It’s a company’s worst nightmare: a client or customer calls, unhappy with the product or service they have received. An unhappy customer should always be taken seriously. Research has suggested that unhappy customers are very likely to pass on their happiness to their friends and family. In fact, a disgruntled customer can quickly tell many other people about the bad service or product they have received from your business. This is a negative marketing message, counteracting all the positive promotion you have been trying to drum up for your company. This post will tell you how you can deal with unhappy customers using your CRM software

Dealing with disgruntled customers

If you have a customer who is unhappy, the most important thing to do is not to panic and not ignore the situation. Many businesses either sweep aside any critiques of their business, or displace the blame onto an employee, making that employee feel terrible. Neither is the correct approach. It is important to approach the situation calmly and to keep communication with the unhappy customer open. Ideally, it is important that you take for responsibility for the problem — even if you think the customer or client was partly at fault. Next, you must sincerely apologize for the problem directly to the customer in a personalized way. Then, you must try to make amends so the customer remains satisfied. Making amends can be as simple as asking the customer or client “what can we do to make this right?” and following through on the action the customer has recommended. Of course, some customers will make unreasonable demands, or demands the company cannot meet. However, by continuing to communicate and by continually expressing a desire to correct the situation, you can often come up with some sort of compromise that will leave the customer satisfied as to the level of service they’re getting.

Relenta CRM and disgruntled customers

Relenta CRM can help your company deal with unsatisfied customers. Many customers initially make their complaints or concerns known via e-mail. If this is the case, your Relenta CRM system allows you to quickly access to the customer’s complaint in the correct department. This allows someone from the right department to quickly deal with the problem. At the same time, since Relenta CRM does not hide individual e-mails within individual e-mail inboxes, it is far less likely that customer complaints can be lost and ignored. Administrators and other members of the team can see that a customer has written in with a complaint, and this can help ensure that several team members are aware of the problem and are prepared to act on the problem. Relenta CRM also allows your company to keep a history of e-mails for each contact and plan forward using a shared calendar. This allows you to see exactly how a complaint has been handled, how often a particular customer has made complaints in the past, and what a customer’s order history is with the company. This allows the company to quickly pinpoint potentially problematic clients and customers, and allows team members to quickly gather information about a specific order or request, in order to pinpoint what went wrong. Relenta CRM can even allow your team to prepare canned emails that can be personalized. This allows your team to respond to customer complaints automatically.

CRM, shared calender, CRM software

You don’t want your sales floor having to learn complicated software just to get their leads. The leads should come down the pipeline with ease, so they can get on the phones and start selling. AIMPromote is the leader in CRM, customer relationship management software, with a very small learning curve. They’ve just added new features and upgrades to their software, and you can read it about it below in their press release.

Traverse City, MI October 19th 2007 — AIMpromote, provider of lead management and customer relationship management software, has launched a significant upgrade to their CRM offering. The newly added white-label CRM software feature enhances the value that lead aggregators can offer to their lead purchasing customers. The enhanced reselling functionality provides an intuitive interface to completely manage the selling of a privately labeled CRM as their own.

Lead aggregators operate in the highly competitive B2B space, and need ways to add value to their offerings. Michael Myles, President and CEO of AIMpromote said “The significant added value provided by the AIMpromote white-label customer relationship software gives lead aggregators a way to differentiate themselves in what has become a highly commoditized market.” He went on to say that “this product also provides an easy way to leverage existing client bases to more rapidly increase sales.”

The close tie-in between the selling of leads and the powerful sales management functionality of the AIMpromote customer relationship software enables the end-users of the system to easily purchase leads that are then available to be worked directly in the system. There is no importing necessary. Billing is also consolidated, providing an easy way for the end-user to manage their funds and billing profile. The system has been designed from the ground-up to offer high levels of customizability and advanced functionality for everyone involved, while requiring little investment in time.

