RatePoint

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.

Posted in Advice, Business, Customer Feedback, News, Tips & Tricks | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Advice, Customer Feedback | No Comments »

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 »

E-Mail Marketing Services Enhanced

Over the past week or so we’ve released some dramatic improvements to our e-mail marketing services that will be sure to impress. Here’s quick breakdown of some of the new additions to RatePoint:

• Updated Building Tools: Our updated editor allows you to edit and preview your e-mail marketing campaign directly in the Business Center. The new editor offers a much higher level of flexibility than the previous version, allowing users to easily change layouts, colors, fonts and upload images all within the Business Center. A live preview also allows you to see your e-mail as your customers should without the need to send multiple test e-mails.
• Image Uploading & Hosting: Our new building tools allow you to easily upload images. Unlike other services that charge an additional monthly fee, images are currently hosted by RatePoint at no additional charge.
  
• E-Mail Templates: As part of the new wizard and editor, we’ve added a number of e-mail templates that can be used to create over 140 different combinations to quickly get you started. You can choose from a variety of layouts and color schemes to create a newsletter or e-mail campaign that meets your needs. New designs and layouts will be added on a regular basis.
• E-Mail Dashboard: A new dashboard rounds out the latest e-mail updates, giving you a snapshot of your e-mail campaigns and their statuses.

If you haven’t visited RatePoint’s e-mail marketing tools recently, or you’re just getting started with RatePoint please take the time to explore these new features and give us your feedback!

Posted in Announcements, E-Mail Marketing | No Comments »

Five Tips to Effectively Create a Newsletter

Delivering a newsletter to your customers can provide a personal touch and keep them updated about new features, functionality and press without the feel of an advertisement.

Here are five tips that can help you create a newsletter that is fresh and appealing to your customers.

1. Try not to highlight more than one or two new features in a newsletter. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to tell your customers everything that is going on, but this can quickly overwhelm your customers. By limiting the number of features in a newsletter, you can focus on what is most important and make sure your readers take that information with them.
2. Consider selecting a general theme for a newsletter. It’s easier to bring various articles together when there’s an overarching theme. Themes such as holidays or seasons are really easy ones to start with. As you become more ambitious and your messages become more targeted, company initiatives, product roll-outs and industry trends are all great themes to create a newsletter around.
3. Don’t over-do it, but be consistent. Send a newsletter whenever you have enough compelling information to warrant one. For most small businesses this is every one or two months. Some larger businesses find themselves sending out campaigns every week. Remember, if you don’t have anything interesting to report, your customers won’t read it. By the same token, you want to stay on the top of their minds.
4. It doesn’t always have to be about you. As a business owner, you’re not just an expert on your business, you’re also supposed to be an expert on your industry. Consider highlighting your customer’s success, or influential trends in your industry that can get people thinking about your products and how they use them. Educating your customers can drive sales and conversion as much as a promotion.
5. Offer Discounts and Promotions Judiciously. This isn’t an advertisement. Resist the urge to offer a coupon, promotion, or discount in a newsletter unless there is truly a good reason or a special occasion. Offering too many discounts can not only devalue the message of your newsletter, it can also send mixed messages about the quality of your products and your business.

Posted in Advice, E-Mail Marketing, Tips & Tricks | No Comments »

RatePoint Live Webinars Every Wednesday

Every Wednesday, starting on July 16th, we’ll be holding RatePoint Live Webinars at 2:00p ET. In each RatePoint Live Webinar we’ll discuss how businesses like your are enhancing their business and improving customer service using RatePoint. In addition, there will be a brief walk-through of the RatePoint Business Center, plus we’ll take a couple of minutes to highlight newly released features and take some Q&A

To sign-up for a RatePoint Live Webinar click here.

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Yelp: Can they have their cake and eat it too?

At RatePoint we work with many businesses who are dealing with the difficulty of managing customer reviews and the impact they’re having on their online reputation.  That’s why our interest was piqued by an article from yesterday’s New York Newsday: Businesses can now ‘Yelp’ at critics.  According to the article, Yelp is trying to make their platform more business-friendly by allowing businesses to e-mail critics.

We’re confused though.

This move doesn’t really mesh with recent comments from Yelp’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman in a New York Times article (May 19th, 2008) where he said: “We [Yelp] put the community first, the consumer second and the business third.”  True to form, according to the Newsday piece, Yelp’s business service doesn’t have an option for posting general messages to allow businesses to defend themselves against overly negative or inaccurate reviews.  In fact, the article states that the only way a business can defend itself on Yelp is by becoming advertisers, which Newsday claims costs at least $150 a month.

The most disturbing part of the article is a quote from an owner of a hair salon in New York, “…it [Yelp] has little or no regard for business owners…Yes you can e-mail reviewers…But most people use fake names and fake e-mail addresses.”  In the Newsday article, Stoppleman claimed that giving the ability to e-mail reviewers would “encourage productive dialogue,” but how is this possible when a reviewer chooses not to respond, is a competitor who is maliciously attacking the business, or is simply not a real person?

We’ve talked to several businesses dealing with their negative reviews on Yelp, submitted by people using fake identities who post outlandish comments, or even worse are competitors trying to bash their business. These fake reviews will remain a problem to businesses on Yelp, especially when studies show that customers continue to trust online reviews and the popularity of them has reached a point where any review, no matter how inaccurate, can really effect the bottom line.

In the end, it seems that Yelp is trying to have the best of both worlds.  However, we all know that Yelp caters to their community first, and sadly, they’re more than willing to take advantage of businesses while stuffing their wallets in the process.

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

E-Mail Marketing Services: Wizards, Scheduling and Importing

A bunch of new enhancements were rolled out to RatePoint’s E-Mail Marketing Services this weekend and are now available to RatePoint members:

• E-Mail Campaign Wizard - To simplify the process for setting up a campaign, we’ve introduced a new wizard based system which will take you step-by-step through  each step of building an e-mail campaign.
• Campaign Scheduling - If you create a newsletter or mailing that is time-sensitive and would be more convenient to send at a particular time or day, RatePoint now provides you the ability to schedule that mailing. Just tell RatePoint the day and time, and your queue will begin sending when it is needed.
• New Import Options - For those of you using your own HTML and templates, we’ve added a couple of additional ways for you to import your HTML. You can now define a URL where you host your newsletter, or upload the HTML file directly. Once you import. RatePoint will grab the appropriate file, set up the tracking and unsubscribes, and away you go.

Thanks to everyone who continue to send comments and suggestions regarding our features. As always if you have feedback, feel free to send it our way!

Posted in Features, News | No Comments »