Anyone over 18 years of age today deals with junk mail. If you don’t get a lot of junk mail you’ve either already taken the chance to opt out of receiving those credit card and other junk offers or if you haven’t then someone at one of your previous addresses is getting all of your junk mail.

Junk mail poses series of problems. Annoyance of every day having your mailbox full of trash is one. The other is the security risk it poses from having unwanted individuals going through your mail or even your trash if you don’t dispose of the junk properly. Dumpster diving, what kids used to do to find useful items that had been thrown away is now the weapon of choice for identity thieves.

I wanted to share 3 quick and free ways to drastically reduce the amount of junk mail and stop those annoying telemarketing calls that we’re plagued with. The following sites offer free ways to opt out of those mailers and put your phone numbers on the telemarketers do not call list.

https://www.optoutprescreen.com

https://www.donotcall.gov

https://www.dmachoice.org

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• Don’t feel restricted by policies. If a customer wants a refund after 40 days (10 days past our 30 day refund deadline), just give it to them.
• Requiring a receipt for a return is ludicrous. You have complex systems for tracking inventory, stocking, pricing, serials, etc. yet for me to return something I need to prove that it came from you by showing you a receipt? Please.
• When a customer is frustrated over chat or just isn’t getting it, sometimes it helps to give them a call.
• If a customer is upset, forget the policies. Give them a full refund. Give them extra SANs on their UC cert. Give them a extra time on their cert.
• If a customer is angry that the product doesn’t work like they thought it would (even if it is a known incompatibility), replace it, better yet give them a new product that works free.
• If a customer goes out of their way to write an email and thank us, send them a package with something free.
• Respond quickly to emails and chats. Give customers on the phone the attention that is needed to quickly resolve the problem.

Winning customers centers on the idea that your customers are not just the customers from the moment they walk in the door to your business or visit your Web site, etc. They are the customer 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They are always the customer. Companies have started to treat people as one time customers, and not as life-long customers. People are loyal to themselves first and if you don’t take care of them, they will go elsewhere.

Remember:

• People don’t know good service until they get it. When they receive good service they go “Wow,” and make the choice to switch to the new service provider.
• The customer is NOT always right, but they are ALWAYS the customer.
• Don’t take the easy way out and say NO, find a way to say YES.
• Don’t hide behind a policy, do what’s right.
• 99.6% of the customer were good compared to those that were bad, why create policies to hurt those good customers?
• Nordstroms once took back and refunded a pair of tires. Nordstroms doesn’t even sell tires. They won that customer.
• Just because we make a special situation for one person, doesn’t mean that everyone else will want that too! Make that customer happy.

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I enjoy technology, I embrace it. I really like social media and the ability it gives us to be connected to the world and to other people in the world. I have a Facebook account, although I’m not ultra active in it. I have a Twitter account and like to peruse it and post to it on a somewhat frequent basis. There is one thing that just irks me beyond all with Twitter. It’s those article spitting people on Twitter.

If you’re connected to a group of people beyond 100 you are bound to have an article spitter. Article spitters are Twitter users who if you check out their Twitter page, you only see posts referring to articles online. Sometimes there are even links to purchase products they are pushing online.

To me, this is Twitter spam. If you’re not going to be communicating with other users and you just spit out random links to articles you’re spamming. Twitter should be a tool for people to connect and communicate, not an alternative to setting up a Web site posting your information online and then spending hours tweaking your site for search engine placement.

More and more I’m seeing articles and products that people buy online that “teach” people how to make money online using Twitter without ever setting up a Web site. The secret behind it? Follow enough people, get lots of follow backs, then start spamming everyone your links to the product you are trying to sell. You then hope that people on Twitter click on your link, then buy the product.

I think that even the emergence of services that allow you to have items saved then posted to your Twitter account at a later time show this trend to Twitter spam. Why would you need to have a service that saves a link to something, then randomly posts it to your Twitter account later? Why not post it when you come across it? Probably because most of the people using this, scour the Internet for articles, then save them and then just tell the service to post it randomly so that Twitter won’t shutdown their account. In all, there’s no real two-way communication taking place online.

I’m not saying that this shouldn’t ever take place, but if that’s all you’re doing…well, you’re entitled to your own opinion. But overall, I think that it contributes to the negativity towards Twitter that is out there online.

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