The CRM reselling and lead sales functions functionality includes the ability for lead aggregators and CRM software resellers to completely customize pricing, including setup fees, discounts, and free trials. This flexibility empowers the resellers of the system to enhance their profit margins as they see fit. The CRM reselling system allows lead aggregators and consultants the ability to brand their system with their own logo and contact information. Integrated Authorize.Net payment processing gives an interface to take credit cards automatically, and have the funds deposited directly into their bank accounts. The advanced accounting and reporting pages in the AIMpromote system give a top-down view of the business as a whole, as well as for each individual account.

The tiered approach that AIMpromote has taken to the reselling of their powerful customer relationship management software gives even the end-user clients the ability to also resell the system. The billing and accounting system automatically takes care of everything for them, even automatically setting up accounts. “The ease of use and flexibility of the AIMpromote CRM for those providing business-to-business consultation services and those selling leads has created an opportunity to significantly improve the bottom line, with very little time or expense,” said Matt Wolfe, Vice President of Operations for AIMpromote. Wolfe added, “The service and functionality of the system is unique in that customers are supported through an integrated support ticket system by their parent account. The end-users of the system will never know that the service they are using is being resold, or that the company from which they are licensing the software are not the actual manufacturers of the software. To them, it won’t be AIMpromote at all, it will be ‘ABC Software Company CRM’, or whatever name the company reselling the software chooses.”

About AIMpromote

AIMpromote leads the market in growth and technology for on-demand lead management and CRM reselling solutions. AIMpromotes enterprise lead management software empowers companies in any industry to more effectively generate, delegate, and report on leads and the teams that manage them. AIMpromote is the only solution that integrates detailed web analytics with sales and marketing analytics to provide a complete closed-loop view of the sales process. The AIMpromote lead management software offers a completely customized solution that can be tailored to fit any organization’s customer acquisition workflow. The unique combination of having the most functionality, and the lowest total cost of ownership, AIMpromote is the most cost effective solution for improving close rates and marketing efficiency.

CRM, AIMPromote, lead management, software

Currently at my job, we have been toying around with the idea of automatic dialers. You know the phone calls that you get from a computer that tells you to stay on the line for a very important message type of thing. I’m not completely sold on the idea, because I usually hang up when I get these kind of calls.

Our dialer is targeted towards people who want these types of calls though, so I do think in the end it will be successful. I just wish I would have known about Vontoo before we spent all the money we did on the computer and software. Now this is the way to go. Voice messaging, without all the extra hardware and software that we had to purchase.

Vontoo voice messaging allows businesses to create, send, and track voice messages. It gets your companies message out to the people that want to hear it. The people that it calls are all opt-in clients, and it won’t interfere with the Do Not Call Registry that gets so many companies in trouble. All the people are checked against this list before ever being entered into the Vontoo system.

Here is what one customer had to say about their success with using the Vontoo voice messaging system…

Using the player’s voice was the key. The message boards lit up with fans saying how much they loved getting a phone call.

Dennis O’Connor
Memphis Grizzlies

Yes, that’s right! They used some of the player’s recorded voices to get the fans interested. Isn’t that a wonderful idea? I would love to give this company a try, and I’m going to email my boss this link, just to see if he wants to try something different. We could have saved sooooo much money if I had only found them sooner.

voice marketing, voice broadcasting, call messaging, auto dialers

Do I have any readers out there that are preparing for their licensing in the real estate, mortgage, or appraisal business? Well the best way to do that is cram all the information in your brain the night before right? How about some software that will help you do just that?

You can prepare for your real estate exam easily with the CompuCram.com exam prep software. It has everything you need to study, and pass your exam, and you can even try out their free demo version before you make your purchase.

exam prep software, real estate exam, real estate exam software

Do I have any Joomla! users out there? I’ve been avoiding it for a couple weeks now at my job, but today I jumped into it head first, and I really like how it works! I learned how to do Sections, Categories, and Content Items, and learned how the hierarchy worked.

