Perhaps the duct tape attaching the cable to the conference’s laptop should have warned me.

So there I was at the front of a room, trying to present without the audience seeing my presentation.

Eventually one of the attendees went out and got someone to help.

Problems are always a possibility in your business. Your customers will have trouble.

When customers run into trouble, do you know?

Are you monitoring the situation for signs of distress or trouble?

Or do you customers have to tell you there is a problem?

At this particular conference, there was no audio-visual (AV) person in the room. Nor were there any representatives from the conference.

When I had trouble, only the people in the room knew about it.

I was alone.

Do you leave your customers alone to struggle through the problems they encounter? Or are you alerted to any issues automatically so that you can rush to the rescue?

How can you be alerted to trouble your customers are having? That, of course, depends on your business and products.

Internet companies can monitor the uptime of their websites and even how customers are interacting with their online products. When a glitch happens, you should know.

The same is true of any type of utility where you, as the provider, can monitor usage. Don’t just see how much your customers use of your product so you can charge them. Monitor for irregularities in usage so you can idenitfy trouble and fix it.

For businesses where you serve the customer face to face, simply keep your eyes open. Observe the customer’s reaction and mood. Looks for signs of trouble and address it right away.

When you sell products that the customer buys and you never see again, you’ll need to proactively follow up that everything is working as expected. Try email, phone, or the postal service.

Don’t leave your customers alone when they are in trouble. Monitor the situation to proactively detect trouble and then fix it!

I asked the server at the restaurant which salmon I should get. She told me that people wait all year for the sockeye salmon catch at the mouth of the 300 mile long Copper River in Alaska. The salmon are then flown all over the world to be enjoyed fresh.

Her description, beyond just “this tastes good”, painted a very vivid picture of where my meal came from.

And you know what? It tasted better because I knew the story behind the product.

I knew that just yesterday my dinner was swimming down the river in Alaska.

Your products have a story too. Do you share it with customers? Or do you leave them to guess?

There is some aspect of your company, culture, product, or service that has an interesting story and background to it.

When you share that story with your customer, you personify your product and make it more attractive to your customer.

People can’t relate to a random product, but they can relate to a story or an experience.

Paint a picture for your customers so they can be excited about your product. Excited and engaged customers will become repeat customers. The story will bring them back. Apathetic customers with no emotional engagement with your product will not return.

Go tell a story!

The review site Yelp.com is a great example of how your customers are giving feedback.

Are you listening?

The potential for good and bad is huge with a site like Yelp. A collection of negative reviews can scare away any potential customer that is looking for your local business.

Conversely, a Yelp listing with customers raving about your awesome service is a golden marketing and customer acquisition opportunity.

During my business travels, I’ve used Yelp to locate airport shuttles, restaurants, and shopping in cities across the country.

Being unfamiliar with several of the cities I visited, I trusted in the collective wisdom of positive reviewers and have not been disappointed. I also changed plans when I saw a massive amount of negative feedback.

If you run a local business, your customers are similarly checking you out on Yelp.

Do you know what they are saying?

Have you responded to comments, both good and bad? Not to rationalize your behavior, but to validate the customer’s feelings and apologize or thank them for their comments?

Is Yelp helping or killing your business?

If it is helping, odds are you’ve heard customers say they found you on Yelp.

If Yelp is killing your business, you may be none-the-wiser if you haven’t reviewed the site yourself. When customers get scared away, they rarely tell you that they even considered your business. They just walk away in silence.

Monitor your reputation and customer feedback on Yelp. It will serve your business well.

When you provide a product or a service, consumers have come to expect you to know something about them and their interests. They expect customized messages designed just for them. They expect on-time delivery, real-time response, and all-time great performance. In short, they want what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. They don’t want to wait for it, and they expect you to deliver on what you have promised.

If the service you’re delivering is delivery itself – that is, shipping and delivery of personal, business or household items such as, furniture, artwork, antiques, computers or just packed boxes – providing great customer service is essential to achieving happiness for both the shipper and the customer. The following are three simple tips gathered from customer feedback that help to define customer expectations.

Educate

Most consumers will use a shipping service or company infrequently so they are unfamiliar with the options or costs. They might be shipping a recently purchased antique or passing family heirloom on to the next generation.

It is important that this customer have phone and electronic access to an experienced staff that can guide them through the pluses and minuses of shipping such a fragile or personal item. For example, the customer service specialist on the other side should be able to advise consumers on how to pack an item, insurance requirements, the availability of inside pickup and delivery, and a myriad of other details that may not have occurred to the consumer.

Creating a FAQ page on your site is also a great resource for consumers and businesses before they ship a product.

