This is very old still getting small business on stock, you're still stuck over customer service because you think that customer service means adding more expense and more people to the process. But that's not the way it works in small business today. A great customer service experience today really revolves around technology. You've got to focus on the technology, your product, people and systems, because a lot of customer service today doesn't happen face to face. It actually happens over the web and through smartphones kinds of technology. And what is critical importance is that the trust don't meter actually has shifted in what customers do before they buy a product.

They're going out there and educating themselves and what they really want to know is what What do people think of your product or service? I remember I was very interested in buying a product called a key vo. And I was so excited because what I wanted was to be able to approach the door of my home just with my smartphone, and it would know it was me and automatically open up my door. And if I want to have guests over, I could actually email them keys. I looked it up on Amazon, and I looked at the reviews, and the reviews were mostly negative. People weren't interested in buying this product.

What do you think? Did I go off and buy that product? The answer is absolutely, positively not. That didn't happen. Now, technology today is closely tied to the customer experience. You need to look in four different areas, mobility, social, the cloud and big data.

And we talked about this a lot in the last presentation, but now I want to discuss mobility and the cloud. And that's The smartphone really has become the game changer. Because as I talked about in my customer service book, bam, delivering customer service in a self service world. I quoted Chris Brogan that said, Now we can work. And customers can shop anywhere, any win. And now the mobile cloud experience has to be at the highest level.

People expect to get information on your products or services. People expect to be able to make appointments if you're a service based organization, people expect to be able to check the status their orders, if you sell products, people expect instant near communication. People expect to know right in the web, your location, your hours, and how to get your darn place and people want it now remember, my younger son said that I understand why just can't download a product from the internet physically and have it delivered physically through the cable modem. Well, we're not quite quite there yet, but I think someday we will get there. But companies like Walmart, Amazon, eBay, are now practicing same day delivery, social tools have become a very key part of customer service. And there's been a huge explosion all sorts of tools on way to communicate.

As I said previously, it does make it harder. And it does make it in some ways easier because people are more likely to be communicating with you. The first step is you have to make sure that you know people are talking about you use things like Google Alerts or super media or blazblue, or Hootsuite to find out what is going on. And make sure that you have social proof. That's what people want. They want to know the customers that have used your product and service before what did they think because they're going to believe those people before they're going to believe you.

Let's talk a little bit how to use Facebook for customer service. One of the great things to do is to post customer stories. variances on your page. Now you can post them or better yet, it'd be great if they would post them invite customers to talk about their experience, their comments, their pictures, their video, but you have to make sure that you thank them and respond to them the same day. And again, there's some great tools out there to manage this, like parature that can make this a lot easier. nextiva, who is a unified communications company, they do a fantastic job of this.

When a customer has a concern that they express over Facebook. They don't just respond in the written word. They actually record a 32nd video posted on Facebook to publicly thank them for their comment. Now, how great is that? How would you feel if you were next Eva's customer on Twitter, the way that you want to use it for customer service is to monitor customer feedback. Since it's a very quick, quick feedback tool.

A lot of folks should be talking about your products and services on Twitter. You have To staff so you can respond within 10 to 30 minutes and follow it up until there is some kind of resolution. I do a lot of traveling and American Airlines these days. And at American air on Twitter does a fantastic job of following up on any concerns that customers have while they're traveling. And again, they can't solve that a that a plane is late. They can't make a plane go faster, but they're there to listen.

Pinterest has become a great tool for a lot of women, customers and men use something called gentlemen. And here you can really post all sorts of pictures of customer success stories. You also should encourage other customers to post their experiences on Pinterest. Now, if you've if you've seen the movie called Captain Philips, they talked about a ship called the Maersk and Maersk actually uses Pinterest really effectively showing where they go different pictures of their ship. So you can come from miliar with their company. Now let's talk about how to use LinkedIn.

It should be an easy way to connect to customer service manager. Now a lot of folks aren't going to be looking for customer service on LinkedIn. But there should be someone within your organization that has the tag customer service. So if someone is looking there, they can get in touch with a person through that method. A great way is what are the awning mats does. There actually is someone there a gentleman named Philip that has customer service in this title.

So if anybody has a concern about RV awnings, they can go right there. The final part of technology really is big data. Now a lot of people ask me well is big data really for small business? And I say it is because remember, big data combines a large variety of data from many different sources with it coming in very, very rapidly. And what a small company can do with big data is you can get to know your customer better. When they buy, what they buy and what they're going to need next, and Amazon does this brilliantly, because they're constantly analyzing where you're going, what you're buying.

So you know, they know really what's going on. And you feel incredibly welcome. And they do this through a series of cookies, and you can look up in the web and how that works. But when I go on Amazon, my home page for Amazon is customized for me. They know that I like to read on the Kindle, they know I just bought a nest. They know I'd like to read teenage apocalyptic fiction.

All these things are right there on the homepage for me. What's happening now beyond cookies is something called re targeting. And the way that retargeting works is that you will visit a website, that company will put a little retargeting cookie in your browser, and then when you go to visit other advertising sites, that advertisement will pop up and try to get you to buy again. Well, it's a little bit creepy. It's a little bit of a genius. But retargeting actually can increase customer service.

A lot of great companies out there doing retargeting. You can use tools like ad roll retarget or fetch back and change. You also can actually use email effectively and customer service. And one of the ways that people fall down in this area is they don't respond to an email quickly. If you can't respond the same day, make sure you have some kind of autoresponder that says, I will get back to in 24 hours. So at least people know that the email actually got there.

You can also use your company online chat. The only way this is difficult is there may not be a lot of chatting from your customers on your website. So it's very, very difficult to be able to staff that effectively. A lot of people ask me, well, should I allow my customers to text me? It all depends on who your customer is. And again, do you have the services within your business to be able to stand A lot of folks have to understand in a small business, there's very strict requirements around when you should reply based on what medium a customer uses to communicate with you.

So for example, you should respond on Twitter within 15 minutes on Facebook for hours on LinkedIn, 24 hours emailed the same day on chat less than a minute, text, five minutes, a phone call the same day and letter. In fact, I hope you're getting it out the next very next day. Whatever you do, make sure each form of communication with your customer is unified. So you know what the different channels are really doing. What's the one change that you're going to make? How are you going to strive for minimal achievement in using technology to improve your customer service experience?

This is very still getting small business unstuck. Have a great day.