Tips for managing your online global reputation

It’s said that a satisfied customer tells three friends. But now an unhappy one can tell thousands, thanks to social media. There’s nowhere to hide in today’s hyper-connected world, and it’s all too easy for poor reviews or Twitter “fails” to come back to haunt companies.

Many of us had a laugh recently when a letter from a disgruntled Whole Foods employee (sent to the entire company) went viral online.  And Qantas had to deal with the backlash from its misjudged #Qantasluxury hashtag campaign in the midst of industrial action last November.

Of course one of the best ways a company can prevent negative publicity is being approachable. Many customers only resort to Twitter rants or angry blog posts because their views have been ignored. Simple steps, such as including easy-to-find contact details and responding to tweets straight away can nip problems in the bud. Live chat provides an easy, and informal way to gather feedback, respond to questions and demonstrate you’re responsive.

There are many other proactive ways to make sure the buzz surrounding your company is for the right reasons. The last thing you want is scathing reviews or inaccurate criticism popping up when a customer types your company name into Google.

Setting Google alerts (or the equivalent) for your company’s name and main keywords should be a first step. These can be set up to your chosen frequency. If you’re operating in more than one country, multilingual tools such as monitorThis and Keotag can track your keywords across multiple search engines.

Trawling through millions of blogs and online message boards sounds like an impossible task. But there are a number of sites, such as www.boardreader.com, www.omgili.com and www.technorati.com that can do the hard work for you.

For global companies, monitoring your reputation can be particularly tricky across borders. Lingo24 once found that a Chinese company had created an almost identical “pirate” copy of its website. This had huge potential to mislead customers. Informing Google straight away and complaining to the hosting company helped limit the damage.

Being active on social media is a good way to build customer engagement and provide a channel for feedback. But if you don’t have time to monitor it closely, it can be a recipe for a PR disaster. Surprisingly, a study by Maritz Research and Evolve24 found that more than 70 per cent of companies failed to answer customer service complaints on Twitter.

If you do find critical comments, reply as soon as possible. Encourage the customer to contact you directly by email or telephone. If you have limited time and resources, it can be worth hiring social media managers to monitor accounts. This is particularly true in different countries if you’re not fluent in the language.

And of course, more customers are turning to online review sites to post their thoughts. The rise in smartphone use has made it easier than ever to check these sites while out shopping or on the move. As well as encouraging customers to review your business, respond promptly to any feedback.

There are few shortcuts to building a great reputation. As advertising guru Jeremy Bullmore said: “Customers build an image of a brand as birds build nests. From the scraps and straws they chance upon.”

But engaging customers through live chat, social media, and other technologies allows you to keep in touch and present a friendly, approachable face to the world. There’s no doubt it takes time and effort to build a following. But there are few assets as important as a good brand name and a stellar reputation for customer service.

BIO: Christian Arno is the founder of professional translation services provider Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 170 employees spanning four continents and clients in over 60 countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated around 55 million words for businesses in every industry sector, including MTV and World Bank.

Wilson here, with your Friday weekly tip! Being one of the only Windows monkeys on the team, I’ve gotten to know Pidgin pretty well, which means I’ve spent a lot of time playing with its plugins. If you didn’t already know, Pidgin comes pre-bundled with tons of useful little add-ons to the experience (accessible from Tools -> Plugins), and I use some of them on a regular basis. Here’s a short list of my favorites and what they do:

Text Replacement

Autocomplete for Pidgin! A great plugin that turns snippets of text into full messages, allowing you to save your precious time and typing fingers. Just be careful not to use it too much; you don’t want to sound like a robot!

Transparency

I work on a laptop in 1366×768, so screen real estate counts. By carefully setting the transparency, I can get glimpses of things happening in the background without having to constantly tab around.

Windows Pidgin Options

Start Pidgin on Windows startup! This means one less thing to remember whenever you power on, which means more time for you to spend with your customers!

These are just my personal highlights–there’s plenty more in there, so if you’re on of our many Pidgin users, go take a look at see what you like!

Olark Best Practices – part 5: Chatting in Multiple Languages

Scaling your business out globally is good for the bottom line but can present some problems for your customer service. e.g. how do you help current customers with billing problems or do pre-sales with prospective new customers when they are in far away time zones or speak one of the 6,500 spoken languages of the world that you may not have in your tool kit?  Sure if you’re huge enough you can create CS teams by language and schedule per time zone* but that kind of scaling isn’t available  to the average small but growing business.