Communicate

Customer service at any company needs to always establish correct rates and regulations when communicating with the public. Most shipping companies, for example, base their rates and charges on minimum weights, from 1,000 to 2,500 lbs. On the other hand, long distance small move specialists can have a minimum as low as 100 lbs. The consumer wouldn’t know the difference and end up paying more if customer service isn’t there to help her.

Having an open line of communication between any company and consumer is extremely important for retention and positive reviews.

Follow Through

A customer’s request is not complete until his/her package is actually delivered, undamaged, on time and at the price quoted. Follow up with the customer to make sure everything went as planned. That, too, is part of the service a shipping/moving specialist provides.

Get to the root cause of any problem that is encountered, and fix the problem, not just the cause. Finally, be sure to treat every new customer as if they were going to be a customer for life.

About the Author:

This is a guest post from Kevin Hagan, the Marketing Manager at Transit Systems, Inc. (TSI). TSI is one of the top nationwide shipping companies and specializes in small moves and furniture shipping. For more information, follow us on Twitter @TransitSystems.

Unbeknownst to you, this is a classic research experiment by researchers at Columbia and Stanford (read original research here (PDF)) to determine how the number and complexity of choices we give to customers affects their purchasing behavior.

At a grocery store they set up a free sample table.

On the table they had a display of 24 jars of jam. They tracked how many people visited the table. They gave those folks a coupon for a discount off the purchase of the jam. Then they tracked how many people went on to purchase the jam.

They then repeated the experiment with a table of 6 jars of jam. Again tracking the numbers of people at each stage.

Which table do you think attracted the most visitors? It was the table with twenty four jars of jam.

That begs the question, which table lead to the most sales?

The table with six jars of jam.

In fact, the people that visited table with six jars of jam were ten times more likely to purchase than those that visited the table with twenty four jars of jam, even though both had been equally encouraged to make the purchase through a discount incentive.

The people that visited the table with twenty four jars of jam were just so overwhelmed with the number of choices that they simply walked away without making a purchase decision.

Likewise, your customers are overwhelmed by the amount of choices you are giving to them. How many of your customers are simply giving up and walking away?

Try experimenting with the number of options you give to customers at any one time. Reduce the number of choices and you’ll help more people arrive at the point of sale.

Even those who do not feel nervous can make crucial mistakes. Read through the following tips on how to improve your presentation skills. Put them into practice, and you’ll start to feel more comfortable, leading to increased success in selling.

Make Eye Contact

Eye contact is crucial. Do not look at any one person for too long, or you may cause them to feel uncomfortable. At the same time, make sure that you look at them for a short amount of time so that they feel a connection to you. Start at one side of the audience and scan your eyes across the group.

Speak With Emotion

No one likes to listen to a presentation given by a monotonous speaker. Work on speaking with emotion and changing your tone depending on the subject matter. This also shows that you care about the topic.

Involve The Audience

You need to keep the audience engaged so that they listen. One way to do this is to involve them by asking questions or having them participate. This will help them to get more out of the things that you are saying.

Make People Laugh

People always like to laugh. You may want to open with a joke and then tell a few more as the presentation continues. This will help keep people’s attention and it will make your entire presentation more enjoyable, regardless of the subject matter.

Use Props and Visual Aids

Another way to keep people’s attention is to use interesting visual aids. This also helps people to grasp what you are really saying with each point. Remember that some people learn more when they are able to see something than when they are simply told about it.

Simplify Everything

Do not make things overly complicated. For this, you have to consider your audience. Things that seem simple to you may be complicated to them if they are not coming into contact with these things every day.

Have A Strong Conclusion

The conclusion is what people will remember the most when they leave. You should sum up all of your main points. If you have a strong conclusion, you can be sure that they will come away from the presentation with new knowledge.

If you work on these specific presentation skills, you will quickly become better at talking in front of groups and will increase your sales. People will find you memorable and engaging. They will be interested in what you have to say and they will be willing to talk with you more about what you are selling after your presentation. Even if you are already doing a good job giving presentations, this does not mean that there is no room for improvement. You should always be working on your presentation skills so that you can have even more success.

About the Author
Written by Amy Henderson, a career and business blogger currently writing articles on presentation skills and leadership on behalf of QA.

Take the example of a grocery store. They are a business and want to be profitable.

Our local grocery store doesn’t want to pay for plastic bags. Sure, this is couched in an Earth-friendly message. However, in addition to saving the planet, the grocery store saves money when you bring your own bags.

So how can they get customers to bring their own shopping bags? Use incentives.

