How many CEO's call a customer after they place an order with their company and thank them in person? Answer: Not very many. Do you ever wonder why? Do you even care? Let me give you some reasons to care and lets see if I can convince you why you should care.

     In this day and age of e-mail and computers things are becoming very sterile in terms of selling a product. Even the cash registers at your local super market say thank you on the display card so the cashier does not need take the time to thank you. Why is that? In my humble opinion I say, we have lost focus on the most important Factor. The human Factor. (It may be linked to the black helicopters but I just can't prove that yet lol :))

     What can we do to correct this? What advantage does my company have if I take the time to do this?

     To answer the first question may I suggest that you take to the time to call a few of your customers  every month and personally thank them for ordering from you. Most are in shock that the CEO himself/herself is taking the time to talk to the customer and not wanting to sell them more stuff. Once they get past the point of being shocked they become a gold mine of information and insight about your company and how things are being run.

     The answer to the second question above is those people who you just called via phone and spoke with will most likely get on the net and write in a blog somewhere that you called them and it was really a nice thing that a CEO of a company took the time out to personally call them and take the time just to talk to them. This is great for your company in terms of free marketing for your company. It is also makes you feel good inside as a person! Now you have something to look forward too every month. I do this every month and it is so much fun. 99% of the people I speak with have so much fun talking with me and I have so much fun talking to them. So lets all set a new goal for next month! Lets call and make a customer happy! A happy customer is a paying customer for life!

My next article will be about Whales. It is such a cool marketing concept. Hint: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Brian :)

We all know how effective using the chat software I have on my site is effective at following customer shopping habits. But did you know you can go keyword mining with it? Keyword mining on your site is like striking gold! Best of all it is free! Because you the owner are doing the work. :)  Learning a new word to associate with your products can and will help you sell more products effectively. I learn about 5-6 new words a day that need to be placed with my products.

Below is an example of what I am talking about. 

When a customer comes to my site and I see the word they used to get to my site I then quickly add that word to that specific product they were searching for.  Then all of the sudden that product appears right in front of them when they search for it on my site. That is really cool to see.

They way people use the English language is very fractured by region in the country. It is the best explained as the tomato vs tow-matoo argument or vase vs's Vahhhse. This is the problem we have as a website owner's. How do you learn these regional language differences? How do we effectively apply the various regional use of the English language to our sites? The first step is to install the chat software and watch, watch, watch and learn the new words and do more watching. I will go more in depth if you e-mail me at sales @ ShopBakersNook.com if I can confirm that you are a WF customer I will tell you the exact system we use. I know other people from the other side are watching me now. I don't need to be giving up all of my secrets to them. :) I also live in constant fear of black helicopters landing on my lawn too. LOL :)

As always thank you for taking the time to read this.

Brian

It is becoming increasingly important to provide documentation on your fraud prevention business practices while you are accepting credit cards on a website. WF has provided an area with each order that you can write notes about a order with out the customer seeing them. This area you should use to write notes about the steps you take to make sure a transaction is real and not a stolen credit card. By doing this you have in effect implemented a fraud prevention policy which is the key to fighting a charge back from a credit card company. We all know that the credit card company's could make things more secure but they worry about losing customers so we are left on the hook. It is left up to us merchants to police this mess. Your documentation and fraud policy practice can and will be your saving grace to  help you prevent a charge back. As seen below I have the steps I have taken on my site. I also have an example of the supporting documentation to back up my fraudulent prevention business practices.

(typed in the not seen by the customer field)

CCV Good

AVR Good

Ip trace Good

Phone call made to Bank and customer. Good. Ok to Ship BDS. Time is O700 date is July 11 2007.

(May Favorite) Customer was difficult rude and used threatening language do not ship any orders to this person.

Also you can use this area to make notes about difficult customers. This could protect you from denial of service claims later on.

How do I start a fraud protection policy?

My suggestion is this.

1. Implement a fraud protection policy for your business that is written down and all orders over a certain amount you should do a trace back and a reverse ip address look up to make sure it came from the area the order is coming from.

2. Get the telephone numbers of issuing banks and make a phone call to check to see if the card is stolen.

3. When in doubt about a order check it out. 

Jerry at partsguyusa.com is a very knowledgeable person about this stuff too. Perhaps he has some tips we all could learn from here too.

As always,

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Brian

1) User-editable page aliases

2) Feedback form. Emails from the forms will be sent in rich text (HTML) format.

3) Blog subscribe feature
- Under General Settings of the blog module settings, there is an email template.
- Subscribers are attached to blog groups, when adding/editing a group in admin you can include/exclude members in/from that certain group.
- In the customer's site members area (a page protected by member's login), the logged in members will have a link Subscriptions; by clicking on that link, the member will be taken to the page where they can check/uncheck blog groups they want receive emails on (when a new post is being posted to that group).

 Olivia E Guerrero
Customer Service
Project Manager Assistant
Training Specialist
www.websiteforge.com
http://support.websiteforge.com
http://support.websiteforge.com/55.html

Manage Content Areas is a very useful tool to help you in copying content from one page to many pages.  It allows the user to select from copying by Reference or by Value. 

Copying by Reference means that whatever is copied and pasted only needs to be changed in the future on one page and it will change the same information on all other pages that were pasted by Reference.

Copying by Value means that the item or items copied and pasted are only copied and pasted.  So if a user makes a change on one page with the same information, then that change will not affect the other pages with the same information.

So, with that explanation you may still be scratching your head!  If you go to Manage Content Areas you'll notice that the first item is a drop down with the list of pages on your site and next to it is a drop down with the different content areas if you have them.  To copy information from one page to many, select that page from the drop down, then select the content area that you wish to copy and click Select.  Next you'll want to expand the pages below the drop downs to paste the information onto those pages.  Next, check the checkbox for the pages you want to copy to and select from the drop down whether you want to Copy By Reference or Value.  Once finished click Apply at the bottom.

This feature works wonderfully for header graphics if you have the same ones on all pages, or footer text when you first set up your pages, or if you have a content area under your navigation bar you can mass copy/paste using this feature.

A word of caution, however, if you copy main content areas to other pages, then you could very well have fifteen pages that all have the same information on them. :)  This feature does not copy certain frames but entire content areas.

If you have any questions, please feel free to post messages here or visit Live Support.

Olivia E Guerrero
Customer Service
Project Manager Assistant
Training Specialist
www.websiteforge.com