How Your Small Business Can Increase Customer Satisfaction

I signed up for Assistly.com desk.com when I heard about their launch and I’ve been using it daily since. It started rough, and has certainly had it’s bumps along the way, but the service has continued getting better and better. With the recent move from assistly.com to desk.com, I imagine the initial kinks have been worked out and we’ll start seeing some really great updates.

 
desk.com logo (via bostinno.com)
 

Not that it doesn’t provide value now (it does), it just seems this is a space that can grow really quickly. A dashboard of your social and support connections is critical as Twitter, Facebook, et al continue to be adopted and accepted by organizations. How are you supposed to stay in contact with your customers and clients when establishing all these touch points?

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Why Does eBay Need My Information? (A Phishing Scam Story)

I was involved with an eBay phishing incident yesterday. Someone had purchased something from eBay and I received the invoice / receipt, along with a notice that my PayPal account was charged. The email was very well done, so I called eBay to make sure they were aware of this.

This is where things turned a little weird for me.

Firstly, I don’t have an eBay account. I do have a PayPal account, so maybe they are tied together. I don’t know. I don’t use eBay.

I mentioned this to the eBay support person I connected with.

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How To Build A Marketing Plan For Your Small Business

In today’s hyperactive markets, small businesses need to move quickly. They need to be ‘agile’. (My Code Year lessons are sinking in!) And a big part of the ability to be agile today is to plan, plan, plan.

On the marketing side, we’ve been taught to utilize a marketing plan to help guide our upcoming decisions based on previous learnings of the marketplace. In other words, what happened and do we want the same thing to happen in the future?

We’d build the marketing plan with an overview that looked something like:

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Do Wine And Technology Mix?

I’m fascinated with technology. Especially when technology helps small businesses compete on nearly the same level as their larger competitors and peers. The goal with this series is to promote all the goodness of using free / low-cost technology pieces to help support and promote small businesses.

 

Jennifer Jenkin - Pamo Valley WineryJennifer J. Jenkin is one of those people who you meet once and never forget. Her love for wine and community-building is as infectious as her charm. Jennifer has been invested in the wine business for a very long time and is using technology to help expand her company’s message.

I’ve known Jenn my entire life – she’s my sister. While I am certainly biased, there aren’t many people in this world that can match her drive, devotion, passion, and love for her family – which all come shining through when you walk into the Pamo Valley Tasting Room.

You can find Jenn blogging on her website and on Facebook.

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Do You Want This Guy On Your Team?

There’s this guy who is looking for work. Actually, he’s being pushed out of his current organization. He’s basically been isolated from the rest of his team but they won’t fire him. The whole thing is really odd.

He made some comment or did something benign, but his boss thought her authority was being challenged. So now he’s kind of stuck. Looking for work.

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