I wanted to share a really good site that helped me learn a lot, called Absolute Beginners Guide to Joomla!. It is by far the greatest Joomla resource I found on the net for a n00b like me.

Does anyone have any suggestions on things I should read?

Joomla!, CMS

One of the greatest frustrations for me is editing pdf documents. I usually end up just retyping them, because I am a pretty fast typer. In the time it takes me to figure out how to edit them, I can have them retyped, and emailed already.

If you’ve ever wanted to be able to edit a PDF file, you know it can be frustrating. Enter PDF conversion software,which will help you convert pdf to Word or to Excel.

PDF conversion software, convert pdf to Word, convert pdf to Excel

There are generally three Windows errors that have to do with your printer, that seem to be a total nuisance and hard to get rid of. They tend to happen when you first start your computer, you go to print something, or when you add a new printer.

1. “Spooler SubSystem App has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”
2. “Operation could not be completed. The print spooler service is not running.”
3. “Spooler SubSystem App stopped working and was closed.”

Spooler SubSystem is just a normal function in Windows to spool printer jobs, and normally this is not an issue. But some known spyware and trojans can hide as these services, making your computer spit out the above errors. These errors generally mean that you have some type of virus on your computer.

You can combat this virus and get rid of the Spooler SubSystem App error with the True Sword software offered by Security Strong Hold. It runs on your Windows computer, finding and eliminating these viruses and trojans. There is no risk in trying out True Sword, because if the Spooler SubSystem App Error Fix Wizard does not solve your problem, they will give you a 100% refund.

Spooler SubSystem Error, printer errors, viruses, trojans

I just read on the Google blog about their GOOG-411 service that they launched a few months ago. I totally missed that, because today was the first day I have even heard of it.

When you dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) you can search for businesses by voice and get connected to those businesses for free. Now they have added a new feature to this service that is pretty cool.

Once you find the business you want, just say, “map it” and they will send you directions by text message, with a link to Google maps to visually see your destination.

I’m feeling like Napoleon’s brother over here, Kip. I love technology.

GOOG411, Google, Google Maps

No one wants to lose all their data. Whether it be business documents, or personal photos of your children growing up, losing this kind of information can be heart breaking. There is no need to ever go through this kind of data lose when there is backup software that you can use like Backup4all.

Backup4all is for Windows based machines including Vista now. It allows you to backup to any network drive, backup to FTP, DVD, or any other USB device. Backup4all comes in three editions: Professional, Standard and Lite.

Backup4all Lite

• Easy file and folder selection
• File filtering - powerful filtering engine with lots of options (filter by attribute, size, date, name and type)
• Multiple backup job configurations
• Intuitive interface - explorer-like, lets you see all files from the backup and new files that will be stored at the next backup execution

Backup4all Standard

• Full backup - starting point for all other backups, and contains all the data in the folders and files that are selected to be backed up
• Differential backup - contains all files that have changed since the last full backup
• Backup directly to CD and DVD - Backup4all has its own built-in CD/DVD burning support
• One Touch Backup - you can configure Backup4all to execute a backup job or a backup group when a button from an USB enclosure is pressed

Backup4all Professional

• Incremental backup - stores all files that have changed since the last full, differential or incremental backup
• Backup to FTP - backup your files to remote locations using the FTP service (with SSL support, active/passive transfer modes, firewall support)
• Test FTP backups using XCRC (is supported by server) - this speeds up the testing as Backup4all will verify the backup based on the CRC information received from server
• Email notifications - you can configure Backup4all to send custom emails after a finished backup with success, error, warning notifications

To download Backup4all, or for more information, please visit BackUp4All.com.

backups, Windows backups, data backup

I found a cool little Windows app called Tag2Find. It’s a simple on the fly way to tag your windows files, like images, music, videos, etc. Very cool and easy way to find what you are looking for on your computer. The download also includes an embedded media player for you to enjoy your tagged files.

Tag2Find, file search