British Online Retailing Association
The UKs first trade association for online businesses has been launched with a focus on promoting best practice and the improvement of rural broadband speeds.
The UKs first trade association for online businesses has been launched with a focus on promoting best practice and the improvement of rural broadband speeds.
Slides from a presentation I gave this morning on blogging. It’s pretty wordy but it was meant for sharing after the event.
With the rise of online products and services where companies never come face to face with their customers, it can sometimes be easy to forget about customer service.
A couple of weeks ago I planned an evening out at the theatre with my wife and decided to use www.bookatable.com/uk to book a restaurant over the road from it. It was easy to do and I received and email and text confirmation of the booking. So far, so good.
I was more than a little surprised, however, to arrive and find that the restaurant was closed for refurbishment. Cue 45 minutes of trudging to about 14 other restaurants to try and find a free table until eventually I managed to find a table in a glorified fish and chip shop. Not quite the start to the evening I had planned.
Just to add insult to injury, I received two emails the very next day - one from bookatable and one from the restaurant themselves asking for feedback from my meal!
A quick tweet mentioning the poor outcome the next day soon led to a request from bookatable to email them to tell them what had happened and then a quick apology by email and the offer of £25 towards my next meal booked through them.
I’m still disappointed with the breakdown of communication between the website and the restaurant but they apologised and tried to make up for it very quickly and to be honest it’s probably meant that I’ll now try them again - or at least I wont avoid them - and that is surely the best outcome they could have hoped for.
I remember reading something about Gordon Ramsey saying that people like to tell other people about bad service but they LOVE to tell people about how the company made up for it and they’ve managed to do it in this case.
Every business gets it wrong from time to time but the important thing is to react quickly and surely.
I was pleasantly surprised to get an email this week telling me that I’d just achieved 1,000 lifetime views on Slideshare.net
Although I’ve used it a few times previously to host slides, I’ve never really made a concerted effort to particularly promote the fact, until last month when I made my first ever Slidecast (power point slides synced to the audio from the presentation) of my recent talk on Local SEO.
The fact that you can link it into your LinkedIn account undoubtedly helps, although the Slideshare website is (apparently) currently banned by all Scottish Councils, which is less than handy while at my day job!
Interesting to see Google has come out and confirmed that their algorithm now promotes fresh content over older. Adds real weight to the case for having a blog for your business.
I’ve been playing about with weebly recently. It’s a really simple to use website creation tool so I decided to refresh my website albryce.com. I’m not really sure what the benefit of having my own name domain is but I’ve decided to play the long game on the chance that it will be worth having in the future so I’ve just renewed the domain for another 9 years.
Great post from Max Atkinson about adverts and their use of language when talking prices
I took this video on my trip to Las Vegas last week, it felt just like a firework display.
I came across the SuperJam website the other day, and despite a few layout bugs that seemed to occur, I really like the website. Very clearly laid out and very easy to navigate it has plenty of call to actions (still notably absent in so many websites).
And I was impressed with the business itself. Not only is it a Scottish success story, but they have also set up a charitable arm that runs tea parties for the elderly.
It’s the type of company I would like to model Kitchen Monsters on. I just need to work out exactly what my product is….
