Ask Jason, How do I get customers for my service business?
Francis Gulotta, of MacSupport, (MacFirst on Twitter) a support call center for mac users, calls in to ask, how do I get more customers?
Jason and George comment:
- Paying $30 is obviously your barrier
- Web site is ok, logo can use work
- No money back guarantee visible
- You need to A/B Test your home page and optimize
- Create a promotion where you leverage your existing customers, ask them if they enjoyed the service to write up a small testimonial and either tweet or Facebook it and you give them a free incident call
- Try get some press from people that do Mac blogs
- Capitalize on the inefficiency of the Genius Bar, go to the Apple store and give away free support tickets
- Be creative with the offers
- Create some press releases, promoting your “Free Support Friday’s”
- Promote the fact that you are a US based company
- Eric Stevens (of Etsy) conducted listening labs for Mahalo ask him for some advice on how to conduct one. (A listening lab is where people comment on your web site while they use the site.)
- Blog about Mac issues and give some free tips/support
- Study how GeekSquad and competitors promote their service
- Video record some of your calls or promote “Free Support Friday’s” on Ustream, so people can observe calls and interact with the you.
- Be patient and grow as a lifestyle business until you get some scale.
The “Ask Jason” segments are probably my favorite to blog about for a couple reasons, one people can ask specific questions that are their pain points and secondly sometimes we see if advice has been taken and this is a perfect example. Here is a image of the MacSupport homepage and the changes made and a few of my recommendations.
click to enlarge
1. Logo still needs improvement
2 + 3. You added them which is great but you need to add an image, add some color do something that will make these differentiators POP!!! .
Recommendations
- Where is the “Free Support Fridays” promotion?
- Sara Sutton Fell of Flexjobs was interviewed on Mixergy and she felt, having the Better Business Bureau seal and headlines of news outlets helped her credibility, consider adding these.
- I think if you went to the news outlets and could prove that Apple has been getting too big and it’s customer service is starting to fall behind you may be able to get a headline. The reason being is Apple kind of has that Disney like feel, they do everything right and if you can show they aren’t, someone will want that story and your company is a viable alternative with “Free Support Fridays”
- Rework the right sidebar of your blog so that the RSS and all your social sites (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) are in the same spot, visible toward the top.
- Do all your support techs have Twitter accounts? If so, try personalizing your business whereby people can interact and create a relationship with your company, no one likes large impersonal corporations.
If you found this helpful please click the “Retweet” button and if you found it extremely help you could always submit it to HN.
