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Our review of service stories kicks off with this most important concept:

Understand where your customers are complaining and what customer complaints are most prevalent.

I sat in a local government proceeding last month where a government employee asserted that there were no complaints about taxicabs in a jurisdiction serving more than one million people.  He finally acknowledged that there were likely issues, but that they didn’t bother consumers enough to complain.

The corollary is almost certainly true.   Consumers certainly received poor service and almost certainly complained about that service.  They complained to the companies involved, a different agency or to others who don’t record complaints.  But because those consumers had not complained in the way that the county dictated they should, county employees asserted multiple times that the county’s programs worked fine and consumers were pleased.

Such nonsensical thinking only occurs in bureaucracies where people don’t have to close the doors if they are wrong too often.  In a small business, pretending that unheard customer complaints means everything is okay is inviting disaster.  Many indicators exist to tell you about your service or product:  revenue, repeat customers, word-of-mouth referrals and proactive market research.

That’s right:  go ask customers how happy they are.

Your takeaway as a small business leader is that you can’t rely on your systems to tell you about service quality by telling you about their complaints.. Go where your customers share their experiences.  Listen.  Ask questions.  Repeat.  Ignore finding out about customer complaints at your own peril.

Customer service and consumer affairs contact centers are for problem resolution.  The very best among them measure customer satisfaction, but that’s usually a market research function.  A small business leader wearing both hats should already be asking these questions.

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Sharing Business Value Reports

Antivirus company AVG pushed a great report to me earlier today called a “Threat Report”.   The security company with the ‘Freemium’ model wanted me to give them credit for protecting one my computers from a series of problems.  It’s a smart, relatively passive way for the company to prove its product’s worth to a user who is a potential up-sell.

silver-beacon-marketing-logoSilver Beacon Marketing does a similar thing, showing clients their return on investment (ROI) for advertising campaigns or other goals from our search engine optimization efforts.  That is proprietary data that few would publicize, but I’ve lost count of the number of times a referral has quoted their friend’s ROI to me. Sharing your business value is easy.

Bragging about the number of threats your computer stopped is something you might share with anyone.  The whole thing sounds like fun.  And even a small adoption rate can mean some great exposure.  Let’s say that the report showed your level of web savvy and a fun rating about your computer’s strength along with some Twitter and Facebook share buttons.  Your product gets valuable exposure every time someone sends that report to their Twitter or Facebook stream.

Enabling that sharing function is only a part of the battle though. Sharing has to be simple–absolutely frictionless–to get the best possible return.  And that’s what I experienced today when I reactivated a StumbleUpon account.

Signing up was easy–only four fields after I clicked “connect with Facebook”.  And the company was smart enough to ask, “Hey, since you’re recommending pages to strangers, how about recommending them to your friends?”

Why not?  That makes perfectly good sense.  And with each post to my Facebook page, StumbleUpon gets a big endorsement from me to anyone connected with me.

Asking that question is smart.  My Facebook friends might not have a StumbleUpon account, but all the work is done for me if I want to post a link to my Facebook page or other social media channels. That is completely frictionless.

Your takeaway as a small business leader is to consider how your company communicates its real business value to stakeholders.  Special bonus points if you make sharing that information easy.

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Google Documents already had a place in my heart for the ease with which basic lists could be shared across devices and accounts with a complete audit trail.  The features were more than enough for almost any personal or business reason.

Then came word last week that Google Documents was integrating email and comments into “discussions”.  The concept is simple.  Using the @ function that is quickly becoming the standard in new media communications, people sharing documents can now have discussions about them.   Even better is the new “resolve” feature.   After a discussion inside Google Docs without resorting to long email threads that may not have brought everyone up to speed, the item can be marked as “resolved”.    And if the person you’re trying to reach doesn’t have the document shared with them, simply type the @ sign and their email address to bring them in.

Finis.   We’re done here.  On to the next issue or quit tangenting off and focus.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because the discussion feature in Google Docs is an awful lot like the feature set in Google Wave.  The main difference is that Wave was built around an email box while this new discussion feature is built into the document, spreadsheet or slide deck.  The change of where this functionality is located creates an entirely new way to use docs.  We’ve written before about collaboration inside Google Docs when the ability to share a drawing was launched last year.  We suggested that was really the Google Whiteboard.

That was before seeing this new collaboration feature being used.  This is truly the Google  Whiteboard and a great example of a company repurposing its assets to enhance its service offerings.  With this, Google Apps continue to be the small business’ best friend.  Your takeaway as a small business leader is that Google may not only replace Microsoft Office, but can bring a new level of  collaboration to your operations by integrating partners, remote team members and even clients.

Have a look at the video and start thinking about how you can integrate discussions into your workflow.