Is it worth $20 a month to you to make it ridiculously easy for you to empower your clients to schedule appointments with you? And for you to engage with them online in ways that make them happier and make you more money?
Those were rhetorical questions that nonetheless have two answers. The first is "of course it is." The second is "heck, yes, which is why you should already be using Schedulicity."
Schedulicity is a one-stop online shop that enables you to enable anyone to book an appointment with you, whatever business you're in. And the folks at Schedulicity have taken basic calendar management and scheduling and added all kinds of nifty social networking features, so that you can use the service to build and enhance all of your client relationships – even from a tablet or a smartphone.
You can let users reach and schedule appointment with you via Schedulicity.com, your own Web site, your Facebook page and/or via Twitter. And Schedulicity lets each client see and manage a "personal account" page showing past and upcoming appointments and reminders. And it's all free for your clients.
You, meanwhile, can use Schedulicity to manage your schedule, handle cancellations and rescheduling and even promote upcoming classes, workshops or special deals. Schedulicity even includes features that help you to manage "daily deals" with companies such as Groupon and Living Social. You can, for example, control the number of discounted appointments you want on any particular day.
If you can use an online calendar and/or Facebook and/or Twitter, you can sign up for and start using Schedulicity, probably in about the time it's taken you to read this far. (If your business is more than you, Schedulicity will cost you $39 per month for you and as many as 19 colleagues.) And you will then have access to all of the information and most of the tools you're likely to need to manage your schedules AND your client relationships. Keep track of their preferences (and even their birthdays). Tell them about upcoming special deals. Do pretty sophisticated e-mail marketing with easy-to-use templates. And more.
Schedulicity gives your business the power to deliver "better-than-most-big-companies" scheduling and client care, even if your business is only you. And the company behind it has scheduled more than five million appointments, so they've gotten pretty good at making and keeping the service robust, reliable and simple.
If you deal with clients who need to schedule appointments with you, for anything from accounting services to yoga classes, throw away the sticky notes and that overflowing bound calendar, and sign up for Schedulicity. (Of course they offer a free, no-credit-card-required trial.) It's a win for you and for your clients.
Showing posts with label customer care. Show all posts
Showing posts with label customer care. Show all posts
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
Yellowbook + Microsoft = A New Marketing Force for Small Businesses
Google has advertising and search-empowered marketing offerings for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs).
So does Microsoft.
Google has online search tools that are popular among users and buyers, and among at least some advertisers. So does Microsoft – more so now that it has partnered with Yahoo! in select arenas.
Google has online applications growing in popularity among SMBs and larger enterprises.
So does Microsoft.
But now, Microsoft has something Google doesn't have, at least not in the same ways. What? Here's a direct quote from the relevant news release, issued June 14 by Microsoft and its new partner, Yell Group, owners of Yellowbook among other related resources.
“Thomas Hansen, vice president of SMB Worldwide at Microsoft, said, 'Yell Group has one of the largest dedicated sales forces partnering with small and medium sized businesses and provides customers with valuable, locally focused internet directories that see over 50 million unique visitors per month. We are very excited about our plans to form a strategic alliance with Yell, as it offers us a way to better reach and serve small and medium sized businesses across the globe.'”
Here's another quote from the same release.
“Yell currently provides print and digital marketing services to over 1.3 million customers across the United States, United Kingdom, Spain and Latin America. Capitalizing on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance and the growing consumer audience of Bing and Yahoo! Search, Microsoft and Yell will join forces to offer compelling search, mobile and local advertising solutions to small and medium businesses and to make the most of emerging business models delivered through the cloud. Under the plans, Yell will also offer the full suite of Microsoft’s SMB productivity and business software and cloud services, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and emerging SMB-focused communications solutions. In addition, Microsoft will assist Yell to accelerate its new cloud-based services, which will provide Yell’s customers with access to these new digital offerings.”
Yell already offers a number of interesting, sometimes innovative marketing and advertising services through Yellowbook in North America and other divisions across the globe. Now, Yell Group reps will have a new, different and growing portfolio of advertising, marketing and business support services to offer.
The day after announcing the Microsoft alliance, the company announced a strategic partnership with Bazaarvoice, provider of cloud-based solutions designed to enable businesses to manage and monetize online customer conversations and communities. The day after the Bazaarvoice announcement, Yell announced a completely new corporate strategy. The company is now focused on evolving from a provider of advertising services to the outsourced marketing department for millions of SMBs.
This means SMB decision makers may soon be able to buy services for contact, lead and customer management (CRM), email marketing, online data backup, Web conferencing and other unified communications (UC) options and more from a single Yellowbook rep. Which could give those decision makers some interesting, valuable options not easily available elsewhere.
Now, Google, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and others offer all kinds of platforms, add-ons and plug-ins intended to enable all kinds of business service combinations. But at most SMBs, one of the first questions to which they want answers is about interoperability with...Microsoft Office. So why not start with offerings that come from the source, so to speak? Especially for those SMB decision makers already doing business with Yellowbook or some other Yell Group entity? After all, "the cloud" is still basically a wild and poorly mapped environment, making the value of a known, proven guide pretty darned high to those users.
