Month: February 2010

Customer Service For AT&T’s iPhone 3GS Network

Everyone I know who has an iPhone experiences drop calls. Some more than others. I am no exception except that I don’t accept dropped calls as normal.

In all fairness, my iPhone 3GS works very well most of the time. Recently I have spent time in California, Toronto, Chicago, Edmonton, Alberta. My home is in Florida. With all of this travel I had very little difficulty with service. My service issues begin when I near my home….within about 100 ft to be more precise. I have several iPhones since 2007 when the first iPhone was released. Since then I have had several periods of weak connectivity but overall I have not had a problem. That changed beginning late last year.

Once it was clear to me that something had changed and my phone was not the problem. I began calling AT&T.  I think having to do that should be considered as a terrorist interrogation technique.  There have been a couple people in that company I connect with who were very nice to talk to and demonstrated they understood the issue.  They also assured me the problem would be fixed.  The problem is not fixed.  And tech support actually misrepresented the action the took. I was told today that an engineer had been dispatched to my home area and found nothing wrong.  No engineer ever showed up and the most that was done was for someone to look at some screen and conclude their towers were operating properly. I never doubted that because a malfunctioning tower would be detected and fixed.

If I heard it once I heard this once I heard this at least 5 times just this week. We apologize, our towers are fine. Please be sure your software is up to date and turn your phone off and on as we sent some data or something to your phone.  There is a lot more but the bottom line is, this issue is not resolved and the discussions I had with tech support were totally not helpful.

Business Marketing 101: make sure you invest in retaining the people who are doing business with you now.

Business Problem Solving 101: Variance are solved one person at a time.

Business Relationship Building 101:  Almost nobody expects technology or any product for that matter to work perfectly all the time. It is how you handle the problem that determines whether you are building positive or negative goodwill.

My Conclusion About AT&T

1. There are indicators AT&T’s network is inadequate and Apple which is an excellent company will find alternatives.
2. AT&T continues to fuel negative goodwill
3. Markets have a way of compensating for weakness. Look at how many companies that were once huge have or are near closing their doors.

Key Lesson For Those Learning Business Principles: Pay attention to what the losers do and then …don’t do that.

Sending you energy of health, happiness, prosperity

Steve Pohlit

Business Consulting, Executive Coach
Turnaround/Crisis Management
Temporary CEO, CFO, Controller Services
International Business Resources

Social Media Services
New Digital Media, Inc.

Twitter

Facebook

Linked in

MySpace

727-587-7871

Email

About: Steve Pohlit is a CPA,MBA and has been the CFO of several major domestic and international companies.  Steve is The Managing Director of  Top 1 Coaching/Consulting of  The JT Foxx Organization. He is  an expert business coach and consultant focused on building massive business  profits and net asset value. He is very experienced with Internet marketing and social media marketing.  All articles published by Steve unless specifically restricted may be freely published with this resource information.

Customer Service For AT&T's iPhone 3GS Network

Everyone I know who has an iPhone experiences drop calls. Some more than others. I am no exception except that I don’t accept dropped calls as normal.

In all fairness, my iPhone 3GS works very well most of the time. Recently I have spent time in California, Toronto, Chicago, Edmonton, Alberta. My home is in Florida. With all of this travel I had very little difficulty with service. My service issues begin when I near my home….within about 100 ft to be more precise. I have several iPhones since 2007 when the first iPhone was released. Since then I have had several periods of weak connectivity but overall I have not had a problem. That changed beginning late last year.

Once it was clear to me that something had changed and my phone was not the problem. I began calling AT&T.  I think having to do that should be considered as a terrorist interrogation technique.  There have been a couple people in that company I connect with who were very nice to talk to and demonstrated they understood the issue.  They also assured me the problem would be fixed.  The problem is not fixed.  And tech support actually misrepresented the action the took. I was told today that an engineer had been dispatched to my home area and found nothing wrong.  No engineer ever showed up and the most that was done was for someone to look at some screen and conclude their towers were operating properly. I never doubted that because a malfunctioning tower would be detected and fixed.

If I heard it once I heard this once I heard this at least 5 times just this week. We apologize, our towers are fine. Please be sure your software is up to date and turn your phone off and on as we sent some data or something to your phone.  There is a lot more but the bottom line is, this issue is not resolved and the discussions I had with tech support were totally not helpful.

Business Marketing 101: make sure you invest in retaining the people who are doing business with you now.

Business Problem Solving 101: Variance are solved one person at a time.

