Kate Morris

When do you fix problems with your product? Traditional business says only when required or when the cost of NOT fixing it out weighs the cost of fixing it.

When did we stop being decent human beings? I read that in my Managerial Accounting text book just a week ago and it baffled me. Then today, I see yet another story about American Airlines. Only this time it’s not wiring, it’s landing gear issues.

In the story, they mention that AA will only fix what the FAA requires. The FAA is 4 year behind schedule! There is something to be said about fixing what is broken WHEN someone recognizes it’s broken.

This goes not just for those with physical products, but also for services. In the SEM world, we are starting to realize that paid links maybe aren’t the best thing. Leaders everywhere are commenting on it. But I still see it widely done on the agency side. We are not rectifying past decisions, even though they might be detrimental now. “Don’t mention it to the client … we don’t have a fix or it’ll cost to much to fix.”

It’s time for the SEM industry and the world to fix their mistakes. Take responsibility for your actions. Do what you teach, it applies to you as well as your 6 year old son.

I think this man is the only one who “gets” it. Seth Godin hits the nail on the head again with his newest post, and I wish more CEOs and VPs would read and understand it. He asks a simple question “Who answers the phone?”

At my last company, our customer support came out of Pakistan. Yep, one of those annoying companies you call and get someone that doesn’t speak English very well. Don’t get me wrong, I loved all our people in Pakistan, but the customer service was horrible.

Every once in a while, we’d have 2-3 days where there were riots, bombings (happy to live in America!), or phone lines were down. Those were the days when the product people had to answer the phone. While it was detrimental to our own workload, the customers were so happy to hear it was us! We got things taken care of the right way the first time and things got fixed.

But every company still spends less on customer service than they do on other forms of marketing. I mean there are lots of people to employ, but the cost of adding a training with the product person once a month would cost very minimal money and bring back so much in return.

It’s like walking into a retail store and lucking out by getting someone that knows the store products, the person that can really help you. Remember it only takes one bad experience to create a lifetime of bad word of mouth.

It’s 2008 and there are still companies doing the “Guaranteed #1 Ranking in Google” crap. I was in LinkedIn today and saw an ad for guaranteed rankings. I am NOT linking to them through here, but the name of the site is BeRankedNumber1 dot com.

They even have a live chat person. I was curious, so I got online and asked what they do, what tactic they use. The response asked for my site and they’d tell me. I said no, that I wanted to know how they did it and if I could choose the words that I rank #1 for. All I got was “No what?”

Yeah, I can get anyone’s site ranking for some scatterbrained keyword. That’s so freaking easy. And what is more annoying is people fall for this shit. This site had no SEO for itself, but doing nothing that violates Google TOC, so I can’t really report it. I mean how do you explain to the world of non-internet people that this stuff doesn’t work? That they are throwing their $200/month down the drain.

This was right up there with the letter I got in the mail one day that said I owed $300 for SEO services. But at the bottom stated it wasn’t a bill. *sigh* These people should be locked away and beaten.