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Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Five Social Media Customer Service Tips | Business 2 Community
Do you use social media as a way to communicate with customers? Based on our recent customer service survey, 18 percent of respondents use a company?s live chat and 5 percent rely on social networks to resolve a customer service issue or concern. If social networks are not an active part of your customers? experience, you might want to invest the time in building a social media customer service strategy that will ultimately put your customers first.
As more and more customers turn to social media to resolve customer service issues, customer service departments need to ensure they have their tools and resources in order to provide a positive customer experience (CX). As customer relationship management is mostly lead by marketing, sales and customer service teams, it?s especially important for employees in these departments to understand how they can take their client-facing interactions to the next level and enhance their customers? experience through social media.
Five social media tips to ensure your business is leveraging social media to put its customers first are:
- Designing a collaborative social strategy that includes a detailed social media 101 plan complete with customer service do?s and don?ts. This plan should be distributed to all employees and helps maintain a consistent brand message from the top down.
- Defining a list of social leaders within a company and deputizing them to take point over customer service interactions. By empowering this group with the tools created in the social media plan, your social leaders will have the resources to effectively engage with customers across all company social channels.
- Dedicating a team that monitors the company?s social media efforts across the web and mobile platforms to proactively handle customer service needs. Detecting customer service issues early will allow your social leaders to respond quickly and decisively.
- Providing a go-to resource or social media help center accessible on the web or even via a mobile application to answer frequently asked questions (FAQs) and make it easier for customers to communicate with your business. A lack of access to quick answers or essential information can be one of the most frustrating aspects of customer experience. The majority of problems can be easily solved by simply creating an FAQ to answer the most common concerns.
- Using analytics to track and measure the value of customer engagement and identifying how your business can improve the social media CX. Measurement is the most important element to improve customer interactions and analytics can provide insight into troublesome areas and identify touch points that need to be addressed.
By incorporating these tips within any social media customer service strategy, organizations can ensure they develop a customer experience that is positive and consistent throughout their entire lifecycle. Social media is quickly becoming the easiest way for customers to engage with a business and having a social strategy that puts the customers first can help organizations quickly resolve customer issues, provide transparency and build brand loyalty.
What companies do you think have a good social media customer service presence? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/five-social-media-customer-service-tips-0338033
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Tuesday, November 20, 2012
What The Experts Didn't Tell You About List Building! - Marketing Aces
For the past 10 years I?ve earned my living on the Internet and a major portion of my income has always come from the names on my email list.
That?s obviously why everyone uses the expression that ?the money is in the list?. Your list is gold?but for how long?
Here?s what no one tells you?
- Lists can get old.
- Lists can dry up.
- Huge lists don?t always mean big checks.
I hate to stomp on your dreams but here?s the truth; even if you were given a list of 10,000 email addresses (double-opt in, real names with a proven buying history) and even if you did make $1,000s for the first few months that you mailed to that list?
?If you never worked on leveraging that list to keep growing your opt-ins (subscribers) ? it would start yielding less and less returns ever year until you were making just a few dollars per month (if that!) from those names.
It doesn?t matter if you have a great relationship with that list, if it was a pure buyers list or if your name is Frank Kern!
I could ramble on and speculate about the reasons for this phenomenon (subscribers needs changing, familiarity with your offer?etc) but none of that matters. What does matter is that you know that list building will always be a part of your business!
If you don?t have an engine driving your list building?a list building machine built into your business right from the start, then you?re putting yourself at a disadvantage.
Everyone of the successful marketers that I know and that I?ve had dealings with has a system in place that cost effectively captures prospects? attention and efficiently turns those prospects into subscribers.
Surprisingly enough ? these are not usually their ?big launch funnels? where they can routinely gain 60,000 new subscribers overnight ? instead the real core of their business is build around the more modest list building machines that bring them a few dozen subscribers per day ? EVERYDAY! (That?s the key).
You NEED fresh subscribers everyday!
You can?t build a long-term Internet business on ?events?. Focus on systematized work-flows and incremental improvement.
I know money is tight for a lot of people and everyone wants their breakthrough today ? but $10 per month over time will always be more valuable than a 100 cash injection.
Master the fundamentals of direct response marketing and the unglamorous task of incremental improvement in everything you do and you?ll be far better off than landing some huge deal right now and not being able to sustain it?s profitability.
Source: http://marketingaces.com/what-the-experts-didnt-tell-you-about-list-building/
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Psychological Factors Can Influence Kids' Chest Pain - Psych Central
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on November 19, 2012
University of Georgia psychologists found pediatric patients diagnosed with non-cardiac chest pain have higher levels of anxiety and depression than patients diagnosed with benign heart conditions.