Business Relationship Building 101:  Almost nobody expects technology or any product for that matter to work perfectly all the time. It is how you handle the problem that determines whether you are building positive or negative goodwill.

My Conclusion About AT&T

1. There are indicators AT&T’s network is inadequate and Apple which is an excellent company will find alternatives.
2. AT&T continues to fuel negative goodwill
3. Markets have a way of compensating for weakness. Look at how many companies that were once huge have or are near closing their doors.

Key Lesson For Those Learning Business Principles: Pay attention to what the losers do and then …don’t do that.

Sending you energy of health, happiness, prosperity

Steve Pohlit

Business Consulting, Executive Coach
Turnaround/Crisis Management
Temporary CEO, CFO, Controller Services
International Business Resources

Social Media Services
New Digital Media, Inc.

Twitter

Facebook

Linked in

MySpace

727-587-7871

Email

About: Steve Pohlit is a CPA,MBA and has been the CFO of several major domestic and international companies.  Steve is The Managing Director of  Top 1 Coaching/Consulting of  The JT Foxx Organization. He is  an expert business coach and consultant focused on building massive business  profits and net asset value. He is very experienced with Internet marketing and social media marketing.  All articles published by Steve unless specifically restricted may be freely published with this resource information.

On Line Marketing: The Formula I Recommend And Why

Question: What Is The Goal of  Business Growth Marketing?

Answer: Traffic and Conversion!

What this means is that in order to grow your business with new customers,  there  needs to be  a stream of relevant traffic interested in what it is you offer.  Your job is to move this traffic from interested to “I’ll Take It” !

Question: How do you move people from being interested to buyers?

Answer: In my experience, people become buyers when a relationship and trust is established. Also, for professional services and many physical products, people want to talk to a person before making a final decision. Contact information including an email address and phone number is very important.

Building A Relationship On Line

The process that has worked for me has at it’s foundation a blog.  The blog has a contact capture form with a reason for people to give you that information. Their name goes into a autoresponder system for follow- up messages with value added content.  Value added content can be tips, a link to another blog article, examples of what is working and direct educational material. Each follow on email should have a signature with a link for more information and contact information.

The blog is the home for valuable content or articles that offer valuable information. This can be current news and relevant “how to” information. Offering examples of what is working is another terrific way of offering value. Marketing messages can be in the signature and the article itself can be structured so the reader understands how your offer is a solution for their interests.

In summary, the blog and the autoresponder sequence is key to building trust and establishing a relationship. Links in the blog and emails can direct the reader to a direct sales page or a contact page.

With this foundation in place and continually growing, you now have the source of material for valuable updates using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Social Media is a major tool for helping you build your business.  I recommend you look at your social media network as an asset for your business that will continually become more valuable if it is properly managed.

Twitter

I always recommend using at least two accounts, one personal and one business. Twitter seems to regularly modify how it is enforcing its terms of service. Having multiple accounts reduces the risk of going completely off of Twitter because of an account suspension. However, if you post quality messages to valuable content plus use tweets that have no URL in them that demonstrate you are interacting, they you should not have any problems with account suspension.

Building a Twitter following and managing tweets through that network can be a significant commitment of time. I highly recommend leveraging or outsourcing a lot of this work. My company New Digital Media, Inc. has been established specifically to help you with this.

Facebook

There are three primary channels on Facebook that should be used that do not cost money. One channel is pay per click advertising does cost money. Regarding pay per click on Facebook,  my initial tests are positive. It appears advertising on Facebook is cost effective. More on this in a future article.

The first area that should be built on Facebook is your profile. There are many exceptions to the rule that profiles are to be personal. Currently I do not advise spending time building a business profile as there is a high risk of being deactivated.  Your personal profile can and should have clear links to your business.

My focus has been on building my profile and my friends list is primarily for business purposes. As I approached the 5,000 friends limit on Facebook I created a fan page. While I am not a fan of the label fan page, it is channel for expanding your network and there are no limits to the number of fans. If your goal is to build a fan page for a business (Facebook encourages business fan pages) then I recommend a build strategy that invites friends to a fan page, uses Twitter to promote your profile and fan page and test Facebook ads to build your fan page. I have seen very effective ad campaigns that have built fan pages fast so I know this works. If you build a fan page then you should have a communication strategy for developing the interest of your fans.

Facebook Groups are one of my favorites for building business since once a person joins your group, generally they are very interested in messages related to the topic of the group. For example, I have the group Build Business Profits on Facebook which ties into the theme of this blog as well as my social media blogs.  The feedback I receive from messages sent to this group as well as several other targeted groups I have built is consistently positive.

