Red Kite Creative

Productivity

Passivity Toward Clients

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Back around Christmas I got a Samsung Galaxy Active 2 watch to replace my old Garmin Vivofit. The watch is really nice, it has completely replaced my Garmin devices including a 230 running watch – so much better than that.

But it has one really strange problem that I encountered the first time I used my ski machine.

The watch connects to Samsung Health on a phone. I like this better than Garmin’s Connect dashboard.

In the watch when you work out, you can choose from a lot of different workouts from walking to running to lifting to hiking to swimming… many others. There’s an ‘Other Workout’ that I use for gardening and yard work.

However – in Samsung Health (phone app) there are hundreds of activities to choose from. Only a tiny number are actually available in the watch.

There’s no way to add one workout type, the way you add an app or widget to the watch. There’s no way to create a custom workout in the watch.

This seems to me really odd, that such a great watch with so many health features has this severe limitation. Cross country skiing would work great for my ski machine. It’s in the app, but not available on the watch.

When I contacted their support and asked about this, they cheerfully told me to put in a feature request. Here is the thread in the Samsung user community regarding the missing workouts on the watch. It was started just over a year ago and has 8 pages of users wondering why a seemingly basic feature is missing on this high-end, rather expensive health-focused watch. Samsung support marked the issue ‘solved’ on the same day it was posted, but it has never been ‘solved’ or addressed since by Samsung.

That’s passivity toward customers. A lack of concern over a key issue that affects a lot of their watch users who have a genuine need for a basic feature.

This week I got a new password manager that has features I need for handling particular business data. It’s a lot better than my previous one, and offers an important feature that lets me customize templates to hold my data in a really organized way. That’s great!

However, as you might imagine, business data might change from time to time. Although you can delete these custom templates, you can never edit them.

So if for example you eventually need to remove a few fields or add a few fields to your custom template, you can’t. Period. You have to first:

  • Create a new custom template.
  • Manually copy all the info for all the custom notes you’ve created into the new custom template – if you have 500 notes, you have to do this 500 times.
  • Then delete the old custom template.

Just like with the Galaxy watch, this edit feature has been requested by users. Not just for 1 year. It’s been a feature request since 2016.

There are a number of threads in their forum asking for this feature. A few of the larger ones have 50+ users involved. So far, I have not seen a single response in any of these forum threads by the password manager support team.

This is, again, an example of a company being passive towards users asking for what should be a basic feature.

In addition, the documentation I’ve read on the company website regarding this and other features is from 2016. Not updating docs is also a sign of passivity.

When I contacted them, they told me:

“We do appreciate your comment and added feedback, and this could be forwarded to our dev team as a feature request. Rest assured I will pass this along to our dev team so they can review, though, I cannot guarantee that this will be added.”

I’m not hopeful that it will ever happen. But at least I know upfront that I’m dealing with a company that really has demonstrated very little concern or interest in its users at least regarding this particular problem. I know that I may be on my own or out of luck if I do have an issue.

I never want my clients to feel this way about Red Kite. I try really hard to always put myself in the client’s position when they contact me about an issue or question, and to do everything I can to give them the best answers possible. Active listening is always better than passive head-nodding.

And I’m thankful that the vast majority of companies that I deal with as a business owner are not passive. They are very interested in solving problems for their customers as quickly as possible – they’re responsive, they actually listen, and they try to come up with the best answers they can. That’s how it should be.

Working from Home for the First Time?

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Working from homeI’ve been working from home since 2005 so it’s nothing new for me. But for those experiencing it for the first time, it can be frustrating. You may feel distracted, that’s a big problem. Or you may have family in the house and feel like you’re getting interrupted and not being productive.

Here are some things that I’ve learned – they work for me, and may help you. Try to find your own work/life rhythm.

  • Define working hours. Doesn’t matter when they are – middle of the night, early afternoon, whatever works for you. But stick to them and make them a habit. Ask others in the house not to interrupt you during these times if at all possible and avoid the temptations of social media or web surfing.
  • Take breaks. Breaks are critical! If the weather’s nice, get outside. Take the dog for a walk. Go for a bike ride. I can’t stand being stuck to my desk for more than an hour or two – even a quick 5-minute walk can help a lot.
  • Establish a routine. For me I check email first thing, then at lunch, then late in the afternoon. When I finish for the day I shut down my apps and don’t look at work stuff again until the next day. Keep a separation between work and real life.
  • Do what makes it feel ‘official’ to you. Get a time tracker (lots of phone apps, or something like Harvest which I’ve used for years).
  • Protect your space. Work in a room with a closed door if you have one to clearly define your space. Use music to shut out other noise or to help you get in the zone.
  • Be social. This is a hard one right now – meeting up with others IRL but staying 6 ft. away. Having human contact is important when you work solo, but be careful for the next while. Connect with your team or clients or customers online or over the phone, too.

More resources for working at home:

Weekly Links Roundup – Top CRMs, Polling Plugins, Nonprofit Content Strategy, Local SEO

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Do you currently use CRM (customer relationship management) software for your small business that you like? Tell us about it in the comments below!