Common, non-serious cardiac conditions include heart murmurs ? the noise of normal turbulent blood flow in a structurally normal heart.
?The fact that these psychological symptoms are higher in non-cardiac chest pain patients suggests the psychological symptoms may be playing a role in the presentation of chest pain,? said Jennifer Lee, the study?s lead author.
The results of the study, found in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, show a statistically significant increase in anxiety and depression among patients who are later diagnosed with non-cardiac chest pain when compared to patients diagnosed with innocent heart murmurs.
Lee said it is not clear if the anxiety is a cause of the pain or if pain caused the anxiety in the sample group.
?The higher levels weren?t so high as to cause a clinical diagnosis on their own, but when you contrast the two groups, there were statistically significant differences,? said study co-author Dr. Ronald Blount, a clinical psychologist.
The study included 129 patients ages 8 to 18. Study participants completed surveys prior to diagnosis.
All patients were essentially in the same situation: sitting in a cardiology office awaiting their unknown medical diagnosis.
?We are highlighting that psychology has a part in these symptoms,? Blount said, ?and screening for psychological, as well as medical factors, is one implication we foresee coming from this investigation.?
Naturally, chest pain can indicate serious medical conditions that require a doctor?s evaluation. In adults, pain in the chest is often linked to a cardiac problem. In children, however, less than 2 percent of patients receive a cardiac diagnosis for their pain.
?We know up front that 99 percent of these patients will not have a heart complication at all. The trick is, it is not zero, and I cannot miss the one patient with heart disease because the consequences could be catastrophic,? said Robert Campbell, M.D.,?division director of the department of pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine.
Researchers discovered non-cardiac chest pain patients have a higher level of functional disability ? or the inability to participate in everyday activities like running across a football field or making it through a day without a nap. They also spent less time at school and were less involved in extracurricular activities.
?These kids also report greater levels of physical symptoms with unclear causes, like joint pain, stomach aches, head aches,? Lee said.
?These symptoms are believed to be psychological manifestations of stress. Sometimes your brain doesn?t tell you that you are stressed out, but your body does, so you will experience symptoms like these.?
Pediatric patients with non-cardiac chest pain also reported higher levels of anxiety sensitivity, a fear of experiencing physical symptoms and additionally fearing that those symptoms are related to a catastrophic health issue.
?Psychological functioning is heavily related to pain,? Blount said. ?Pain is a sensory experience, but your attention to one thing or another and your emotions can impact your experience of pain. And how debilitating the pain is for you can be determined by psychological and social factors. That is what we were interested in looking at.?
Previous studies have shown reducing emotional symptoms can lead to better coping ability with pain, Lee said. ?A goal with these patients would be to create a clearer, more comprehensive picture of what is going on and determine a better way to help these kids and adolescents.?
Researchers believe the new findings will help physicians manage the majority of patients who are diagnosed with clean bill of health but unexplained chest pain.
?Most importantly what we?ve learned is that after a physical evaluation of the patient, we take the time to sit down with the family and find out what they are most worried about so we can address their psychological issues,? Campbell said.
?We?ve learned to pay attention and to be confident and reassuring. I need to make it clear to my patients and their parents that I?m not saying you are not having pain, but that the pain is not caused by your heart.?
Source: University of Georgia
Doctor examining a child photo by shutterstock.
APA Reference
Nauert PhD, R. (2012). Psychological Factors Can Influence Kids? Chest Pain. Psych Central. Retrieved on November 19, 2012, from http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/11/19/psychological-factors-can-influence-kids-chest-pain/47901.html
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ScienceDaily: Gene News
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/rss/health_medicine/genes.xml
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Monday, November 19, 2012
NC legislators nearing unemployment debt proposal
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) ? A road map to rid North Carolina of its $2.4 billion debt to the federal government for jobless benefits and to place the state's unemployment insurance system on sturdier financial footing is getting sketched out by legislators and business leaders.
It could be rocky both for employers who pay for the benefits and displaced employees who receive them. It might be the first test of how Gov.-elect Pat McCrory works with fellow Republicans running the Legislature.
Based on interviews, the legislative proposal set to be unveiled early next month would likely keep business paying more to pay down debt and reduce benefits for workers who become jobless in the future. McCrory also is expected to have his own ideas.
"We're going to have to make some tough decisions so that we can maintain the financial integrity of the system," said Sen. Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg, co-chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. "We need to fix a serious problem."
North Carolina is one of 20 states that began borrowing money from the federal government at the height of Great Recession when insurance taxes were outstripped by claims from a flood of unemployment applicants. North Carolina's tab is currently the third-highest in the country, behind only California and New York. The state's unemployment rate remains above 9 percent.
