Verizon Small Biz Blog

[#1]

Most of you are probably watching football right about now, but I want to get this up as I didn’t get the chance to on Friday.

Many enjoyed and learned so much from John Jantsch’s webinar last week (Jan. 12) – the replay to ‘Useful Search for Twitter’ will be up soon for those who want to catch a replay.  For now, John’s slides are available by clicking here.

Mark your calendar as John will be back again this coming Wednesday (Jan.26.) to share steps to create your very own social media conversion system.

While Mr. Jantsch will show you how to generate leads; let’s not forget that once you have a customer you need to keep them coming back or to continue working with your business.  This short video from the Wall Street Journal showcases a successful small business in the New York metro area that treats his customers like family and friends and finds products (or solutions) that are unique to attract and keep them coming back for more.

Now, in this very blog, we’ve talked about the need of a website for your business.  Some of you may have a website, but are you using it to help generate leads… leading to sales?  This is a good read from the New York Times small business blog featuring a limousine company that for years treated its website as if it were an online brochure… one day this business owner made some changes and today, 85 percent of his business comes from the Internet… his website!

And speaking of websites, this short read will provide some tips to configure analytics for your business website.  Of course, if you subscribe to a new bundled service from Verizon you’ll get a simple do-it-yourself website building software and more for six months.  Click here for more details.

Lastly, in this very blog, we have discussed the importance of prepping your business in case of a disaster such as a hard drive crash, malware/virus, etc.  This study from Information Week points out that small- and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. lag in disaster recovery readiness. 

Let us know  how you like the weekly round up.

[#2]

I called in today tried to get a service from Verizon and I just have the worst experience in my life spending my 10 minutes over the phone with the two representatives. 1/23 21:00, I was trying calling in for this billing matter regarding to my account. This representative I got in the phone with me was having a attitude to provide me the right service. She was being extremely unprofessional with me and told me that there’s nothing she can do to help me. I am already being frustrated with the phone bill that I was mislead by Verizon that my internet was not going to charged until the day when I set that up, which the representative from previously repeat her self twice back in December that I will not be charged until January, 2011. So when I try to explain myself to her with the situation today at 21:00, she told me that no there’s nothing about this she can do about this and I will be charged for the month that your company activated the internet service without my approval. After this information she represented the Verizon to notify me. I decided to try speaking to a supervisor level of representative to help me solve this matter. 21:01 as someone with a male voice over the phone he said himself a supervisor and he can help me with my account. So I try explaining to him the account situation about someone at Verizon on 12/7 I spoke with has been telling me that I was not going to be charge for the internet service until January of 2011. I also told this supervisor that I think Verizon have to investigate into this matter before charging me unfairly. The male supervisor representative immediately told me that there’s no recorded voice unless that was for training only with his extremely rude attitude. I paused right there at that moment for a whole minute. So here is what I get from Verizon Company when I use their internet and phone services. I would like to share with all of my friends today and with the media. 1. mislead customers to buy services 2. activate customer’s internet services without permission 3. adding on extra charges by activating extra services without notification and without permission 4. extremely unprofessional from customer service representative to supervisor level representative by using a rude, impatient, not caring, misleading attitude to their customers 5. there’s no problem solving and no one will be able to help the customer for whoever uses Verizon company’s services.