Speaking of which...
If your company already works with Yellowbook, you and your rep should be having a heart-to-heart talk very soon now. You should ask about everything from what services will be available and when to how and whether you can move and share spend dollars across multiple online and offline opportunities. You might want to focus a few questions on how Yellowbook + Microsoft might help you to offer more and better local and daily deals.
If your company does not do business with Yellowbook but does work with one or more of its competitors, you might ask your rep what their company plans to do in response to Yell Group's moves. Meanwhile, keep a close eye on what Yell and Microsoft do, and on what Google and others do in response.
So does Microsoft.
Google has online search tools that are popular among users and buyers, and among at least some advertisers. So does Microsoft – more so now that it has partnered with Yahoo! in select arenas.
Google has online applications growing in popularity among SMBs and larger enterprises.
So does Microsoft.
But now, Microsoft has something Google doesn't have, at least not in the same ways. What? Here's a direct quote from the relevant news release, issued June 14 by Microsoft and its new partner, Yell Group, owners of Yellowbook among other related resources.
“Thomas Hansen, vice president of SMB Worldwide at Microsoft, said, 'Yell Group has one of the largest dedicated sales forces partnering with small and medium sized businesses and provides customers with valuable, locally focused internet directories that see over 50 million unique visitors per month. We are very excited about our plans to form a strategic alliance with Yell, as it offers us a way to better reach and serve small and medium sized businesses across the globe.'”
Here's another quote from the same release.
“Yell currently provides print and digital marketing services to over 1.3 million customers across the United States, United Kingdom, Spain and Latin America. Capitalizing on the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance and the growing consumer audience of Bing and Yahoo! Search, Microsoft and Yell will join forces to offer compelling search, mobile and local advertising solutions to small and medium businesses and to make the most of emerging business models delivered through the cloud. Under the plans, Yell will also offer the full suite of Microsoft’s SMB productivity and business software and cloud services, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and emerging SMB-focused communications solutions. In addition, Microsoft will assist Yell to accelerate its new cloud-based services, which will provide Yell’s customers with access to these new digital offerings.”
Yell already offers a number of interesting, sometimes innovative marketing and advertising services through Yellowbook in North America and other divisions across the globe. Now, Yell Group reps will have a new, different and growing portfolio of advertising, marketing and business support services to offer.
The day after announcing the Microsoft alliance, the company announced a strategic partnership with Bazaarvoice, provider of cloud-based solutions designed to enable businesses to manage and monetize online customer conversations and communities. The day after the Bazaarvoice announcement, Yell announced a completely new corporate strategy. The company is now focused on evolving from a provider of advertising services to the outsourced marketing department for millions of SMBs.
This means SMB decision makers may soon be able to buy services for contact, lead and customer management (CRM), email marketing, online data backup, Web conferencing and other unified communications (UC) options and more from a single Yellowbook rep. Which could give those decision makers some interesting, valuable options not easily available elsewhere.
Now, Google, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and others offer all kinds of platforms, add-ons and plug-ins intended to enable all kinds of business service combinations. But at most SMBs, one of the first questions to which they want answers is about interoperability with...Microsoft Office. So why not start with offerings that come from the source, so to speak? Especially for those SMB decision makers already doing business with Yellowbook or some other Yell Group entity? After all, "the cloud" is still basically a wild and poorly mapped environment, making the value of a known, proven guide pretty darned high to those users.
Speaking of which...
If your company already works with Yellowbook, you and your rep should be having a heart-to-heart talk very soon now. You should ask about everything from what services will be available and when to how and whether you can move and share spend dollars across multiple online and offline opportunities. You might want to focus a few questions on how Yellowbook + Microsoft might help you to offer more and better local and daily deals.
If your company does not do business with Yellowbook but does work with one or more of its competitors, you might ask your rep what their company plans to do in response to Yell Group's moves. Meanwhile, keep a close eye on what Yell and Microsoft do, and on what Google and others do in response.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Get Satisfaction: Turning Customer Communities into Bigger Business Benefits
What's the most important thing to your business? Its customers, because without them, your "business" is likely just an expensive hobby. (This is equally true for non-profit organizations, but they serve two groups of "customers," the ultimate consumers of the services the non-profit provides and the people and organizations that fund those services.)
So what's the most important business resource your organization is probably under-leveraging or not measuring, tracking or paying attention to at all? Generally, it's what your customers think and feel about your organization and its offerings. More specifically, it's the engagement and passion of your best and happiest customers.
Those qualities are probably the most effective tools you have for recruiting and acquiring new happy customers. But you absolutely need the best available information about your customers – who's happy and why, who's unhappy and why and everything related to those questions. That information is crucial to your efforts to identify your most positively engaged customers and to leverage and amplify their engagement and passion.
