Work From Home - Customer Service

By Rebekah Mack Bono

Are you looking for customer service work from home? Work at home employment that is legitimate, is much harder to find online than one might think.

There are some, however, not nearly as many as you would think considering the amount of interest there is in working from home. Research is key in obtaining legitimate employment. You also must weed through the many online scams. Many people who locate customer service work from home start out working in an office, but are able to make arrangements with their employer to work some or all of the time at home.

We all know someone who works part-time from the office and part-time from home in order to accommodate their children's school schedules. People who have good relationships with their employers, are more easily able to negotiate flexible work schedules including at home employment.

There are companies that hire people directly to work from their homes. Many of these positions are those where you cover a territory for an insurance company or a consumer products or publishing company, for example, and spend some time on the road and some time in your home office. There are also jobs available in:

- Customer Service
- Recruiting
- Sales
- Technical Writing
- Telemarketing
- Virtual Assistant ...and many more.

In many cases, the jobs are commission based, part-time or pay a flat rate for a completed project. Full-time jobs that provide health insurance, vacation, a pension and other benefits while you work full-time from home are few and far between.

Finding them online is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Flexibility is one of the most factors in finding home employment. If you are willing to consider freelance or contract work, or are willing to combine a couple of part-time positions, you will have greater success in locating work at home employment opportunities.

Customer service work from home is really like any other work from home job. If you have the skills and the right mindset, you just have to get out there and give it a good solid effort. If you do your research, and truly dedicate yourself to your work at home venture, you will succeed.
Program yourself right here and now, that quitting is not an option, and in one year from today you will look back and see just far you have come.

You can do this! There is nothing holding you back but you, so go out there and find your perfect customer service work from home job, or whatever you feel would be the best match for your skills.

Rebekah Mack Bono is a specialist in the work at home field. She operates two successful online businesses.
http://www.best-work-at-home-resource.com
http://www.glamourgal.net

Branding - The Way To Customer Loyalty

By Andy Lomax

The average consumer is hit with 1800 marketing messages every day in the offline world alone. This means his personal spam filter works overtime to keep out the barrage of advertisements that he doesn't need. So how does your product make an impact in this crowded arena? Effective branding is one way. Once a consumer has accepted your brand, your products will have the status of a trusted friend.

A brand is defined as a combination of symbols and values that lead to a successful business. In other words, your corporate and product symbols in the form of logos and slogans will become associated in the consumer's mind with satisfaction. So how do you go about branding your company and its products?

Corporate branding depends on clear, consistent communication of your corporate culture. This communication is effected through your logo, slogan, web design and content, service standards, products, and advertising. In fact, it should be apparent in every contact your company has with the marketplace. Brand development is an ongoing process which has to be continually managed like any other company asset.

So bear in mind that brand effectiveness is a dynamic concept. The time may come when an reformulation, redesign or a total overhaul of your brand is needed. Fads and fashions change fast in the wired world. New products and ideas can appear in the market out of the blue together with new channels of distribution. Your brand must adapt to keep up.

If you want to develop a new brand or change your current brand status, you might want to call in a firm of brand development consultants. These firms offer a range of brand development services. The first thing they'll do is to carry out an analysis of your brand to determine its current effectiveness. They'll also analyse the prevailing culture of the market. From this information, they'll advise on the best brand development solutions for your situation.

Other than helping your company or product stand out, branding offers many other benefits. For one thing, clearly defining your brand gives focus to your advertising, in fact to your whole marketing process. What's more, you spend less money on promotion for a product with a strong brand name. In some cases, a famous brand name is all it takes to sell the product.

Ultimately, brand development is about stamping your identity on the clutter of the marketplace and so attracting consumers. A number of brand development agencies exist to supply the brand development solutions that your company needs. Building branding loyalty translates into superior market competitiveness and ongoing repeat business.

Andy Lomax owns and runs Kudos Web Design one of the Leading Web Design companies in Manchester. He has been working within the internet industry for over 10 years and has advised hundreds of companies about their websites and online marketing strategies. Kudos Web Design provides Corporate branding.

