With that said, no matter how hard we try, how hard we work, or how good our intentions may be in delivering our promised service offering, we still manage to upset at least a handful of clients each year. Given our scale, and the number of clients we service, that is a very small %, though wouldn’t it be great to get that number to Zero?

Sometimes it’s a misunderstanding, often it is human error or bad expectation management, and oftentimes it’s ego or finances weighing in on the kerfuffle. The point is, regardless of how hard a company tries to keep every client as satisfied as possible, there are always going to be problems that arise from both sides of the fence.

Why do disagreements occur between customers and businesses?

We don’t think there is any one reason, other than that there are human beings involved in the collaboration. We all have our own ideas, opinions and expectations of one another in a working relationship, and even though we have spent literally hundreds of thousands of dollars building a custom collaboration system (TheHub) to manage the accountability and work flow process of the campaigns we run, no piece of software will ever have an answer for a client, employee or contributor who is having a bad day.

We’re human, we all experience those days.

But, isn’t the customer always right?

This old adage is heralded by any well trained customer service rep that did their training in the last 30 years, and for good reason: without customers, there IS no business. What’s key however, is to remember that the customer is right only so as long as they are still a customer. At some point, a customer can change roles. Should a shoplifter in a supermarket still be treated as a customer?

As a business owner, you’re in business to be in business. And when in business you do not have to accept every customer. In fact, you can and should draw the line at customers lying to take advantage, stealing, or being abusive. As a business owner it is in your interests to know which type of customers you should service, and which you should simply not cater to.

That may sound harsh, and go against anything you have read about customer service – though isn’t it far more advantageous to spend your time servicing the right type of customers, and having the time to service them well, than trying to be everything to everyone?

We love our clients, and we love the campaigns we work on for them, but unfortunately when most businesses think that “the more customers the better”, they’re usually wrong. Some customers are quite simply bad for business.

Surely, every relationship can be salvaged

In a perfect world, every customer relationship could and should be salvaged in the light of confrontation or disagreement; but only up until the point that the value of the relationship outweighs the risk.

There is a reason why a credit card company freezes credit, or a Telephone company cuts the line if bills go unpaid. They are weighing up risk. It is in their respective interest to keep their paying customers, if the customer is meeting their side of the arrangement. The moment the risk gets to be too great, is the exact moment the relationship becomes unsalvageable.

Know when to say No.

A story I overheard in a hotel-lobby bar from a Southwest pilot passing through, has stuck with me to this day. He spoke of a female passenger who traveled frequently with his airline. The woman was apparently in a constant state of disappointment with every aspect of Southwest’s service. So much so that within the company they began to name her the “Southwest Pen Pal”, as after every flight she took, she would spend the time to send the airline a written complaint.

The complaints varied from problems with in flight meals, to the flight attendants’ uniforms, the check in counters and seat allocation. Each time she wrote, as company procedure required, someone within the organization had to investigate each matter & take the time to reply.

Her final letter, littered with a shopping list of complaints, was finally pushed up the tree and landed on the CEO’s desk (Herb Kelleher), requesting that he reply personally.

Swiftly he wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’”

If you have a billion users, and a mere 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you’d spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.

If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you’d need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up.

That, folks, is internet scale.

We are often asked in our Live Support Chat ‘Do you guys ever sleep?‘ or ‘How can you afford to offer 24×7-365 live support, as a start up?‘. The answer is simple really, and it all comes down to the foundation of this very business.

To put it bluntly, the SEO industry for the most part totally sucks when it comes to client service and accountability. Agencies and ‘celebrity’ (spew) SEO consultants that work the speaking circuit tend to spend more time promoting their capabilities, their new book or their personal brand, than they do focused on delivering value to their customers. Which is where LC is a little different.

In short, we are well aware that this business is nothing without our customers. Evidently so, as we named the company LOVEclients. So how do we keep up with the demands of 24×7-365 live support, scale the business, and still deliver a quality service that our customers have become accustomed to?

It is a mix of the following:

Technology (The HUB)

Every LoveClients campaign is managed within a custom built application that acts as a central communication tool for everyone working on the campaign.

The hub, which is what we call it internally, is a place where clients can login to track progress, provide their input, approve process elements, and communicate directly with the team 24×7-365. It keeps everyone accountable, and campaigns on track.

All reporting, communication, trackable metrics and and site analytics are conveniently located in one place, so as to make daily decision making an informed, and simple process.

