I don’t like FAQs, but I’m sometimes asked to write or edit them.  As a user, I seldom read FAQs and, when I do skim them, I seldom find my question. A staple of computer software and hardware products,  FAQs were originally designed to answer technical questions, but today marcom departments may get involved. At their best FAQs are a cumbersome necessary evil. At their worst, they are  maddening. Phony questions with marketing “speak” for answers are likely to be scorned by customers. Not a desirable reaction. So when I’m called on to write or edit FAQs, I try to keep these tips in mind.

1. Use real questions, not ones made up to promulgate marketing messages
2. Keep questions and answers short and simple
3. Don’t include questions that are answered in other places (on the website, in manuals)
4. Categorize questions to help readers find what they are looking for more quickly
5. Limit acronyms and avoid jargon
6. Allow readers to comment on and rate the answers for usefulness so you can improve them

What are some examples of the best and the works FAQs, you ‘ve come across?

I had a 40-minute telephone conversation with some who wants my business, or rather the business of a non-profit association for which I am on the board of directors as a volunteer. Her company is planning to respond to our request for proposal and she called to get acquainted and ask some questions. A good idea that fell short in execution. I would love to tell her that she should have talked less and listened more. As she went on and on, she tripped some alarms that she could easily have avoided by listening first.

1. She lectured me about what we “should” be doing  in social media to grow membership, without asking what we are already doing, have desires to do, or are staffed to do.

2.  She volunteered about their offices in New York City, Paris, and London. Oh, oh. These are all high-priced neighborhoods. Can a non-profit organization like ours, with limited budget, afford their overhead?

3. She rattled off experience with some big-name companies. Impressive, but ding, ding goes my internal alarm. These are companies with big budgets and deep pockets. The association is not. Why, I ask myself, does this company want to work with us? She would have done better to name non-profits and other customers who are more like us.

4. She told me how they like to be “full-service” with their clients. I get planning and strategizing and integrating. But I’ve had my fair share of experiences where “full-service” means paying more. If she’s going there, I need to hear what problems this solves for the association; instead I was seeing dollar signs marching into the future.

At more than one point, I found myself stuttering to try to get a word in. I wonder if she came away with any useful understanding of our association? I know she doesn’t know anything about me — she never asked.

By contrast, Jeff Nielson, when we first worked together on the identity and website design for one of my businesses, asked me lots of smart questions about customers, about competition, about business objectives, and about me.

I’m not great at sales myself and have a lot to learn, so I’m sympathetic with her. This conversation was a lesson to me. Ask and listen, then talk. Her company is not out of the running, but I’ll be reading the response to the RFP with the concerns she triggered already there on my mind.

I heard something new when buying container plants today. The vendor told me the principle of grouping plants for a complete, stunning effect. “You need a thriller, a filler, and a spiller,” she said. Gardeners know this, but I hadn’t heard it before, and it struck me as brilliant in its memorable simplicity and usefulness. The “thriller” provides height and drama—it’s the defining centerpiece that gives the pot its unique identity.  The “filler” spreads and fills out most of the container. It doesn’t call a lot of attention to itself, but you sure notice its absence. The “spiller” grows over the rim and outside the confines of the container or garden bed.

It occurs to me that the best customer service follows a similar thriller-filler-spiller principle. Take my hairdresser for example. She gives me the unchanging good service I would expect from any hairdresser—competent cut and consistent color.  That’s the filler. The filler is the basic level of service that everyone in the business should be capable of delivering. In addition, to that expected level of customer service, she gives the most wonderful shampoos! She doesn’t just wash hair—she gives a head and neck massage that is out of this world. This is the thriller. It’s her particular signature—part of her brand.  But what about the spiller?  What does she do between appointments to keep the relationship with me going and growing? She calls to remind me when appointments are coming up. This is not only good for her business—fewer missed appointments—but I really appreciate the reminder. I even quit a hairdresser once because she didn’t do this. Other spillers could be a newsletter with hair care tips, pictures of style trends, and special partnership offers, such as a discount on a pedicare at neighboring nail salon.

Sorry about the girly examples, but Nordstrom, too, is a good example of the thriller-filler-spiller principle. The filler consists of the quality, fashionable clothing choices I expect. The thriller is the free “Personal Touch” service. I call Ildiko A. Scott at the Walnut Creek store, and she pulls together clothing and accessory choices for me. I breeze in at the appointed time, try things on, make my choices and leave with clothes that fit my life and preferences in only an hour or two. This is a “thriller” because I don’t like to shop. But I do love to shop this way. As the “spiller,” Ildiko sends me notes throughout the year so that I can come in ahead of sales for the best choices at the best prices.