Customer Service Processes – Companies Still Don't Get It!

By Derrick Strand

A key component of customer loyalty is how well a company handles complaints. I have a fresh example to illustrate! I bought a top of the line, king size memory foam mattress six months ago and it already has a lump in the middle. It has a 15 year warranty on it so I called customer service. They are sending out a third party to determine if there is a defect which is fine.

The customer service representative then informed me that if the mattress is defective and needs to be replaced, there is a $50 charge that I must pay for them to deliver the new one and take away the defective one. I told her that doesn’t make sense that I would have to pay a delivery charge for their defective mattress. She calmly and politely informed me that in the small print of the agreement that I signed, it clearly stated that I was responsible for these charges if the mattress was defective. I didn't check the small print but I’m sure it is there.

I’m not sure what occurred in their customer service process design meetings (if there were any) but they were obviously looking at the process from an internal, short term financial point of view. The cost to deliver goods was to be passed on to the consumer...for their defect!!

Although this may satisfy a short term financial metric, it fails miserably on the longer term, more critical metric, customer satisfaction. I believe there is a simple solution that satisfies both metrics. They could deliver the new replacement mattress free of charge (what a concept!).

This satisfies the customer who is upset that the product was defective but at least the company stands by their product and makes the replacement as positive of an experience as possible.

From the financial perspective, a financial analyst could determine the defective mattress rate (for simplicity, lets say one defect for every 50 sold). If the average delivery cost is $50/replacement, then that cost could be spread over every 50 mattresses sold by adding a dollar to every initial delivery or adding a dollar to the sales price. The customer, at the time of sale, could care less if the delivery fee is $20 or $21 or if the sales price goes up a dollar. It would be transparent to them.

The end result is a satisfied customer who would consider buying from the same store again and the cost of redelivery is covered indirectly. The result of their current process is that I will never buy another mattress from them.

They won’t be able to measure that directly but it will show up in future sales since there will be less repeat business over the long term. I know this sounds basic but I am continually amazed at how many companies do not understand customer service and satisfaction.

Some companies just don’t get it and they will pay dearly in the long run!

Consultant, writer and speaker Derrick Strand is not your typical management consultant. Derrick spends most of his time helping companies get rid of him. It is his philosophy that companies have most of the answers already inside of their business and inside the minds of their people. His job is to help them unleash that power to drive bottom line results. For more information, please visit http://www.derrickstrand.com

The Power of Words - How to Avoid Stomping on Personal and Customer Relationships

By Sandy Reed

The power of the word is real whether or not you are conscious of it.
Your own words are the bricks and mortar of the dreams you want to realize. Behind every word flows energy.

Sonia Choquette
One of the most profound powers we have, in our business or personal life, is the power of speech. The way we talk to people, and ourselves, shapes our relationships; and these relationships shape our world.

When you speak to someone in a gentle, loving tone of voice, you will most likely receive a gentle, loving response – and build a relationship of caring and trust. When you talk to someone in a condescending manner, being sarcastic, hateful, or just plain nasty, you will probably get back the same.

I had an experience recently with the latter situation. I'm in the process of setting up a new blog in WordPress for Inner Clarity. I chose a web hosting company based on a recommendation from another coach. This whole blog scenario and its set-up is new to me, so I've been getting a lot of mental exercise learning about cpanel, Fantastico, and MySQL, etc. Sounds like a foreign language, doesn't it?

I've been working my way through the steps of learning this new language, so I can create my blog, without much support except online documentation. When I had questions for my new web hosting company, I expected help – not ridicule. In the beginning they were somewhat helpful, but obviously irritated about my lack of experience. As time went on, and other issues came up, they became downright condescending in our email communications. Every day I dreaded having to contact them about any questions or concerns I might have encountered.

