Customer Service

I write because I love to write and because I love to create stories. I'm in love with love so I spin love stories.

If I had my way, I'd only write. I wouldn't promote. I wouldn't do anything on the business side of writing. I'd just write.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to hire a business manager, an admin assistant, or a promoter. I wish...

That means I also have to do customer service from time to time. As if I don't get enough of that in my day job.

Today was a gruelling day at the day job - my alter ego is a customer service manager - and so the angriest, least satisfied customers are forwarded to me.

Unfortunately, today, I had a very important doctor's appointment and I had to leave work by 3:15 to run across town and make the appointment by 4:15. At 3:15 I had signed off my computer, tidied up my desk, and was slinging my purse over my shoulder to walk out the door when one of my staff ran to me because she had a very disagreeable customer that demanded to speak to the manager.

My heart fell. I had just enough time to safely make my appointment but my job called. My employee was looking at me with big puppy dog eyes to save her from a situation she couldn't handle. So I took the call.

For ten minutes the donor rambled angrily without getting to the point of her call. When I got a break, I asked as nicely as I could if I could call her back tomorrow or if I could have one of my very capable coworkers help her.

WRONG THING TO DO.

The customer was offended. She didn't want to speak to another of my coworkers and after that, she wouldn't stay on the line with me, either.

Just as bad, I ran to my car and started driving to my appointment. I called my doctor's office and explained I might be a few minutes late, that it was unavoidable. The doctor's receptionist told me not to come, that I had to reschedule. They would not wait for me. Now I have to leave work earlier tomorrow to go to the doctor. Although I went back to work today, this is still not good. Right now my office is being deluged with phone calls, emails, and letters. I also can't afford to anger another endocrinologist - there are only a few on my plan in my area. One already dumped me for missing an appointment which is why I was so anxious not to miss this one.

In retrospect, I'm still confused. Should I have given up all hope of keeping my appointment and stay with the donor? Should I have told my first employee to transfer the customer to another employee who is good with handling difficult customers? Or was I within my right to ask what I did of the customer? I'm still learning. I wasn't born a manager.

Likewise, I'm still learning the craft of writing, of business, of promotion. I don't know that people ever stop learning. While I wish I'd known the answer to today's dilemma, I also don't want to become stagnant and stop growing.

Don't forget: To win a pdf download copy of "Naked Ambition" leave a comment for me on this blog before 8 pm EST Sunday February 7th. Tell me what your favorite Valentine's Day date would be.

How to Make the Most from Twitter - By Regular Person

I'm a Twitter groupie or addict or whatever you like to call it. I tweet several times a day. I'm sold Twitter is a good marketing and information tool. It's also fun.

When I first started Twitter, it fascinated me. Actually, it didn't happen when I first started. I started, barely looked at it then let it sit stagnant for six months. Not much happened from my perspective. Then I read something that made me want to look at it in more depth and give it another whirl. The second time I really got into it and started deriving benefit.

I'm not a techie or a marketing guru, just a regular person. But I'm getting a lot of value from it so I'm going to share some easy tips in case you decide to try it.

First, you'll get more out of it if you follow a lot of people. If you only follow a few, you won't get much news coming into your feed. Nor will many people follow you unless you're a big celebrity like Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres or Miley Cyrus.

Secondly, don't limit yourself to reading your personal Twitter feed. Follow hashtags. Hashtags are similar to links but are found in tweets and begin with "#", i.e. "#ashleyladd" (without the quotes). They enable you to tune into conversations of interest to you or to see the top ten things being discussed on Twitter. You can save up to ten favorites for quick reference. Since I'm a reader and writer, I like to check into these conversations.

• #writegoal
• #wordathon
• #romfail
• #writechat
• #reading
• #rejectedHQNtitles
• #amwriting
• #notwriting
• #romancewriter

I don't want to follow just anyone, however, and I presume you don't either. I could care less about discussing football, brain surgery, or the reproductive cycle of an alligator. In order to tune into tweets and conversations about reading and writing, I search for writers and readers and follow them, in particular romance writers and readers. Since I'm a mom, I also like to follow other moms. I find them by using the search box and inputting keywords such as "romance writer", "romance reader", "erotic romance writer", etc. I also find them through the hashtags. Another way is to put the name of someone you know in the search box.

Once I find a peson who has tweets that interest me (you can read a person's tweets on their profile page), I click on the "follow" button to follow them. For more suggestions I check out who they follow and who follows them. The follower's and followee's last tweet is shown by their name. If the tweet looks like a real, interesting person, I usually follow. If it looks like the person sent spam email or an email that turns me off, I don't. Rarely do I follow celebrities like Ashton Kutcher as I know they won't follow me back. I also don't follow people if they have a lot of followers but follow few. Of course I make exceptions for people I really want to follow like the SmartBitches. If I really want to check out what Ashton Kutcher is tweeting, I can search for his name and read his tweets that way without hindering my following limit.