Multiple TimeZones

When LoveClients first started trading, we opened a 24×7 production facility based out of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We thought we would take advantage of the low production and operation costs, and access to great talent. It didn’t work however, here’s why:

In under 12 months, we came to realize that the type of people that were willing to work the ‘late shift’, really were not suited to the level of fanatical support that we have for our clients, and their respective campaigns. To add, due to the timezone difference our best team members were working the day shift; while our clients were sleeping. When clients awoke, they were then dealing with the team on nightshift.

We are still paying for that mistake, but it taught us many, many valuable lessons. We adapted quickly by opening offices within the TimeZones our clients trade in, and scaled KL down.

Now we operate separate offices and production facilities in Vancouver, London, Riga and Melbourne, taking advantage of the differences in timezone to offer a true 24×7-365 service offering. Each office now has an overlap, of a few hours, so as the team in London is coming toward the end of their day, the crew in Vancouver takes over, and as Vancouver is calling it quits, Melbourne is fresh and ready to be of service.

So.. No, our clients are not serviced by half-asleep crew in stale offices that stay open 24×7-365 – but instead by opening strategically placed global offices, and a custom built central communication tool (The hub), we are able to offer 24×7-365 live client service & support, by mother tongue, english speaking professionals who keep normal hours!

Mother Tongue client service

When I called to query a charge on my AMEX bill last month, I was routed from Vancouver (Canada) to Bangalore, India. The representative that took my call was helpful enough, and for a task as simple as checking a transaction on my statement, I completely understood why AMEX would use a facility in India to cut down their customer service costs.

Though when it comes to providing high-level, often culturally sensitive, marketing advice; the timezone and cultural differences between say Birmingham, Boston and Bangalore can play a massive role in the quality of advice you receive from your SEO Agency. Even though the human resource costs are high in cities like Vancouver & London, we have found that keeping customer service, strategy planning and research on-shore has played a massive role in the overall experience for our customers.

There are many great SEO companies that operate throughout places like India and the Philippines, though there is a notable difference between simply delivering a shopping-list of tasks for a customer, and actually getting involved in a clients business, understanding their objectives, the cultural sensitivities and their specific audience requirements.

Don’t try to be Everything to Everyone

Love the clients you have, and service them well, but don’t try and tackle tasks that are way out of scope of your offering. If you were to walk in to a McDonalds Restaurant, and order a plate of Spaghetti Bolognese, they are not going to hop out the back and do their best to whip up the sauce, to keep their customer happy. On the contrary, they stick to what they know best & deliver what they know works.

As a small business providing a professional service offering you can’t be everything to everyone. Know your limits and deliver a brilliant customer experience to those customers that suit your service or product offering, trying to deliver something that is way out of scope or simply not part of our core competency will only end in tears.

Manage Client Expectations

For starters, don’t even begin to promise #1 rankings as a reputable SEO Agency. A sure fire way to lose a client is to promise deliverables that are out of your 100% complete-control within a timeframe that is totally unrealistic.

Not only will you not keep your customers happy, you will lose them for good. Prior to building LoveClients the founders of this company worked in the web design & advertising space so we are all very well aware of how the promise of a deadline that is not met, can ruin a working relationship in less time that it took for you to read this blog post.

As a service provider, if you provide realistic expectations from the outset and explain your channels of communication, then life will be a great deal easier for all parties concerned.

In our instance, we have three very specific forms of communication. Live Chat, The Hub & a 24×7-365 Live Call Back service. No power-point presentations, no long-winded lunches & no, we will not write you a proposal. As outlined on our Contact Us page, we simply don’t do meetings.

Although DeWitt Clinton makes a valid and interesting point about the true human cost of scaling client support, it is still arguably possible to manage at scale if expectations are managed correctly, the technology is in place to communicate efficiently & of course if the company has hired the right people (in the correct timezone) that are dedicated to client satisfaction, & not just client service.

Obviously these questions matter for anyone trying to make money using different forms of content distribution, whether it be advertising in a local newspaper or taking out new ad space on YouTube. But what matters even more is how these new forms will actually affect the content itself. Let’s look at a few recent ideas and see what they can tell us.

Marshall McLuhan Is Still Pretty Damn Important.

Now, if you remember nothing else from this pioneering Canadian media theorist, just take his most famous aphorism: “the medium is the message“. It’s since been tweaked and refuted and played with so many times as to lose some of its original meaning, but in general, you can take it to mean form affects (or is) content.