Our store gives customers a five cent refund for each reusable shopping bag they use to bag your groceries. You save. The store saves. The planet is happy.

When you positively reinforce the behavior that you want your customers to do, they will start to act how you would like.

What would you like your customers to do? How can you gently push them in the right direction?

What sets these social media platforms apart from other marketing methods is that they provide a space for a two way conversation between customer and product. Print and broadcast are completely one directional, permitting the conversation to only be from the product to the consumer.

With social media, consumers can reach out to the product marketers and voice their opinions. Of course, this can be a beneficial thing and a destructive thing. Open communication between business and customer allows for a more personal relationship to be forged. However, in an open communication forum, businesses must also be prepared for potentially negative criticism of a product or company. The first step in managing negative feedback in the social media world is being able to distinguish what type of feedback you’re receiving.

Genuine Problems

Sometimes the negative remarks made about your company, product, or service on social media are useful. Obviously, negative remarks are a problem, but if someone has laid out a genuine problem and explained the problem evenly and coolly, you are able to respond for the better.

This type of remark is negative in that it says something negative about your business. However, you can use this opportunity to respond to their problem and try to solve it. Other consumers will see your genuine concern with your customer’s problem and will admire that. Negative feedback like this exposes real issues that need to be addressed.

Warranted Attack

This type of negative feedback can be some of the most difficult to manage. These attacks are tricky because they are usually more enraged or upset than they need to be, but they are also typically warranted. The attack itself may be overkill or unnecessary, but the complaint is typically founded on genuine grounds.

The issues that are at the foundation of these types of attacks are things that need to be addressed by the company. In this way, these criticisms can be constructive. However, comments that are angry and loud have to be dealt with carefully.

Reputation is an important aspect of managing a business in today’s society (especially with social media). Respond to these comments reasonably and quickly. Try to address the real problem at hand without displaying any emotion.

Spam/Trolling

These are the least productive and most obnoxious types of feedback companies get through their social media marketing campaign. The difference between troll posts and warranted attacks is that trolls have no reasonable or valid reason for being upset.

For the most part, these types of posts won’t cause too much of an issue because most readers will recognize it as a false claim. However, it is important that you address trolls or spammers. Try to bury the post or establish that it has no grounds, but do not pay it too much attention. You don’t want to fuel the fire.

About the Author:
This is a guest post from Jacelyn Thomas. Jacelyn writes about identity theft prevention for IdentityTheft.net. She can be reached at: jacelyn.thomas @ gmail.com.

One conference had the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever sat in. Typically, conference rooms have hard and uncomfortable chairs. Even though attendees must sit for hours on end, few facilities make that a pleasant experience.

Another conference I attended made special arrangements to have good wireless Internet. By the organizer’s own admission, they didn’t want the wifi to be horrible like most other conferences. This conference understood what attendees needed and wanted: really good Internet access.

In both these examples, the attendees’ expectations are typically low. However, because these two conferences made sure they took care of the details, it was a pleasant surprise for this attendee and made the overall experience that much better.

Your competition and industry peers are currently delivering poor experiences to their customers. They do it because that is how things have always been done.

In fact, you probably deliver similar sub-par experiences to your customers. What can you change to improve your customer’s experience?

Look for something that your customers always complain about. These complaints may even come in the form of jokes. The best jokes typically resonate with people because there is an element of truth in them. If your customers are joking about your product’s shortcomings, don’t laugh. You need to fix the problem.

When you do something poorly, it makes it easier for competition to come in and amaze the customer. Those that provide a better experience can easily come in and steal away your customers from under your nose.

Don’t let this happen to you. You need to differentiate your offerings to customers so that they notice the positive differences between you and the competition.

You want to stand out from the crowd because of your attention to detail.

Look for things you can improve. Eliminate those nagging annoyances your customers face everyday and they will notice.

In the past, I’ve noticed that all the outward paintings on airplanes are so that people outside the plane can tell who is flying.

Southwest Airlines has colorful planes painted like the flags of their destinations or even a large Shamu killer whale plane.

Frontier Airlines has wildlife pictures on their planes’ tail fins.

Each of these decorations serve as visual reminders to those that see the planes.

However, on a recent American Airlines flight to Boston, I opened my shade to glance out the window. On the wing tip was a prominently lettered display: “AA.com” that was facing the passenger cabin.

The letters were too small and facing the wrong direction for those on the ground to see them.

These letters were put on the wing tip specifically for the passengers to see. They offered a subtle reminder of where you can go to buy your next tickets.

It seems that advertising is permeating and omnipresent. However, this ad was relevant and unavoidable. Clever and subtle.