Products, as well as services, can follow the thriller-filler-spiller formula. For example, my husband, an amateur archer, loves his Damon Howatt bow. The thriller of a Damon Howatt bow is the beauty of a traditional recurve bow custom made for the individual archer. The filler, of course, is that the bow performs well as expected. The thriller wouldn’t matter otherwise. The spiller? This could be a beautiful printed catalog that my husband would look forward to receiving and poring over. Or it could be a community forum with other Damon Howatt owners. I don’t know what would be cost-effective, effective spillers to continue the customer relationship after the sale, but I do believe a “spiller”—along with the thriller and filler–is part of all truly great products and services.

While writing for a software company recently, I learned that their developers have begun going to customer locations to watch customers use the software in their daily work. Instead of relying on various emissaries, such as account managers, to bring back customer needs, the company had decided to send the developers out into the customer’s world. What a great idea! A few years back, Credit Suisse addressed low customer service ratings by having executives immerse themselves in both sides of the customer experience. As customers, they went into branches, opened accounts, used the ATM, etc.  Apparently the exercise was eye opening for the big wigs. There is now a reality show, Undercover Boss, based on a similar premise, in which CEOs come out of their offices and work on the front lines in various jobs throughout the company to see how processes work and how customers are treated. These, however, are after-the-fact exercises. They can help companies fix what is wrong or do better next time. But what about designing products, services, processes in the first place from the customer perspective?

This reminded me of a 2008 Ted Talk by Tim Brown of  IDEO. In his talk on creativity and play, he advocated having product designers engage and watch users in role-playing scenarios. Role-playing is a good way to design services, too, he says. And the more serious the problem, the more important it is to act out the solution first–for example in financial services, security, education, and heathcare. Role playing isn’t just fun and games, either; the value of it is backed by research. Watch Tim Brown’s TED talk on play and role-playing.

If you don’t know already know about TED, it’s packed with fascinating talks by smart people on all sorts of topics with application to life and business.

Nancy
www.forcefulcopy.com

The cast of the interactive murder mystery, "The Altos," at Bus Barn Stage Company

The interactive murder mystery, The Altos, has been making the rounds of community theaters and murder mystery dinner shows since at least 2006, but I finally saw it last night at the Bus Barn Stage Company. Bus Barn is a professionally managed community theater in Los Altos, Californa. Bus Barn puts on an eclectic slate of plays each season that may run the gamut from Little Shop of Horrors to A Street Car Named Desire.

Last night’s fare was fun for the audience and good for the company’s marketing.

In this spoof of The Sopranos TV series, which is set at the memorial service of a mob boss who isn’t really dead, audience members are engaged in many ways. Some are seated on stage and drawn into the comic action. Others are pulled up from the front rows to say something about the departed. At intermission the cast members mingle and banter with the audience. (The “priest” in the play invited me to confession and if I didn’t have anything to confess, he said with a wink and a smile that “we could work on that, too.”)  The audience is given a chance to ask questions of the characters that ranged last night from, “where did you get your shoes? to “who knew you were going to at the Millers Crossing Motel on the night of the bombing?” Then we got to vote on our favorite suspect.

And this is where the marketing tactics got smart. The ballots were simple, asking just two questions: Who did it? What is the motive? Then there was a line for an email address to receive Bus Barn information.

First, the theater company put on a performance selected, I’m certain, for marketing purposes.

Second, they delighted the customers with experiences that got us involved and created relationships with people in the company.

Third, while we were having fun and liking them, they made sure to collect priceless contact information.

They succeeded at getting mine and in reminding me about some simple business principles–to delight the customer and follow up.

Nancy
www.forcefulcopy.com

In a previous blog post, I shared the advice of Charles Green (founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates who has articles in the Harvard Business Review): “In tough times, shift your business development efforts away from new client acquisition to existing client development.”

Of course, selling to existing clients or customers costs less than developing a new customer. Accepted wisdom is that acquiring new customers costs between 4 to 6 times more. Analysis by Frederick F. Reichheld, author of The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value, showed that the cost of acquiring new customers was five times the cost of servicing established ones.

Online retailers are getting it. Existing customers who have recently purchased have just shown that they are in the mood right now to acquire what they need. I am a classic case in point. I recently purchased some clothes for my husband on line from Lands End. The very next day, I received an email from Lands End offering me savings on further purchases, along with free shipping. I decided to add a pair of $75 slacks that I had considered but passed by during my first shopping spree. I got $10 off because my purchase was over $50. (But I tell you, I narrowly resisted spending $100 in order get $25 off.)