Other Social Media Sites

I highly recommend using YouTube and I have done  a lot of YouTube work in the past and will be stepping up my YouTube activity again this year. I also recommend LinkedIn  There are many other social media sites and I have some work being done on a handful of other sites. However, with the growth in Facebook and Twitter I continue to concentrate on those two. Up and coming and closely being watched is Google Buzz.

The Number One Key Success Factor

While I am always building my social media network and the network for clients of New Digital Media, Inc. the most valuable asset in social media is the quality of information offered in articles and personal communication.  With my own accounts and those of clients there is always a focus of adding value and blending with personal messages.  I have no automated messages flowing through Facebook and I am paying increasing attention to the balance of non automated messages on Twitter.

Related

My focus is having people connect with me on my offers. This is what I always advise clients as well. Consistently there is contact information with articles, contact name and email forms feeding an autoresponder with an email message sequence and published phone information.  This is fundamental internet marketing.  There is always more including search engine optimization,  search engine pay per click, squeeze pages and more. However with a consistent focus on building a relationship with people who are interested in your products and services, you will be able to stay focused on those on line tools most effective for your business.

Then there is off line marketing which is a topic for another article.

Steve Pohlit

Business Consulting, Executive Coach
Turnaround/Crisis Management
Temporary CEO, CFO, Controller Services
International Business Resources

Social Media Services
New Digital Media, Inc.

Twitter

Facebook

Linked in

MySpace

727-587-7871

Email

About: Steve Pohlit is a CPA,MBA and has been the CFO of several major domestic and international companies.  Steve is a business owner and an expert business consultant focused on building profits and net asset value. He is very experienced with Internet marketing and social media marketing.  All articles published by Steve unless specifically restricted may be freely published with this resource information.

Toyota Should Decline The Invitation From The US Congress

There is simply no rational for the CEO of Toyota to agree to an “inquiry” by special interest driven congress members.  With one exception, there is nor should there ever be a congressional oversight board reviewing how business is conducted including how business problems are being handled. That exception is an obvious violation of the constitution.

The US Congress has already demonstrated massive incompetence in fiscal responsibility so what the hell do they think they are about to accomplish by putting a legitimate business on trial. The US Congress does not even know what they are doing yet alone evaluate what someone else is doing. Members of Congress may know how to drive a car but that does not mean they know how to manage  a car company. Haven’t they learned from the GM fiasco where we the American people have allowed our President and Congress to drive up the deficit by bailing out a company that has sunk so  deep the American taxpayers will not be repaid in full.

Damage control is now the number one priority for Toyota and they don’t need a committee that is from a Congress whose idea of damage control is to hold a politically based public view of questions prepared by people who are not even members of Congress. It solves nothing. Toyota has problems. There is an obvious quality control problem and a cultural problem. The cultural problem is obvious from their lack of aggressive communication and damage control related to defects.  The marketplace will actually sort this out not the US congress.

As for Toyota, it is amazing that in 2010 an international business seems void of sound damage control and public relations practices. There are numerous examples that serve as best practices guides when a company is involved in a negative situation. One I often point to as a great positive example is the way Johnson & Johnson handled the Tylenol recall in 1982. However, even they may have forgotten how well  and fast they recovered from that episode since more recently there is increasing evidence Johnson & Johnson did not react as fast or well to problems with certain products recalled earlier this year.

Solutions:

Companies like Toyota, Johnson & Johnson normally have policies in place that define the quality standards and quality culture of the business. They also have boards that have fiduciary responsibility to ensure executives running the business are doing their job in all areas including quality. An effective management system includes regularly addressing how the quality culture and standards are implemented and not just “dust collectors” on company shelves. Product problems do not universally mean there is a general breakdown in quality control. However, it is clear the quality related management system for Toyota and maybe for Johnson & Johnson either no longer in place or broken.

Sending you energy of health, happiness, prosperity

Steve Pohlit

Business Consulting, Executive Coach
Turnaround/Crisis Management
Temporary CEO, CFO, Controller Services
International Business Resources

Social Media Services
New Digital Media, Inc.

Twitter

Facebook

Linked in

MySpace

727-587-7871

Email

About: Steve Pohlit is a CPA,MBA and has been the CFO of several major domestic and international companies.  Steve is a business owner and an expert business consultant focused on building profits and net asset value. He is very experienced with Internet marketing and social media marketing.  All articles published by Steve unless specifically restricted may be freely published with this resource information.