Federal law says the state needs to set aside more than $2 billion by 2019 to borrow interest-free in the future. Businesses already are being forced to pay higher federal and state unemployment insurance taxes to pay down the debt and make interest payments: Another $21 per-employee increase is on the way in January.
Ben Stuck, a vice president at Charlotte-based Marshall Air Systems, which manufactures restaurant equipment, said more taxes mean less for retirement income and profit-sharing, as well as capital improvements that can help the 100-employee business grow.
"If I have less money to reinvest in my business, then that's going to affect the economy in a negative way," Stuck said.
New Republican leaders at the General Assembly vowed to find a solution to the debt nearly two years ago. At least two studies have now been issued on North Carolina's unemployment benefit challenges. Last year legislators overhauled the state agency that manages the program and are looking for more ways to reduce fraud and restrict who gets benefits.
The Legislature returns to debating and passing bills in late January, the same month McCrory takes office.
The debt is "going to be one of the biggest issues that I have to deal with immediately," McCrory told The Associated Press in an interview in September.
Two key negotiators on the legislative proposal told the AP last week they don't plan to recommend the state issue bonds now to pay off the federal debt more quickly and so employers can avoid mandatory higher incremental taxes. Rucho and Rep. Julia Howard, R-Davie, said in separate interviews said the state can't afford more debt, even if employers pay it back.
Studies commissioned by the N.C. Chamber and the state suggested bonds were the way to go if they could be issued at a lower interest rate than the current federal borrowing rate. Even McCrory said in September he thought issuing debt to repay the federal government was a likely course. Gary Salamido, the Chamber's vice president for government relations, said he hoped legislators would consider other refinancing options. Repaying the debt without changes would take several years.
Rucho also said he expected the proposal would make sure "benefits will be aligned with the Southeastern states that we compete with." He didn't provide further details.
The study by the N.C. Chamber, which has been involved in the legislative proposal, recommended capping weekly benefits at $350 for future unemployed workers and reducing the maximum number of benefit weeks to 20. The maximum weekly benefit amount in North Carolina is currently $535. South Carolina, Virginia and Georgia range between $300 and $400. North Carolina's portion of unemployment benefits is capped at 26 weeks.
Salamido said expanding benefits over time have contributed to troubles.
"Our position is that we all got into this together and we all have to get out of it together," Salamido said Friday.
Alexandra Sirota with the North Carolina Budget & Tax Center, which advocates for the poor, disagrees that expanding benefits are to blame. She said reducing benefits would place only more strain upon the unemployed, causing them to rely more on credit and miss paying utility bills.
Many attribute the unemployment debt problem to a series of employer tax cuts in the 1990s. The tax cuts weren't reversed after the last recession a decade ago, and people stayed jobless longer.
"We can't arbitrarily change the benefit amounts without considering what a family needs to make ends meet," Sirota said. The center recommends keeping current benefit levels in place but raising employer taxes over time by using a great percentage of the state's average annual wage to calculate the tax.
Both the chamber and the center agree better re-employment and worker training efforts can get more people back to work. And most agree the state's unemployment insurance system must be fixed before the next recession arrives.
"It took us 20 years to get into this situation," Sirota said. "Hopefully it won't take that long to get out."
Source: http://www.foxcharlotte.com/news/nc-news/179861181.html
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Cottonwood Park Engagement Session ? Prince George BC ...
We met Jessica and Preston for their engagement session on a beautiful fall morning at Cottonwood Island Park in Prince George BC. Jessica was the winner of our draw at the Storybook Wedding Bridal Expo in January. They decided on a fall engagement session to take advantage of all the amazing fall colours.
We are looking forward to the 2013 Storybook Wedding Bridal Expo ? to be held on January 20, 2013 at the Prince George Civic Center. Its such a great place to start building more great relationships with the brides and grooms, as well as the other wedding professionals in town.
And you don?t have to wait until the Bridal Expo to contact us. We are booking weddings for 2013 and have already turned away a few brides as well. If you would like to discuss your own wedding or engagement session you can Click Here to fill out our Contact Form and we will get back to you within 48 hours. And we love to travel, so we would love to hear from you whether you are in the Prince George area, throughout British Columbia, or wherever else.
If you like our work you can follow our blog to receive future posts. And we always appreciate Feedback, so feel free to Like this post or leave a Comment Below. Or you can also Like our ?Northern Pixel Facebook Page or check out our Website.
Thanks for reading, hope to see you at the 2013 Storybook Bridal Expo in Prince George BC!
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Source: http://northernpixel.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/cottonwood-park-engagement-session-prince-george-bc/
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