But if you don’t, and you’re looking for one, here’s a review of 9 top CRM software tools for businesses. CRMs help you track notes, leads, contact info and much more for each of your customers. I use Freshworks for my helpdesk so am looking into Freshsales by the same company.

Would you like to collect visitor feedback or run surveys on your site? Of course there are plugins for that! Learn how to use a WordPress polling plugin on your site. The linked post contains reviews and usage info for a number of popular polling plugins.

If you run a website for a nonprofit, this is for you – learn about content strategy for nonprofits, including the planning, development and deployment of your site’s content.

Finally… Brightlocal (a company that provides services geared to improving local SEO) did a big study of the Google Analytics data of over 11,000 local businesses to look for trends. Although over 92% of consumers search for local businesses online,what’s “normal” traffic for one industry may be completely different for another. As you might have guessed, car dealerships, restaurants, hotels, entertainment and local stores got the most inquiries, while cleaning, marketing, and landscaping companies were at the low end of traffic.  How did your company’s Analytics stack up against the others in your industry? Let us know in the comments below.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

Weekly Links Roundup – Email Signatures, Asking for Referrals, Project Launches, Images in Posts

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The top website and online marketing links of the week.

Ever give much thought to your business email signature? Not for your newsletter – just your everyday email. I have to admit I hadn’t paid much attention to mine in quite a while, but this week a colleague pointed out that I could make that sig work a lot harder for me if I wanted to. While doing some research into this, I came across a post on 25 effective business email signatures from pros that might give you some inspiration as well.

One of the top tips I got from this post and others I found was to ask for referrals in your signature, if your business benefits from them. My colleague told me that he’d once asked his clients about referrals and most said they’d be happy to give them – but they’d never been asked. So ask! Here’s a guide on asking for referrals without sounding desperate.

This week I’ve been working on revamping my older launch documents – what a design/development client gets when their project is complete. Now I have a more cohesive launch package that includes a thank you letter, project sign-off form, training documentation, optional maintenance plan and more all presented in a Red Kite-branded folder for keeping. How do you deal with the completion of a project? Do you regard it as the end of the relationship, or more like a new beginning? Here’s something I found on building happy long-term client relationships for web professionals, but it can apply to other businesses easily.

Finally… a great post detailing 10 places to get free stock images for your blog or website. Adding a photo or two to your blog post is not just a way to build visual interest and better communicate the idea behind your post – did you know that they can also help with search engine ranking? If you use appropriate keywords in the image file name, and fill in the ALT text and image description, they can help your post get found more easily in searches. And social media shares are much more likely with posts that have images. Learn more about why you should include images in posts. Yes, I’m aware there’s no image in this post, thanks… it’s hard to find a single metaphor that works for email signatures/referrals/client relationships/stock photos.

Did you find this information useful? Please share with your friends and colleagues! And comment below with questions or observations.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Thanking Customers, Old Content, Too Many Choices, Trello

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The top website and marketing links of the week.

Making sure your customers know you appreciate them is an ongoing and critical task for business owners. Here are some ideas for thanking your customers from Constant Contact.

What to do with the old content on your website is another constant question. Here are some good ideas for dealing with old content from Yoast. Don’t forget that you shouldn’t just delete an old post – if the old post has good-quality links pointing to it and you have a new post that fills the shoes of the old one, you’ll need to add a 301 redirect from the old post to the newer one; or if you just really want to delete that old content forever make sure you read the part about 410 Gone.

Is your site cluttered? Does the user who arrives on the home page have any clue what they should do next? Sometimes the problem with a design is not a lack of direction, but too many choices! Studies show that the more choices a user is given, the less likely they are to get to a conversion. Learn about how to both simplify and group user choices for better results.

Finally… a non-marketing link but one that could be of great benefit to your business. Trello is one of my favorite tools; I use it for project management and my clients tend to like it because it’s so intuitive and easy to use. It’s very flexible and it’s an ideal tool for implementing the Kanban methodology from Toyota. However, it can also be used for customer support, and here’s how to do that.

 

Weekly Links Roundup – Site Structure, CRMs, Membership Sites

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The top website and marketing links for this week.

Starting your website off with a solid site structure (or Information Architecture if you want to get a bit more technical) is important and usually not too hard to do. But keeping that structure as your site grows can be more difficult – check out those huge menus and category lists you see on some complex sites! Note the lack of breadcrumbs that can help you see where you are at any given point. Learn how to recover that great site structure and improve UX as well as SEO.

Are you using a CRM (customer relationship manager)? If you’re not, consider doing it: it will help you consolidate all the information you have on clients and contacts all in one place. They can also help you manage the sales process and communications. Read reviews of 9 CRM services all under $25/user. I’ve used Insightly in the past with success and am currently trying out Capsule.

And finally… if you’re running a membership site, how do you make it more engaging and more interesting for members so they’ll keep coming back for more? Here’s a guide to 11 methods for increasing interactivity for your membership site. It’s geared toward WordPress but the ideas will apply to any site (even if the implementation is different).

Be sure to check out our Start-of-Summer specials at WP Minder. If you like peace of mind, that is.