* I once toured one of AOL’s cs call centers back in the day and they had a huge facility with hundreds and hundreds of customer service agents — with little flags of the world above each group’s pod so you could easily find the French team or Brazilian team. Sweet.

Here’s  a few best practices tips we’ve found for taking care of our many customers who’s first language is not English (Olark is a small team based on the west and east coasts of the US and Canadaland).

1.  Be patient. Just because their English is not strong doesn’t mean they aren’t a Nobel Laureate. Imagine yourself trying to ask for a technical solution while speaking to a Slovakian support rep**. In fact I always make an effort to bolster their confidence when they start apologizing for their poor English skills. “No worries, your English is 100x better than my Finnish!”

** Nathan, our front end designer reinforces this tactic adding: Take the extra time to really listen and ask for clarity if you have any doubts about exactly what it is they need. This can save you from going down tangents of confusion if you start giving them advice on something they haven’t really asked about.

2.  Use Google translate, but make sure you tell them you’re going to use a translator so they understand why it may take longer than they expect for each reply from you end.

3.  Keep trying. If the chatter has multiple languages, Google translate might do better with another one. Case in point:  Just two days ago I was in a chat with a person from Brazil and I was using Google Translate to listen and speak in Portuguese with them. Google was just mangling the text making it unintelligible. We tried Spanish  and it got worse.  But when he wrote in French Google made sense of it — at least close enough that we were able to resolve the issue. (this may be related to tip #5)

4.  Learn a new language.  Really. Just like when traveling it is polite and respectful to learn as much of the language of the country you’re traveling in, if you have many visitors from Germany, pick up some German so you can at least speak rudimentary, schoolboy German to them.  If you can say “Nicht so schnell, bitte, mein Deutch is aber nicht so gut” it can help a lot towards easing the tension of a painfully stilted conversation.

5. Cut out the slang from your post.  Local idiom and slang most likely won’t travel well or be understandable to a non-native English speaker — not to mention mr. Google.

6. Be patient. Such good advice that it warrants repeating.  If their attempts at speaking your language is slow and painful, relax. Ask for clarity when necessary and generally be supportive of their efforts. It may take a while but the point will come across and you’ll end up with a very happy customer.

Hope this helps. Best of luck and remember to have fun talking with your site’s users from all across the world.

Here at Zurb, we spend a great amount of time working on our apps and maintaining positive customer interactions. As our customer list continues to grow, we’re excited to have integrated Olark into two of our apps, Notable and Verify, to ensure that each and every one of them stays happy and utilizes our apps to their fullest potential.

Our customers mean the world to us. Our apps help a wide variety of people — from established designers to people passionate about increasing design literacy. Olark can help us effectively serve customers on a one-to-one level and customize our assistance to the user’s understanding.

Olark helps us connect with current and potential customers when they need it most. We develop connections with ZURB apps users through these chats. Repeat conversations often carry over to conversations on other channels, which help us build passionate lifetime fans.

Specifically, the ZURB team uses Olark in three ways:

1. To explain the benefits and features of our apps to people who are visiting the ZURBapps marketing pages.
2. To respond to customer inquiries.
3. To understand customer needs, mindset and how users engage with our products and services.

Louis, our customer service advocate, notes that Olark has blended really well into his workflow. But it’s not just him:   Our team has benefited significantly from using Olark in our day-to-day communication with customers. In Q1, we handled over 300 chat conversations with current and potential customers. Many of these conversations led to conversions on our marketing pages and apps.

This week we discover and uncover another tiny trip-wire annoyance in a 3rd party Im client.

Initiating a chat using iChat:

Many folks like to initiate chats with their site visitors as a way of pro-actively greeting and welcoming a visitor and starting a conversation. Much in the way when you walk into a store and the person behind the counter says, “Howdy, nice day, can I help you find something?”

Recently  I found a little tick in iChat that can yield an annoying error message if you’re not careful.

If you see a visitor in your iChat buddy list you want to chat with, a simple double click on the visitor will open a chat. No problemo.

However, if you click on the visitor and select invite to chat, the window will pop up but when you try to post you’ll get this ugly warning:

What’s happening is that iChat, with the invite to chat command is creating a multi-user chat room while our Olark Jabber is only set up for 1:1 communications.  No esta  simpatico.