Look at the Kindle, for example. The world’s biggest online bookseller has now entered the hardware game, creating a device that is designed to replace the very book form itself. And of course Amazon, being a huge seller of books, is hoping to control and monetize as much of the distribution method as possible. It’s very much along the lines of Apple’s iTunes store: create a device that a lot of people buy, then offer an elegant solution to sell content for that device.

Why Comparisons With the Music Industry Aren’t Always Perfect.

But comparisons with the music industry don’t work after a certain point: formats have changed quite frequently in the last several years, from vinyl->tape->CD->digital. Books have been the same for hundreds of years. So any time we get over-excited about the death of print, we need to step back and look at the longer view, like Dave Eggers suggests:

Eggers has a point. But there are some very convincing arguments to the contrary, and as Apple has proven, if a device good and useable enough comes out, enough people will buy one that it can change an entire industry in the course of a few years. But we do need to remember: completely ignoring print and assuming that a declining readership means a non-existent readership just isn’t a good idea.

A Microcosm For Us All: Intellectuals and Published Content.

A recent argument has also been floating around about Masters and PhD dissertations, and how the cost of publishing them is nearly always prohibitive. The argument usually continues that the ‘book’ form for academic argument is not always ideal; it has created the expectation that if a professor has something good to say on a subject, it must come in a minimum of 220 pages. While this might seem like a small corner of the publishing market, it’s actually a perfect microcosm of some bigger changes we might see in the future.

A long, read-by-no one dissertation is an antiquated notion. Don’t get me wrong—I’m sure it will continue for some time, but any progressive university is probably realizing that the whole ‘university publishing’ business will have to change radically over the next several years.

The Delivery Method Starts Changing the Stuff Inside.

Here is where the dozens of options available for content publishing (the form, or medium) will begin to change the content itself. Once the necessary existential debates on the role of the academy and the importance of intellectual discourse are hashed out, we are going to be looking at a very different landscape, one where serious academic thought is not walled up in quarterly journals but actively distributed across a whole range of channels.

Many of these channels will not be conducive to a 220-page dissertation. Some will support, say, a 15-page essay, others might be wonderful for a short book (say 100 pages) on a particular subject, others only a brief article. But all of these options, and the various ways in which content creators, editors, and distributors will try and monetize this process is definitely going to change the content itself.

And Just Why Does This Matter to Us?

Simple: if you get too focused on creating quality content along a single model, the speed of innovation might take you for a loop. Things don’t change so fast that all your hard work will disappear in a moment, but if you are trying to improve your website’s SEO, build a brand online, or market your product through any kind of content creation, you need to pay attention to how the mediums are changing.

Just because Twitter has become insanely popular in the last 3 years doesn’t mean you need to scrap your print advertising budget and start tweeting incessantly. That would be quite useless. But it does mean you need to be conscious when something like a Twitter pops up, and suddenly a new 140-character format for content exists. Remember not to get too comfortable and you’ll stay on the right track.

(photos by flickr users peagreengirl and cogdogblog. Used under a creative commons license.)

So Yes, Jerry isn’t a bill gates. He came up with one massive idea and is worth a few billion dollars but i can’t see his business skills extending further than that of Yahoo. The board of directors should have hired a seasoned veteran, a CEO with some business accumen to take over after Terry Semmel left and that decision has led to the companies poor share price (Apart from the fact Google is whipping them in search).

Good luck to you Yahoo, but its a very long road to stay independant for you at this point. Maybe it’s time to speak to your friend Rupert about that other option!

Her departure from Ninemsn’s product and network strategy division comes shortly after Jane O’Connell left as director of the unit last December.

Wilson, who is one of Australia’s most respected experts on mobile marketing, was responsible for new developments in engagement, interaction, social networking and user generated content at Ninemsn.

Explaining why she resigned from the company, Wilson would only say: “I had a lot of ideas and I needed to be slightly less constrained in my ability to deliver on them.”

Wilson said her position, which was newly created in August last year, would not be replaced and said Ninemsn was “rethinking” the role of product and network strategy unit.

A spokeswoman at Ninemsn said the unit would still operate but added a restructuring has taken place following the departures of both O’Connell and Wilson.

Wilson said she would be doing consulting work and was working on securing backing for ideas that she wanted to develop.

Before ninemsn, Wilson was previously managing director of HWW, a content provider and developer of online sites which was bought by Ninemsn.

As expected, Windows VP Mike Sievert, online services senior VP Steven Berkowitz, and Windows Mobile head Pieter Knook are all leaving the company. Knook is heading to a new post at Vodafone, Sievert plans to start his own company, and Berkowitz will stay at Microsoft through August, as his duties transition to other executives.