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Traveling....

It is the holiday and several of my coworkers and friends are still looking for places to travel. Either by car, plane (yes, there are last minute fares), bus or train. While helping them find a good destination, I used a site called Uptake. A nice little travel site that helped me find some spots to visit and stay at in Seattle. So, we salute: Uptake.com

And even if you decide to just stay at home with friends and family, all of us at Intuit Community want to wish you happy holiday.

What’s customer service mean to you?

Do you remember the days when you had a complaint about a product you purchased, and the merchant would gladly refund your money or offer you whatever was needed to appease you. I do. I remember when faulty products or improperly cooked meals were fixed because companies wanted to make their customers happy.

Where have those days gone? This recently occurred to me when I brought a mistake to the attention of a clerk at a clothing store, and the clerk happily provided a refund. I was shocked that they actually helped me and didn’t shuffle me off to “talk to someone else”. After thinking about it, I was shocked that I was shocked – because that’s what you’re supposed to do when your company makes a mistake – you’re supposed to make it right.

These days if I call a company’s customer service number, it’s been rare to come away from the experience as a satisfied customer. The motto that “the customer is always right” has long since been forgotten. Granted, the reasoning behind this is that some “customers” take advantage of customer service and demand things they just don’t deserve.

So as business owners what do we do? How do we distinguish between the customer who is just trying to get something for free, and the customer who just wants a good experience? Some situations are blaringly obvious and I think we can start there. The harder part comes when you have you decide when a customer is walking the fine line between the two.

It may be a good practice to remember that if you cannot tell, there is a 50% chance this is an innocent customer just looking for a good experience. Being in the business of providing a good experience to all customers is usually more profitable than to turn away complaints.

I think it’s time for us business owners to go back to the basics of “the customer is always right”. Let’s get back to providing quality service to our customers, they deserve it – and so do we.

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Effective marketing is a must

In tough economic times, many business owners are looking to slash expenses wherever they can. Should marketing be one of those cuts? Should you increase your marketing budget? After all, every business needs new customers to keep going. Maybe the answer is somewhere in between.

If you are spending $100's or $1000's of dollars a month on marketing, you need to know how effective that marketing is. What good is that $10,000 a year yellow page ad if it only generates $1000 in income? The trick is to always be tracking your marketing efforts. When you make contact with a new customer, one of the first things you should ask them is "How did you hear about us?" Already doing that? Good for you. Can you tell, at a glance, what the cost per contact and cost per new customer was for each and every new customer over the last month? The last year? Do you know how much revenue each marketing dollar generated for you?

By simply asking the question, "How did you hear about us?" every time contact is made with a new customer and then keeping track, you will soon have a gold mine of data available to you. You will know how many customers came from TV ads, newspaper, Internet, or whatever methods you are doing. You will also know how much revenue each dollar you spent generated. It is even possible to learn the lag time from when you begin a specific marketing campaign and you start gaining new business from it. Think this information could be useful to you?

Now that you have this data in hand, you can answer the questions asked in the beginning; Should marketing be one of those cuts? Should you increase your marketing budget? You might cut spending in certain areas and increase it in others. This is also a great way to do test marketing prior to committing a lot of time, energy, and money into new marketing arenas. For more useful information on successful marketing, check out our Get Customers section.

QB Win 09 to QB Mac 09 Conversion

A common question by QuickBooks for Mac users involves whether or not files can be converted from QuickBooks for Windows 2009 to QuickBooks for Mac 2009.  In their original releases, this process created a .MAC.qbb file that was only 88 bytes in size, and did not contain actual data.  This has been resolved with the R3 update of QuickBooks for Windows. 

Additionally, another issue existed with this scenario.  While QB Win 2009 now successfully created a .MAC.qbb file, when restored in QB Mac 2009, a message was returned stating,

Your data has NOT been restored.

This has been resolved with QB Mac 2009 R3.  QB Win 2009 can now successfully convert to QB Mac 2009. Please update your QB Mac to the latest release.

For further information, please see KB 1011108.

Article provided by Holly_H

Holly_H has been working with QuickBooks for Mac since 2005,and even has a certificate in AppleWrite on the Apple IIe. Holly can usually be found holding court with other agents, sharing her expertise.

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