Initially, you can follow up to 2,000 people. Then you will hit a plateau where you can't follow more people unless the ratio of people following you is close (I think it's within 10%). To get past this quickly, use a Twitter tool such as Tweepular to find out who's not following you back and unfollow them. This frees you up to follow different people who hopefully will follow you back and help you get over the 2,000 limit.

The only drawback I've found from doing this is that there's no easy way (that I know of) to see who you unfollowed so that you don't refollow them by accident. My memory's not good enough to remember every person I unfollowed when I do a bulk unfollow and it didn't occur to me to copy every name I unfollowed so that I wouldn't refollow in the future. A couple people have blocked me, probably because I refollowed them. (Or maybe they just don't like my face or object to the fact I write erotic and even m/m romance - Who knows?) Don't worry, I won't try to sue them for unfollowing or blocking me. Life's too short to worry about such nonsense.

Once you follow a decent number of people (and a decent number follow you), magic starts to happen. Not only have visits to my blog increased, but I've booked author interviews (for myself on other blogs and booked other authors to be guests on my blog), run contests, entered contests, helped charities, found out about local tweet-ups and other local events, stayed in tune to romance writing industry news (i.e. hear about RWA and RT conference news hot off the press), and found reviewers for my books. I've also found out about free meals from KFC, coupons for other restaurants such as Boston Market and free books from Harlequin. Best of all, I've made some friends through Twitter which is not something I expected but am enjoying.

Using Twitter is a lot easier and less time consuming than joining 15 (or more) Yahoo Groups and trying to keep up a conversation and failing because you don't have all day to and night to follow the conversation. Commenting here and there on Twitter is acceptable. Too many tweets are considered spamming. On email loops an occasional post is considered a "drive-by" and very much frowned upon. Also on Twitter, you can quickly catch up on conversations by using hashtags instead of slowly searching through emails.

Twitter can also be used for customer service. Type in your Twitter name, book's title, or other name associated to your product  in the box under "Favorites" on your Twitter home page. Everything ever tweeted about it will pop up - good and bad. If good, you get a warm gooey feeling. If bad, you get a heads up that you may need to do damage control. Some big companies are using this very well. Since tweets appear instantly from a worldwide audience, on the spot news reporting and consumer feedback are instantaneous. It's much faster than waiting for opinion polls, newspaper articles, or even blog posts. It's much more proactive than waiting for a customer to call and complain. And they're easy to find by searching even without hashtags or @yourname.

Since I can't be online all the time and sometimes I want to let my followers know I have a book coming out that day or about another important event, I can preschedule my tweets. I use Tweetlater It's easy and free to use. There are also secret Twitter email addresses to use from places like your day job, but that may not be a good idea in case your employer becomes wise. With Tweetlater, you set up tweets on your own time.

One last piece of advice. Mix up your tweets. Be human, be friendly, be entertaining and provide benefit. In other words, don't just tweet about your book release, your new blog post or your product. On the other hand, don't tweet innocuous things like "I'm going to the bathroom" or "I'm going to bed now", either. When you do have something important to tweet, ask people to "Retweet" (retweeting will spread the word among their followers and start a viral buzz) and be polite - use the word "Please".

It's also polite to be generous. Help spread other people's news and pleas for help by Retweeting or mentioning their news.

Here are a few of my tweets so you can see examples of what I'm talking about.

"I lost my mother and my aunt (my dad's sister) to cancer. It's past time we beat it! #beatcancer"

"http://twitpic.com/lwi5o - This squirrely fellow wants to be in 1 of my books." (I also like to tweet a lot of pictures of Florida wildlife, scenery and funny things for the entertainment value).

"Have you ever been ghost hunting? At a haunted hotel? #halloween http://bit.ly/UbxPq"

 "All nighter for charity tonight. Help feed poor in Haiti. Also good entertainment tonight online. Please RT. http://bit.ly/qycnT"

 ""Sticky Wicket" - free m/m short erotic romance. Please retweet. http://bit.ly/1wSMBC"

"I just got great news! My book Caught in the Middle is going into print next month. http://bit.ly/1v4OAY"



"I'm the guest author at Linda Kage's blog today. Please RT. http://bit.ly/3HvjWq"

"Reading: "Molly's Musings and her excerpt from "Love is Sober"" (http://twitthis.com/sskuj3)"

This is a very simplified and quick overview about getting started on Twitter so that you can enjoy it as quickly as possible if you so chose. There are many more articles you can find if you want to find the hundreds of Twitter applications available. When I have time and want to learn more, I simply google "Twitter" and find enough reading material for days.

