them, it’s difficult to get motivated to push a proposal. Having written goals around the actions you are going to take drastically improves your ability to achieve them, because you are programming your mind to look for those opportunities. If you don’t write your goals down and don’t look at them regularly, you’ll simply forget about them and move forward without actually making progress.

Willpower is a muscle, and it has to be strengthened. Like working out, sporadic repetitions don’t build muscle. What builds muscle is creating a plan and executing on it. 

One way to offer more is to bundle your offerings. But what if bundling doesn’t always make sense for everyone in your audience? What if they don’t want more for less? What if they want less — and are willing to pay a small premium for the convenience of less?

Long gone are the days of being forced to purchase a whole music album: With iTunes, you’re free to build your music collection one song at a time. Media companies let you forego subscriptions in lieu of per-article pricing. And massive open online courses make it possible for students to take single lessons without the commitment of a degree program.

I’ve been observing these industry changes throughout the past decade, both as an employee in product management for a Fortune 500 company, and as a strategic consultant helping organizations rethink their products. Today, as the owner of a business strategy company focused on product management, I advise my clients to consider bundling (and unbundling) strategies.

Bundling can be a valuable part of product strategy, but it can limit your choices. By unbundling your products, you can give your audience what they want, while creating new revenue streams. Follow these five steps below to discover product unbundling opportunities for your business: 

1. Inventory Your Offerings

Before you can break your offerings into bite-sized pieces, you need to have a firm grasp on your inventory. You might already have a tidy list of all of your offerings, or you can pull one from your e-commerce site. If things are a bit more murky, you might need to sit down with your team and talk through everything you own and sell. During this step, don’t worry about decoupling: Just focus on documenting what you have.

2. Consider Your Audience

Next, carefully consider your audience’s needs. Why do they buy from you? What pain points are you helping them solve? If you haven’t already done the research to confidently know the answers to these questions, conduct a customer survey that helps you better understand your audience and their needs.

When I worked with a micropayment processor, we wanted to better understand consumer habits related to charitable donations — specifically micro-donations. After conducting market research and reviewing surveys on the topic, we found that men were more likely than women to be impulsive with micro-donations. By honing in on our target audience’s behaviors and motivations, we could create an unbundling strategy directed at the microprocessor’s target clients, non-profits, by incorporating micro-donations into non-profit business models with larger followings of men.  

3. Evaluate Your Products for Individual Components

Exploring avenues for new revenue requires an examination of each of your products. How can you make a decoupled product available in a way that’s profitable for your business (and useful for your audience)? If you sell a physical good or service, think about how to break your product into smaller pieces. For example, a flatware manufacturer might be accustomed to selling sets of forks, knives and spoons — but some consumers might be looking to replace a single spoon. 

While working with an online education company, our primary product was degree programs, but we had to think smaller — even smaller than individual courses. We asked ourselves: How can we break down a course to the smallest level? We started looking at learning objectives and divvied up the course materials in a way that aligned with each individual learning objective. For a digital marketing course, we could break it down to “identify the top social media platforms,” “create a social media marketing plan,” and “create a social media calendar.” 

Not only were we able to bundle and unbundle the course materials, but we could actually look at different types of learners, such as auditory versus visual. By breaking the course offerings down to such a finite level, we created a customized educational experience equipped with new products to sell. 

4. Determine Pricing

Once you have determined individual components to sell, strategize the price points that make the most sense based on your current bundled pricing and your audience’s perceived value.

Make sure that the bundled offering still provides a price break, but doesn’t underestimate the value of the decoupled products. If the most valuable piece of content in your e-book is a template, for example, don’t be afraid to make that template worth half the cost of the entire ebook.

To start the pricing process, I typically evaluate the current pricing model, the production time required, and the product’s perceived value. I also advise A/B testing to see how the market responds, and then adjust pricing accordingly.

5. Analyze and Experiment

After you announce your new products and pricing, it’s important to continuously monitor your market. What are they buying? What bundles remain big sellers? Which ones are no longer selling?

As you introduce new offerings to your audience, continue to experiment with bundled versus unbundled products. The market and your audience’s needs are always changing. Your ability to provide what the market demands relies on the effectiveness of your ongoing research and product strategy. Remaining static is not an option.

When I launched a community for “parentpreneurs,” I saw a need for family-friendly business events and conferences. After holding one in July, I have continued to be aware of the market. If someone launches a similar event, I can tweak my offering to remain competitive.

Not ready to unbundle your current offerings? You can still plan for future products. When you’re creating a new offering, be sure to design a product infrastructure that will ultimately allow you to sell products in a variety of ways later. By unbundling your product offerings, you have an opportunity to better serve your audience and create a viable stream of revenue for your business. It doesn’t get much better than that.

One of the things I frequently tell clients is that they don’t have to think of SMS as a replacement for their other marketing activities. In fact, some of the best results I’ve seen are from businesses that incorporate SMS into their overall marketing strategy. Text marketing can complement other strategies such as SEO, social media and email marketing.

How to Integrate SMS Into Your Marketing Campaigns

Nowadays, smartphones and mobile devices have become an increasingly popular way to access the internet. People use them not only for phone calls, but also to access social media sites, check email and, of course, to send and receive text messages.

Because phones are now such a ubiquitous part of modern culture, they can be integrated with your other marketing efforts. SMS marketing offers many apps and services that make it easy to connect text marketing with other platforms, such as:

• Capture emails: You can use an app that lets you capture email addresses via text. This gives you another way to build your email list and power your email marketing campaigns.
• Social media: You can use SMS to get more social media followers by running contests and sweepstakes that are promoted by both social media and SMS. For example, people can enter text-to-win contests by texting a short code. Place the short code on your Facebook or Twitter, making it easy for your followers to enter the contest. You can also do it the other way around — send your SMS contacts texts about a contest you’re running on your Facebook page.
• App downloads and website traffic: Use text marketing to direct people to download your app or visit your website. By delivering a direct link to download on the App Store, people can immediately download it instead of having to search for it.
• Live events and offline marketing: SMS is also a powerful way to boost the effectiveness of your offline marketing campaigns, such as sales and special events held at a retail store. The traditional practices of putting up billboards or hanging up flyers can be enhanced and modernized by using SMS or QR codes that let people enter your contest or join your list instantly.

Enter the New Wave of SMS Marketing

As I mentioned, SMS marketing has changed quite a bit in recent years. When I first entered the field, SMS was a new concept and involved lots of experimentation. Early text marketing suffered some of the same flaws as early email marketing, such as sending messages without permission, or creating lists that were not well targeted.

We are now entering what I see as the second wave of SMS marketing. Here are some of the characteristics of this new and more powerful wave.

• Building targeted and segmented lists: The key to successful SMS marketing, which holds true for all types of marketing, is to send messages to the right audience.
• Developing good timing: You want to send messages consistently, but not so frequently that it becomes annoying. You also want to identify the best times of day and days of the week to send messages. This is another area where testing and analytics helps you become more effective.
• Integrating SMS with your other marketing efforts: As discussed, you should look for ways to make text messaging fit in seamlessly with your overall marketing strategy.
• Creating compelling offers: One of the benefits of SMS marketing is that there are many ways to provide value with your messages. Contests, promo codes and giveaways encourage people to respond to your texts and check out your offers.

While SMS marketing is no longer new, you still have plenty of time to benefit from this industry’s new wave. There are now more ways than ever to make text marketing a powerful component of your marketing mix.