So stay stress free and take the easy route of just double clicking on the visitor to initiate  a new chat.

Cheers,

Bill T

How to set your chat client’s sound notification settings to your personal preferences.

We all have differing needs around notifications of visitor actions. For some, they only want to hear when a new chat request comes in.  Others, who work in sales may want to know when a new visitor hits the site or a certain page.  Still others who are in a high traffic environment with many chats going simultaneously may want to hear a swoosh every time a new post comes in or goes out.  Since Olark works with a variety of 3rd party chat clients and we get asked this question pretty often in support and live chat I thought I’d put together a primer on how to find and adjust these settings.

1. Pidgin

go to the file  menu:  tools>preferences>sounds

You can set a wide variety of actions that will send you a notification or not.

*don’t forget to make sure the mute box isn’t checked.

2. iChat

When using iChat go to, preferences>alerts

Chose an event and choose to play a sound or not and choose which sound to use.

Simple as pie.  Everyone likes pie!

3. Adium

Go to Preferences>Events.   Click on an event and an action for that event and you can turn sound on/off or choose from different sounds.  Hit “ok” and you’re all set.

4.  Meebo for web

Being a web based client it’s a little simpler and also doesn’t offer as many choices. But you can still customize it somewhat.

Go to preferences>im settings

You’ll get a screen which allows you to turn off sound for incoming and outgoing chat posts.  Not as granular as pidgin or iChat or Adium but still gets the job done.

5. Imo.im

Perhaps the simplest of the im chat clients its options are also the simplest

On the upper right, click on the gear icon to access preferences

In the preferences page you can enable or disable sound notification

Hope this helps.

Bill_T from the Olark Support Team

Set your alarm clocks to go off every Friday morning and learn more about how Olark works.

This week in Tech support @4/20

Why Is My Pidgin Being Set to Away?

If it seems like every time you turn around you’re set to away status in Pidgin and your Olark chatbox is showing in Offline messages mode, it’s likely a set up problem with your Pidgin chat Client.

Pidgin has an auto set to idle mode which is on by default, set to kick in after 5 minutes of inactivity (no mouse or keyboard).  Taking a walk to get a fresh cup of coffee, or taking a phone call is often long enough to for it to be set idle which sets your Olark chatbox connection to away mode. Frustrating.

But never fear, with a couple of deft moves you  can reset these preferences to something more functional.

1.  Go to your Pidgin preferences

I threw in a pointer to the basic status setting button. You’ll need this if you’ve been set to force away, or if you want to take a lunch break and not answer chats for a while (or at end of day).

2.  Here are the default settings you’ll find in the status/idle tab:

3. Some sample settings to change that will keep you online and answering chats

That really all there is to it. Experiment a bit and find what time range works for you as some folks like the auto set to idle mode so they don’t miss chats when they go to the kitchen to heat up some hot-pockets for a snack while answering chats.  Just remember to set the status back to “available” when you return.

Bill T

Olark Best Practices — Part 4:  Proactive Messaging

In an earlier post in the series we talked about user engagement and making your visitor aware that you’ve put live chat on your Website and that you’re standing by, ready to answer question and help people out. But sometimes that is not enough to get people started having a conversation and to that end we’ve provided a couple of more proactive approaches to get them chatting and letting you now what they need.

There are three basic ways to connect with your site visitors and let them know you’re available to start a conversation:

1. Initiate a chat with any visitor via the buddy list

2. The Olark Greeter utility

3. Targeted chat  (the Greeter on steroids!)

Initiate a chat with any visitor via the buddy list:

The simplest. It’s as easy as clicking on any user you see in your buddy list to reach out and start a chat with them.  We recommend extreme caution in doing this though as people can be touchy about their privacy and not react well to someone suddenly starting a chat with them.   I blame the Nigerian bank spammers for this level of paranoia.   But if you identify the user as a repeat visitor and someone you know won’t mind (the buddy list user info is powerful Kung-fu!), start that chat.

The Greeter

The Greeter is a cool little utility that allows you to set a timer wherein a chat box will pop up for a visitor (once per visit, not every time they navigate to a new page) with a message you create.

Ex:  set your greeter to pop up if when a user has been on your Website =/> :25 seconds  “Hey there, can I answer any questions you might have?”

It’s simple to set up and many of our customers report up to 300% more chats when they employ the Greeter.  You can find The Greeter from the customize tab in your Olark.com dashboard.