Lands End had used my transaction with them to sell more to me. They could have helped me (and themselves) by personalizing the offer to specify savings on the pants, the boxer shorts, and the madras sport shirt that I removed from my shopping cart. There is good chance I would have snapped them up. After all, I had seriously considered buying them and then deleted them from my cart at the last minute because I didn’t want to go hog wild on spending and because they weren’t on sale. Amazon.com is good at knowing what its customers are likely to be interested in based on wish lists and previous purchases, but smaller businesses can’t afford the technology to do this. However, most of us can do better than we are at present.

The point I’m making is this. Do you know what your customers are buying (and almost buying)? Are you using that information to extend follow-on offers to customers who have recently purchased from you? If a customer recently bought an energy-efficient furnace, are you ready to follow up next month (after they have seen savings on their utility bill) with a compelling offer for a  tankless water heater? If you’re an accountant and you just finished preparing tax returns for clients, what can you offer to bring them back in May, while taxes are still fresh in their minds? A workshop that will help them reduce their taxes next year, perhaps? There are probably lots of good ideas that I can’t think of because I’m not an accountant.

Mark Stevens, in his best-selling book, “Your Marketing Sucks,” tells a story about a well-known investment company that was missing a golden opportunity to sell more to existing customers. The company started putting information about new funds in clients’ quarterly statements. Simple, right? This seems like a no-brainer, but they hadn’t been doing it before.

I admit selling to existing customers may be easier for some businesses than others. For example, I write for many large B2B companies. For one of them, I recently completed a series of flyers on services related to their new technology product. They are very happy with them right now, especially after a disappointing experience with another writer. Would it work for me to go back soon after their product launch and offer  a series of customer success stories? I may try it.

If you have any ideas for me, I’d love to hear them. In the meantime, I’m putting my thinking cap on as well.

Nancy Heifferon
Forcefulcopy.com

The line from Field of Dreams, novel and movie, has become iconic. “If you build it, they will come.”  This may be true for baseball fields, but not necessarily for websites.

Jeff and Ben here at Nielson Design can create you a smashing website that invites your customers and prospects to interact, one that creates a delightful user experience for them once they are there, one that makes it easy for them to share your content with others, one built for SEO. But that isn’t the end of the story—it’s the glorious beginning. How do you get more people to find your awesome website ?

One way is to write articles and submit them to article directories on the Internet. This can be free, except for the time it takes. Readers of the articles may be inspired to go to your website. You get self-qualified visitors—people who are looking for a business like yours or are at least curious.  In addition, your Google page rank may be raised by the incoming links from other websites because Google considers incoming links to be “votes” for your site. When you submit articles to directory sites, they can be reused, as-is with your name and web address, by other websites. The upside: more links from other websites to yours. The downside: you have no control over who uses your article.

If you decide to write and publish articles, here are a few tips and considerations.

• Include a link to your website. That’s obvious.

• Come up with an intriguing “signature” or bio at the end of the article that will make readers want to check out your website.

• Don’t pay for a service that blasts your article automatically to the hundreds or thousands of article sites that exist today. Google may consider you a spammer. Instead submit to four or five favorite article sites.

• Find a few niche sites for your articles. For example, if you are a personal historian, as I am in my spare time, and you want to reach women over 40, you might want to write articles and stories to post on www.more.com. Or if you run a plant nursery, you may want to submit articles to a specialized site such as  Organic Gardening Articles Directory.

• Market your marketing. When you submit an article to content sites, consider sending the link to the people in your personal and professional universe giving them a nugget from the article and inviting them to read the whole thing. Do a LinkedIn update and put a message with a link on Facebook. The more popular the article, the more visibility it gets, increasing the likelihood that other websites and bloggers will use your article.

• Leverage your content. Create it once and use it many times. Do short versions of the article in your blog and your newsletter, for example.

You can search for the most popular article submission sites and directories on Alexa. Go to http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo and enter “article directory, article submission” in the keyword box. You get a list of sites. Clicking on each listed site will give you the traffic rank, the number of sites linking in, and reviews. Top ranked directories when I searched recently were, in order:

1. EzineArticles.com
2. ArticlesBase
3. GoArticles.com
4. Associated Content
5. Article Dashboard
6. ArticleRich
7. ArticleClick

Coming soon: Part 2, Joint Ventures

Nancy Heifferon
forcefulcopy.com
For writing that connects with customers, builds relationships, and leads to sales

Salespeople like to close the deal quickly. But sometimes slowing down the customer’s purchase decision process is the best thing you can do.