This whole situation came to a climactic end when I asked them to make a change in my domain name set-up. As a result of the change they made, I lost all the work I had already entered into WordPress. They didn't inform me at any time that this was a possibility. Nonetheless, they managed to make it appear that the loss of data was my own fault, and had nothing to do with the changes they made.

It seemed that the words they used and the tone of their emails were geared towards making me feel inadequate and ignorant - and they succeeded! While their evaluation of my skill level, at that point, may have been accurate, that is certainly not the way to keep customers – not to mention get referrals. It became crystal clear that this was not a company I wanted to deal with on an ongoing basis, so I cancelled my account with them. My only regret is that I didn't cancel it sooner…

What's the point of this story? If you want to build a successful business, be aware of the impact your words have on your customers and the people who support you. If you're trying to irritate your clients so they'll move on, then the condescending, sarcastic words and tone of voice may be appropriate. But if you want to have happy customers and support people, you probably want to take a different tactic.

Here are 3 tips for choosing the right words to fit your situation.

1. Use the "positivity sandwich". When you have a need to correct someone, express disappointment, or give feedback, use the "positivity sandwich". This is a term coined by Dale Carnegie; author of the classic "How to Win Friends and Influence People". This concept operates on the basic premise that you can tell anyone anything if you sandwich it between two positive statements.

When using the positivity sandwich, the ACT with Tact approach may be helpful. ACT is an acronym for Appreciate, Correct (or Communicate), and Thank. In the book by Linda Kavelin Popov, "A Pace of Grace", she writes about the ACT with Tact approach for giving feedback about sensitive situations. Here's an example.

My ex-web hosting company could have said something like, "I appreciate and understand you're trying to learn something new. Why don't you try doing it this way? We value your business". Can you imagine what a different relationship we would have had!

2. Use the "Would you be willing" approach. When there's something you want, but don't quite know how to get it without offending the other person and starting an argument, try asking them "would you be willing to…" This is an approach used by Marshall Rosenburg, in his enlightening work on Nonviolent Communication. When you use this gentle approach to a sensitive situation, it shows you are caring and considerate of the other person's feelings and whatever may be going on in their life. In this way, you can ask for what you want without criticizing, condemning, or complaining. Just be sure you're using a tone of voice that says you're being sincere in your request.

3. What do you say when you talk to yourself? You tend to show the world the feelings you have inside of you. If you're being critical and condemning yourself on a regular basis, it's tough to be in a state of graciousness to others. The solution to self-criticism is to catch yourself when that internal critic takes over, STOP it in its tracks, and instead look for things you have done right – things that you can appreciate about yourself. Elevate your negative self-talk to, "I know how to do this", or "I'm clear about the next logical step to take", or "I know I can figure out how to….", etc.

We all have our unique approaches to life. Just because your internal guidance led you to do something a particular way, and someone else did it differently, doesn't mean you were wrong. It just means you're different. We need different viewpoints and creations in this world. Be willing to give up the self-criticism and celebrate your uniqueness. Don't get hung up on the "good opinion of others". Here's a wonderful quote that expresses the beauty of diversity.
"You don't get harmony when everyone sings the same note." - Doug Floyd

The power of your words, whether external or internal, shapes your world and carries over into your physical and emotional state of being. Your internal critic may be replaying those critical and condemning words you heard as a child. These are the words you came to believe because other people were describing you to you, and we tend to believe other people more than we believe ourselves – especially as a small child. You can learn to replace these hurtful words with words of love and support for yourself.

If you're having a challenge in your life, whether it is health, finances, personal, or business; look to see if your words are supporting or hindering your progress towards your goals. You may find the answer to your challenges just by listening to what you say when you talk to yourself.

Sandy Reed, Certified Life Coach, ex-corporate manager, and small business owner, is the coach to call for support when you’re ready to break out of the corporate prison, and create a life of freedom and flexibility. Visit her website at http://www.innerclaritylifecoaching.com for more tools and information and to sign-up for her free mini-ecourse “7 Steps to Personal Power”.