By the way, I'm the guest blogger on Emma Lai's blog today. Please pop over and leave me a question or a comment. :)

Also, it's my day to blog on the Rom-Erotica blog.

Recent posts you might like to read:



Author Interview: Claire Ashgrove


Ghost Hunting at a Haunted Hotel

Welcome to the Spookiest Month of the Year (+ don't burn your Ouija Board!)

People Don't Fall Out of Trees - Without Reason 

I'm Part of a Tribe 

Big Brother Is Watching You - This Means You BLOGGERS!

Are You Writing Me Into Your Book?

Dont Give Up Too Early

Must Write Must Write Must Write!!!

You'll also want to see what Amarinda Jones, Anika Hamilton, Anny Cook,
Barbara Huffert, Brynn Paulin, Bronwyn Green, Dakota Rebel, Kelly Kirch,
Molly Daniels, Sandra Cox, Regina Carlysle, and Cindy Spencer Pape
are up to, so make sure to visit them also. :)

Meme: 6 more random things about me

Tagged!

I've been tagged! Not the first time it has happened, but it's always fun. Nicole McCaffrey tagged me. Pop over to her blog to find out 6 fun things about her. The rules: 1) Link back to the person who tagged you. 2) Post the rules on your blog. 3) Write six things about yourself. 4) Tag six people at the end of your post by posting links to their blogsites. 5) Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their site. 6) And let your tagger know when your entry is up. Okay, now for the hard part. Here are six random things about me that I've not already posted. Let's see if I can top the one about liking to catch fireflies that everybody loved. 1) I love Scooby Doo. I've loved this cartoon and Scooby himself since I was a kid. Now my 13 year old follows in my footsteps. In fact, we're watching a Scooby Doo movie right now. 2) I also love the Disney cartoon movie "Mulan". Not only do I love it, I used to watch it so much my kids begged me to stop. My daughter-in-law and I were both in love with Shang Le (the hero in Mulan). 3) Sometimes I eat sushi for breakfast, I love it so much. 4) I used to be a river rat. Dad and I used to boat and water ski on the Ohio River all summer long. Boy do I miss that. Although I can water ski, I've only been snow skiing once and the ground was almost flat on the beginner's "slope". 5) I consider myself to be a tomboy (remember I like to climb trees, catch fireflies, walk, ride horses, shoot guns and archery) but my daughter says I'm a "girlie girl". I guess that's because I rarely go out of the house without makeup, I wear pink a lot (even if it's pink fatigues), and I wear dresses a lot. I just like variety and I love being a woman because we have more choices than men. Compared to my daughters, I guess I am a girlie girl. My younger daughter would rather die than wear a dress or make up. She won't go near pink. 6) I take shorthand and thus whenever there's a meeting in my company, I get called to take the notes a lot - even though I have trouble hearing what's said (and I tell them - funny, I guess they don't believe me). Although it's becoming increasingly frustrating to hear, I am privy to a lot more information than I otherwise would be because of this skill. I also use it as a secret code to write notes to myself that no one else can read. Or when I'm out in public writing, and if I think someone might be looking at my writing pad, I write the dirty words in shorthand. I also amuse myself (aka keep myself awake during staff meetings) writing stuff in shorthand. Years ago, my boss thought I was taking such good notes of the meeting, he asked me to transcribe them and email them company wide. I'd been writing my own thing and so really had to scramble to put out decent minutes so I wouldn't get in trouble. Or maybe he'd caught on to me and was trying to teach me a lesson. After that, however, he made me take minutes of the staff meetings for a year or two after. Oy! Now, I have to tag 6 people. Here goes: Giggles (you have to read her "Adventures of Rat Girl" Vi Kelly Kirch Molly Amarinda Jones Brynn Paulin It's my hubby's birthday and we're going to have pizza and ice cream cake tonight. However, he just called, pissed, because he has to cover a softball game (he's an umpire) for someone who bailed at the last minute. So he won't be home till late. The family's coming over for his birthday. Sounds like my kind of luck. From time to time I'll pass on a bit of advice I've learned from doing customer service for a charity. Today's advice is: if you want your name removed from a mailing list from any organization and you mail a note to the organization, mail back the reply card containing all the numbers as well as your name and address to reduce the waiting time of your request. Some people who want off our mailing list delete the numbers or cross them out or write notes on their own paper and don't include the numbers. Since we're so busy, we separate the requests into stacks of "people with donor numbers" (the fastest way), "People with cold mail numbers" (pretty fast), "people with no numbers" (by far the slowest as we have to do more research and because we're so swamped with work, those piles wait until everything else is done, so we can help as many people as possible. I read a lot of rude notes that come with these requests. We at my charity read everything and don't take things personally (I try not to) and do what is requested. However, I've known people at other places that will deliberately lose or ditch a request if it arrives with a nasty note. So please remember to be nice, even if you're boiling mad if you really want to be helped. I know my hubby won't listen to me, and then he'll wonder why his requests aren't meant or at least why they take forever to get done.

