You know you’re supposed to build a customer list, and you’ve even done a great job of creating one and keeping it updated. But knowing the best way to use it is an entirely different story.

Yaro Starak’s Small Business Branding & Marketing blog has a few ideas, all of which, happily, don’t cost anything to implement (except your time and devotion, of course).

1. Broadcast Monthly.
   You don’t want to be constantly throwing email at your customers, but you also don’t want to lose track of them, either. One message a month is about right, especially if the information has real value.
2. Offer Discounts.
   It’s a pretty common way to use a customer list, and there’s a reason for that—it helps convert prospects into paying customers, and former customers back into current ones.
3. Encourage Referrals.
   Another technique that’s used often because it works: offer your customers an incentive to refer their friends to you. “Happy customers are happy to spread the word, they just sometimes need a little nudge to do it.”
4. Joint Ventures.
   If there’s a business in your area that’s not in direct competition with you, but with whom you share similar customers, offer to send an announcement about their services to your list, in exchange for an announcement about you to their list.
5. Market Research.
   Use your customer list as a focus group for new products, or to get details about the kinds of customers who are drawn to your business. Free services like Survey Monkey make it easy to create online surveys that you can link to from your email.

   There are lots more explanatory details in the original article

If it’s thought out carefully, a Frequently Asked Questions page can be a great tool for a business with a web presence. It can be the point of first contact for a potential customer trying to decide whether you’re the right business for them. It can be a resource for an existing customer who needs help. And it can even be a way for you to sneak in a little more sales copy into the site.

Unfortunately, if you create your FAQ when you’re just starting out, you don’t really know for certain what the common questions will be. If the page is never updated after that, your FAQ will not be nearly as useful as it could be.

Here are some good questions to start with, but put a note in your calendar today to have a look at your FAQ every few months to make sure it really reflects what your customers are curious about.

• How quickly can you get the job done?

• What services do you offer?

• What are your credentials?

• What are your payment options?

• What if I’m not satisfied? Do you have a guarantee?

• What’s the best way to contact you if I need help?

• Are you available on weekends? In the evening?

• Do you offer any discounts?

If you’d like a little more information, Frank Ross’s Home-Based Business blog’s article on this topic is what got me thinking about FAQs and small businesses.

I just had a fantastic customer service experience with Zappos.

“Fantastic” and “customer service” in the same sentence?

I was just as surprised, but after I recovered from the pleasant shock, I called back to thank them. I also asked what Zappos does to train their customer service reps.

The rep I was talking with couldn’t stop telling me what a great a place to work it is.

Their training and employee development programs:

• 2 weeks of initial training
• Plus on-going training on-site (with various manufacturers reps)
• With an on-site coach for employees to make goals and work with them to meet them

For call reps, they offer a clear path to promotion:

• temp -> perm 3 mos, promotions based on performance
• level 1 -> 3 mos
• level 2 -> 3 mos
• level 3 -> 3 mos

The performance metrics they use to promote folks include:

• “Call” metrics, rather than phone metrics—was the proper process followed for what was being handled; did they include the right elements in their conversation with the customer?
• “Attendance & punctuality are big here,” she said
• Test score percentages (level 1 has to score at least 90%, it goes up from there)

Here are a couple of articles about their customer service philosophy:

At Zappos, customer-service employees don’t use scripts and aren’t pressed to keep calls short. Hsieh says customer loyalty is so important to the company culture that the call center and headquarters have to be in the same place—Las Vegas. Every new hire spends four weeks as a customer-service rep and a week in the Kentucky warehouse before starting work. from Business Week

Zappos’s three-week training course for call-center reps starts with telling employees to forget everything they’ve learned. That’s partly because Zappos, a six-year-old online shoe retailer with $184 million in 2004 gross sales, isn’t like many other companies. The training course’s required reading? A 156-page handbook on Zappos culture, written entirely by employees themselves. In it, they quote Jimi Hendrix, praise the company-paid lunches, and tell stories about how they’ve felt empowered to help customers. Chairman and founder Nick Swinmurn… calls Zappos “a service company that happens to sell shoes.” from Fast Company mag

According to business guru Tom Peters every company that wants to thrive now, big or small, needs to be, first, a customer service company.

From Harleys to iPods to Nyquil to the $46 billion value-added water market, we are miles and miles—and then more miles—beyond the “stuff” economy. source