Today I wrote another article and submitted it to www.EzineArticles.com, where I had written my first piece relevant to this blog a couple of weeks ago (and an earlier one last fall that was on another subject altogether). You may recall from a previous (Day 16) post that the folks at Ezine Articles granted me the lofty status of “Expert Author”—but upon further investigation, just as I suspected, hundreds (if not thousands) of other article submitters have in fact been awarded the same distinction! But it’s nice to be able to claim “expert” status, no matter where the designation comes from.
This second article was prompted by my concern over the failure of so many high-priced professionals (like doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, etc.) to keep up with the changing preferences—and in fact, the demands—of today’s Internet-savvy marketplace. I won’t go into detail here about what I wrote (click the link below for my main blog site and the “Day 31″ post to access that article), but after describing what I see as the problem, I announced that in the future I will personally be much more selective about where I spend money for those kinds of high-ticket services. If I don’t feel that I am going to receive the kind of outstanding customer service (on an ongoing basis) that one has a right to expect, then I’ll find a competitor who will provide it for me.
What prompted me to write a whole article about that, you may be wondering? Well, without getting specific, I’ll just say that two or three professionals in the categories I mentioned above, whose services I’ve been using for a while, have fallen short of what I consider to be excellent customer service. And I realized that although they are, yes, familiar and even though it does, yes, require extra effort to start a new relationship with somebody else, in the long run it will be worth it. Remember, these are professionals whose services do not come cheaply. Why should they be rewarded for failing to keep up with their more market-conscious competitors?
Ironically, I received a pleasant surprise shortly after finishing the article. I was checking the Internet to shop for a possible replacement for one of my professional service-providers with whom I have become dissatisfied for a couple of reasons. I discovered that the person I had previously used for this service when I lived in California (19 years ago) and liked very much is still in business. Not only has he not retired yet (which I had incorrectly assumed), but he also has an impressive presence on the Internet, including videos he has personally created to answer in detail some of the questions people have about his services. I recall his office environment being very pleasant 19 years ago, and I noticed that somebody else (a current customer writing a “review” of him on www.Yelp.com) mentioned that it’s still that way today. So, believe it or not, I’ve decided that I’m actually willing to travel to California just to be able to have that kind of quality experience when I periodically need the service he provides.
Of course, because the main purpose of writing an Ezine article is to prompt readers to click the link and discover my main blog site, I found an obvious way to relate the “customer service” angle to what I’m discussing in these posts almost every day. Because it is my goal to create a business of my own in which I am showing professionals how to maximize their Internet presence and keep up with what many of today’s customers (and all of tomorrow’s customers) want to see, expressing my concern over that issue in writing means that I’d better be able to “deliver the goods” myself when the time comes! And I’d better be able to show other entrepreneurs how to do it, too.
Unfortunately, I think that a lot of professionals who own their own businesses often forget that in order to be successful on a consistent basis, they must know how to do two things at the same time. They must of course be better than their competitors in technical expertise—that’s a given—but they must also master the challenges of running a business with everything that entails. Large companies can easily solve that problem by delegating authority to the most qualified people in each department, but small entrepreneurs too often try to “wing it” and assume they can retain loyal customers just on the basis of their technical skills alone. I think that will become much harder to do in the future, because it has become easier than ever for their customers to research the competition on the Internet (as I did today) and get lots of other recommendations through the “social media” sites. And their customers are only going to become more demanding as time goes on.
If you’re curious about how I’m doing on this 26- week “accountability”
project–including the full, unedited blog postings for each day as I go along (with videos, photos, comments, and other links)–please visit my Creating an Internet Business blog site. I’ll look forward to seeing you there!