Customer Service

I've mentioned that I work in customer service. It's very interesting - usually - but sometimes also very frustrating. We can usually tell when there's a full moon - the donors get frantic over the teensiest, most insignificant things, and some are downright nuts. Over the years, we get somebody who becomes obsessed with one of us. At least that's what we think has happened. One man I'll just call "J" calls several times a day - has for months. He usually has shoes he wants to donate or he has some detailed about an appeal and makes us jump through hoops to answer and then says he'll think about donating. The next call he'll say he has no money - so why does he ask all the questions? Today, he told one of the ladies in my department "I know the women in Haiti have tiny feet so I'm going to send a size 7 1/2 and a size 12 pair of shoes". Size 12 is tiny??? Unless he means little girls shoes. My rep didn't think that's what he meant. We think he was obsessed with a young lady who used to work with us and that he made excuses to call, hoping she'd be the one to answer. He'd call using several different phone numbers, I guess, trying to trick us in case we had caller ID (which we do). Then there's another woman who I'll call "Z". Z only wants to talk to one woman in a different department upstairs. She wants a certain information package sent each time she calls. This is an expensive package unfortunately. She claims she never receives it. Finally, the young woman who keeps sending it, sent it certified return signature mail. The woman still claimed she didn't get it. Then she was confronted that she signed for it. Then she changed her story that she lost it and wanted it again. Meanwhile, she's never donated a dime. She's signed up for a special pledge, but then she keeps canceling it, and then resigning up. She wants to talk to this specific person several times a day. She'll hang up on some of us. We know it's her because of the caller ID. She, too, uses a few different phone numbers. There was another donor I'll call "A" who swore up and down, and was getting very nasty, even threatening because we didn't send her a tax receipt for her gifts of $1,000 in 2007. We searched and searched and found nothing like she claimed. She refused to send us copies of her checks or statements. She went to her credit card company and complained about us. She was wrong. She'd given us those gifts in 2006 (yes SIX, not seven). She realized this after throwing a total hissy fit for over a week. Then there's "Q" who was incensed that we couldn't tell her exactly who gave us her name - we sent a one-time cold mailing inviting her to be a donor. When I looked it up on the computer, it only told me something very vague. I read it to her. She didn't believe me. She said I was lying to her. She demanded to speak to my boss. My boss told her the same exact thing - because we were telling the truth. She accused him of lying, too. He promised to find out. It took awhile because our director of that department had to ask his vendor who didn't know because it came from some other list. The woman called again and got me. She kept saying I was calling her an idiot, that I was lying. She refused to let us call her back - she demanded the info that moment which I didn't know and my boss was in a meeting and couldn't be called out. My boss's boss was in Haiti dealing with an emergency. Of course, she called me a liar again and couldn't believe people weren't just waiting at their desks, twiddling their thumbs, awaiting her call. I had one donor accuse me of sleeping with my boss. That really threw me for a loop. This person doesn't know me. He had no right to get so personal. Of course, I never did and never would. This was in regards to my ex-boss. Then there are donors who go to our website and order an e-card to be sent to somebody. A month or two later, a couple have called furious because their honoree didn't get a snail mail card acknowledging their donation to our charity. Hellooo! They didn't give us a snail mail address. The text on our website said they were sending an email postcard. I guess we're supposed to be all-knowing, that our crystal ball will tell us the person's mailing address? Another man today said we (our charity) should give vasectomies to all the poor men in the Caribbean to stop the poor from overpopulating. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time I've heard something similar. We're supposed to force them? Catch them first and pin them down? Birth control is a very controversial issue, so we have to stay neutral or risk losing a lot of church support. I can understand their basic reasoning, but to suggest forcing somebody to do something... That goes against my grain. One woman blamed all charities for causing 911. Because we help people, we made the terrorists reign terror on us. Huh??? People amaze me. The majority are nice and sane, but some are completely unreasonable (and worse). I never know what I'll hear when I pick up the phone. So now, you know how I spend my days. Lots of time, truth really is stranger than fiction.