I needed to replace my back door, so I requested estimates from three contractors. Two replied immediately and I picked one. Two days later, I had my new door. One contractor missed the boat this time by waiting two days to contact me, but I may have missed an opportunity, too, by rushing to a decision.  You see, I’m planning to put my house up for sale in a few months. When he did respond and I gave him the bad news, I found out that he has a partnership with a great realtor. Together the two of them probably could give me some valuable guidance on how to ready my house to get the highest return for the least expense. As we talked, he asked smart questions and gave me some good “free” advice. It was a very valuable conversation. That was yesterday.

Then today I downloaded a whitepaper titled “Selling Through a Slump,” from the BNET Business Library (I subscribe to some free newsletters from BNET http://www.bnet.com/). Offered by Oracle, the paper has some good pointers for selling in various industries from noted experts in each field: retail, insurance, law, health, accounting, services, and others.

Some of the advice includes:

• For insurance agents: Develop a professional blog and a web storefront. (Nielson Design specializes in website design and blog design and can help you with this.)
• For lawyers: Never assume your current clients know all you can do for them.
• For accountants and consultants: In tough times, shift your business development efforts away from new client acquisition to existing client development.

And the one that really spoke to me, offered by sales strategist Jill Konrath, for selling business services:

“Slow the decision process down. Harried customers, racing to get things done, want “the facts” as fast as you can deliver them. But too much gets missed without a full understanding. Help them understand why multiple conversations help them make better choices.” (The italics are mine.)

By showing me that he understands the bigger picture and can help me make better decisions, that third contractor is very likely to get my future business.

Take-aways:

If you’re a contractor, answer your calls right away.
If you’re a consumer like me, take a little more time to make decisions.
If you’re selling services, consider slowing down the customer’s decision process.

Get  “Selling Through a Slump”
Visit Jill Konrath’s blog
Subscribe to BNET newsletters

I told my hairdresser the other day that I really like the way she does hair coloring—my hair looks natural and has depth and I feel like it’s really me. She thanked me, and that was it. She missed a great opportunity. By contrast, I thanked my health insurance broker for going the extra mile for me, and that very afternoon she requested a recommendation on LinkedIn. Good for her!

When a customer volunteers praise for your product or service, you should jump for joy and then leap right into action. Right then and there is the time to ask the customer to provide a testimonial or a reference. References are golden. They give you credibility. They back up your claims. If you are a graphic designer or web designer like Jeff and Ben here at Nielson Design, or if you are a writer like me, you can show examples of your work in a portfolio. If you can’t so easily show off the work you do, references can be enormously helpful. References also give your business a human face. They tell your business story better than you can. They also help you deepen relationships with your satisfied customers. What should you do when you are blessed with outbursts of customer praise? Here are 7 quick tips for helping them to become powerful ambassadors for your business.

1. Ask permission immediately to contact the customer and request a quote or perhaps a customer story.

2. Get the person’s name, email address, and telephone number. And keep the information in a reference database or spreadsheet.

3. DO NOT offer an incentive to participate. (You can send a thank you gift afterward, but never poison the reference by turning the relationship into a transaction.)

4. Don’t create extra work for your customer; instead make it EASY for the customer to recommend you. There are two ways to do this:

Listen up all you on LinkedIn: No one who has ever asked me for a recommendation on LinkedIn has bothered to do this for me! Do you really want to leave the message entirely up to me?

5. Get the customer to approve the quote or story. Tell customers clearly how their testimonial or reference story will be used, obtain their written agreement, and stick to it. If you later find a new way to use the reference, go back and ask permission again.

6. If the customer is strategic (your ideal customer, a customer with influence, a customer for your newest product or service), then see if he or she will be involved with you in other ways. Will the customer allow your prospects to call or visit for a one-to-one reference? May the media contact the customer for a quote or an interview? Will the customer appear on a speakers’ panel or in a webinar with you?

7. Protect your references with your life. Don’t over expose them or overuse them. If they feel exploited, that’s a relationship killer. Set a policy for how often to use each reference customer and get customer agreement. Then track and monitor.

Finally, I shouldn’t have to say this but never ever make up a testimonial. I was appalled when a client told me that she had been advised by certain sales people to create fictional customer testimonials. In addition to being dishonest, they don’t sound real and prospects will give them no credence. Fake testimonials are at best a waste of time and at worst toxic.

If you comment to tell me what you think of this post and email me (nancy@forcefulcopy.com), I will send you a spreadsheet template for tracking your references.

Also if you need help interviewing and writing customer reference stories, I do that.

Nancy Heifferon
Forcefulcopy.com