Targeted Chat

This is basically The Greeter on steroids and a high protein diet. You can employ Targeted Chat to get completely granular with the scenarios for reaching out.

A couple of example of things you can do using Targeted Chat rules:

If a user is on say, his 3rd visit to Olark  expand the chat with this message: “Welcome back, can we help you out, do you have any questions?”  and change his nickname in the buddy list to “repeat visitor”

If a visitor has been on “this page” for the second time in one session, expand the chat with his message: “Are you having any difficulties with the download process? Can I help you?”

“Highlight returning visitors in my buddy list”

Target my French visitors by sending a custom message in their language:    If the visitor’s country is France, send this message:  “Bonjour, Comment etes-vous?”

If a visitor is viewing the page, http://www.olark.com/extensions/targeting, expand the box with this message: “Any feedback on Targeted chat you’d like to share with us?”

You get the idea, the only limits are your own creativity in interacting with your customers and visitors. You can turn the rules off and on as needed and really test out which messaging works best. This is powerful Juju in helping you to make the most of your live chat offering.

Have fun and be sure to tell us of creative ways you’ve found to use targeted chat to ramp up chatting with your site’s visitors.

Olark Best Practices – Part 3: Offline Messaging

Okay, you have to go offline sometimes, it’s inevitable. Even the Spartans at Thermopylae had to take a lunch break now and again.

So what’s the best thing to do with your Olark Live chat when you’re out recharging your batteries?

Offline messaging

Yep, the best thing you can do is to make sure your site visitors have a clear path to contact your with their issues and questions regardless of your  instant availability via chat.  To that end we’ve set the chat box to instantly change to an offline email submission form that you can set to send to an address(s) whenever you log out of your im chat client.   We think that’s a pretty perfect one-stop solution for customer interaction.

However….

Not everyone agrees and so we’ve built in the option to hide the chat box when you’re offline.  The use case for this is a strong one. You may have a rich content Help Center with Knowledge base, FAQ, Community forums AND email/phone contacts that you’d like to funnel users to when you’re not available to live chat with them. In that case, hiding the chat box when you’re unavailable makes perfect sense.

Whichever way you chose to serve your visitors is up to you as you know your customers best. We only suggest that if you choose the latter meme,  you pay special attention to daylighting the path so that people initially looking for that Olark live chat box will have no problem finding their way to your Help Center.

Olark Best Practices — Part 4:  Proactive Messaging

Olark Best Practices – part 2: User Engagement
Okay, you’ve set up Olark on your web site (every page!) and hooked up your chat client and set it to available.  So why aren’t the chats pouring in? You can see tons of traffic on your Kitties And Puppies In Love website (through your chat client buddylist ) and you just know that your people love to talk about their leetle animal buddies. So what’s going on, what are you missing?

It could be that people just aren’t aware that you have live chat available. Our themes are pretty cool (thanks Nathan and Danielle) but in trying to be somewhat unobtrusive we keep the tabs as thin as possible and down on the bottom of the page.  It’s possible that people just aren’t noticing the chat tab while looking at all the coolio content on your site.

What to do?

Get your chat noticed!  Here are some easy to utilize practices that will help draw attention to your live chat feature.

#1  Attention Grabber

The name is a perfect description of this feature.  The Attention Grabber allows you to place an off the shelf or custom image to go along with your chat box window to well, grab a visitor’s attention.  This feature, which you’ll find in the customize tab of your account console has a couple of Olark built images:

You can also create your own and upload them to use….

…and even add a snazzy “slide out” feature to give a little animation to the call to action.

#2 Click to chat image or link

A slight variation of the Attention Grabber is using a Click-2-Chat link or image that can be strategically placed anywhere on your website.

These can be in the form of links, a click-able image or even a custom tab

You can even set it up so the chat box doesn’t show up at all until someone clicks on the image (to conserve real estate on your Web site).  Here’s a quick Tutorial on setting this up.

We’ve had countless customers tell us of the up to 300% uptick in chats that providing an Attention Grabber or Click To Chat link encourages.

We can’t recommend this feature highly enough and strongly recommend this for your site if you’re feeling like you’re not getting the amount of live chats that you anticipated.

The next post in this Best Practices Series will discuss the next step in user engagement if putting up attention grabbing calls to action is still not getting you the results you desire.

Olark Best Practices – Part 3: Offline Messaging