Of course, your organization should already be tracking what customers think and feel, using everything from social media monitoring to periodic proactive outreach NOT intended to sell anything. But how best to go one step beyond, closer to the encouragement and leverage of actual customer communities?
I recommend a close, careful look at Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction helps companies to leverage and monetize pervasive, passionate engagement of those companies' customers. (I've run this admitted mouthful past a few Get Satisfaction executives, and they say it captures what they do pretty well, so I'm sticking with it.) It does this via a combination of really cool software and effective, field-proven processes and practices that it makes available to its customers.
Pricing starts at $19 per month for all the tools you need to build and manage a basic community. For $49 per month you can add support for a team of community managers and Facebook integration. At $99 per month you get additional community customization, analytics and Web site integration features. And at $289 per month you can add integration with customer relationship management (CRM), help desk and other systems as well as enhanced support from Get Satisfaction. Free trials and options for full customization and rich branding are available as well.
There are other customer community management and feedback collection solutions out there, to be sure. (Three of them are discussed briefly along with Get Satisfaction in a November 2010 article at Inc.com.) However, none that I've seen offers the combination of flexibility, functionality and economy available with Get Satisfaction.
Also, Get Satisfaction's founders, management and corporate culture are, to put it mildly, intently focused on empowering customer-led communities that deliver real, measurable business value. This is reflected in everything I've seen them do, say and deliver so far, and strongly complements the strengths of the company's core offerings.
Your customers are your market. The more you can empower your customers to ask questions, share ideas, provide feedback and form communities, the more you know about what your customers really think and feel. The more such information you have, the better your marketing, sales and customer care efforts can become. If these things matter to you, you should explore Get Satisfaction. Now.
Free Webinar: Synchronicity abounds – Lane Becker, a co-founder of Get Satisfaction, will be the featured speaker in a Focus.com Webinar entitled "Think Like an Entrepreneur: Lessons for Businesses of All Sizes." It's sponsored by GoToMeeting, another tool you should be using if you're not. I'll be moderating. Should be an interesting and valuable conversation. I hope it will include you.
The live event takes place on Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010 at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET. It will also be available on demand later, if you can't make the live version. For more information or to register, please go to http://dortchon.it/f32uR8.
So what's the most important business resource your organization is probably under-leveraging or not measuring, tracking or paying attention to at all? Generally, it's what your customers think and feel about your organization and its offerings. More specifically, it's the engagement and passion of your best and happiest customers.
Those qualities are probably the most effective tools you have for recruiting and acquiring new happy customers. But you absolutely need the best available information about your customers – who's happy and why, who's unhappy and why and everything related to those questions. That information is crucial to your efforts to identify your most positively engaged customers and to leverage and amplify their engagement and passion.
Of course, your organization should already be tracking what customers think and feel, using everything from social media monitoring to periodic proactive outreach NOT intended to sell anything. But how best to go one step beyond, closer to the encouragement and leverage of actual customer communities?
I recommend a close, careful look at Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction helps companies to leverage and monetize pervasive, passionate engagement of those companies' customers. (I've run this admitted mouthful past a few Get Satisfaction executives, and they say it captures what they do pretty well, so I'm sticking with it.) It does this via a combination of really cool software and effective, field-proven processes and practices that it makes available to its customers.
Pricing starts at $19 per month for all the tools you need to build and manage a basic community. For $49 per month you can add support for a team of community managers and Facebook integration. At $99 per month you get additional community customization, analytics and Web site integration features. And at $289 per month you can add integration with customer relationship management (CRM), help desk and other systems as well as enhanced support from Get Satisfaction. Free trials and options for full customization and rich branding are available as well.
There are other customer community management and feedback collection solutions out there, to be sure. (Three of them are discussed briefly along with Get Satisfaction in a November 2010 article at Inc.com.) However, none that I've seen offers the combination of flexibility, functionality and economy available with Get Satisfaction.
Also, Get Satisfaction's founders, management and corporate culture are, to put it mildly, intently focused on empowering customer-led communities that deliver real, measurable business value. This is reflected in everything I've seen them do, say and deliver so far, and strongly complements the strengths of the company's core offerings.
Your customers are your market. The more you can empower your customers to ask questions, share ideas, provide feedback and form communities, the more you know about what your customers really think and feel. The more such information you have, the better your marketing, sales and customer care efforts can become. If these things matter to you, you should explore Get Satisfaction. Now.
Free Webinar: Synchronicity abounds – Lane Becker, a co-founder of Get Satisfaction, will be the featured speaker in a Focus.com Webinar entitled "Think Like an Entrepreneur: Lessons for Businesses of All Sizes." It's sponsored by GoToMeeting, another tool you should be using if you're not. I'll be moderating. Should be an interesting and valuable conversation. I hope it will include you.
The live event takes place on Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2010 at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. ET. It will also be available on demand later, if you can't make the live version. For more information or to register, please go to http://dortchon.it/f32uR8.
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