The Sunday print edition of The Wallet, the personal finance blog of the Wall Street Journal, reports that Twitter users are able to save money, find deals and solve problems as more and more mainstream corporations sign on to the fast growing micro-blogging service. Airlines, such as JetBlue & Southwest are offering special fare deals to their followers. Dell and Amazon are offering ‘tweet’-heart discounts to their Twitter fans and corporate giants like UPS, Comcast and Bank of America are monitoring tweets (the term for the 140 character posts users make on Twitter) to identify possible customer complaints and offer their assistance in resolving those issues. Bank of America has helped over 300 customers resolve issues since they set up their Twitter profile in January of 2009. All in all a very savvy, smart approach…

How is your company using Twitter?

Let us now how your company is using Twitter, click on http://poll.fm/tuwt/.

Marketing Sherpa provides great information and guidance on what works, and doesn’t, in all aspects of marketing.

They recently published a chart reflecting the results of a poll conducted with webinar attendees. The results, if you’re a vendor, should be eye opening.

Why do you lose business? Why does your customer loyalty stink? The lie we tell ourselves is that our competitors offered a superior price. The truth? Our service sucks.

If you’re into pain, take a look at the following chart and link through to Marketing Sherpa’s analysis (but be forewarned, they only make these results publicly available for a limited time…):

Source: Marketing Sherpa - Customers & Vendors Disagree on Loyalty

Marketing Sherpa’s Analyis: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?id=30719

Mark Sanborn is a hall of fame speaker and the best selling author of The Fred Factor and You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader. He’s also a friend and client. He has a new web site and, in addition to his books and training products, he makes several free resources available. One of them that I highly recommend is called The 10 Commandments of Customer Service: 150 Ideas for Improving Service.

Diamonds, gold & rubies abound in this customer service treasury. For example every e- or retailer needs to embrace Idea #47:

Flight attendant: “Sir, would you like the chicken or the beef for dinner?”

Passenger: “Which do you recommend?”

Flight attendant: “Neither. I don’t eat this food.”

Question: Does the flight attendant not eat the food because it is bad, or is the food bad because the flight attendant doesn’t eat it? When you don’t use your own products or services, you lose touch with the customer’s experience.

If you haven’t walked a mile in your customer’s shoes, eaten the food you’ve served them or drank the Kool-Aid® you’ve poured into their mugs then I guarantee you that you are leaving a ton of sales by the trailside. (In a 2006 survey of online shoppers, Marketing Sherpa discovered that nearly 60% of these shoppers abandoned their shopping carts. Deludedly enough, online retailers guesstimated their abandonment rate at 20-30%, less than half of the actual number!).

How many times have you been frustrated by an on or off line shopping experience due to byzantine checkout procedures, missing-in-action or clueless sales associates or impossible to locate products? Do you find yourself wondering who would design such a travesty? I find myself wondering who the owner is and asking myself if they have ever shopped there themselves. Shopping cart abandonment is a significantly larger issue in the online world where it is so much easier to click to the next etailer’s site than get in your car, hazard traffic and cruise the lot for a parking space that’s not halfway to Toledo.

So what do you do to improve your customer’s experience?

First, drink your own Kool-Aid®… At the most basic level, you shop your own site. And then you shop your competitor’s and if you prefer the competition’s experience that’s a big, red flag right there. Even if your happier with your site’s results than your competition you still need to be looking for new and better ways to improve the customer service you provide. Jeff Bezos, founder & CEO of Amazon.com, allocates time every day to come up with several ideas for improving his web site. The man’s a multi-billionaire yet he’s obsessed with providing an ever better experience for his customer. Hmmm. Maybe that’s why he’s a multi-billionaire.

Second, have a Kool-Aid® party… invite your employees, friends, neighbors, golf partners, kids’ friends and anybody else you can think of to shop your site and give you candid feedback. Establish some basic scenarios and see how easy it is for them to accomplish. Sit back — quietly, no intervention — and observe. Give ‘em a few bucks or buy the beer and pizza. It will be one of the best investments you ever made.

Third, don’t fixate on perfection… Try something, measure the results (so many great tools for this; Google Analytics is a great place to get started), if it works, improve it, if it doesn’t, do something else. The web is an instant feedback mechanism. With just a few tools you can tell what’s working and what’s not quickly and for relatively few dollars.

Fourth, steal Your Competitor’s Kool-Aid® Recipe… If you see somebody doing it better and it’s not copyrighted or patented, adopt it for your site. You don’t have to be the master innovator, just the master executor.

Is it ever okay to fire your customers? The small or struggling business may gasp in horror, “NEVER!” But the truth is that we fire customers everyday; too often in a passive aggressive manner of being slow to respond, offering shoddy products or delivering sub-par service.

You should delight your customers but I think that customers should delight you as well. Otherwise, what’s the point? Oh yeah, money… but sometimes there’s not enough money in the world to make certain customers worth it so why not focus on finding customers that are a delight to delight! Businesses are, after all, relationships and don’t we all work harder to maintain & nurture relationships we enjoy?

I’m sure most of you have heard by now about Sprint’s decision to fire about 1,000 customers. You might have reacted in outrage or bemusement at Goliath telling David that he’s tired of being pelted with those stones, so just go away.

Sprint’s in the business of making money and when you have a significant population of customers who are costing you more money than they return in profit — yeah – get rid of them. According to Sprint these ‘customers’ were averaging 50 calls a month to customer service. In my view that’s pathological. Sprint nicely informed them that it was pretty obvious they weren’t happy with Sprint so we think you should take your business to someone who can make you happy.

It was the business equivalent of, “It’s not you, it’s me!”

A question to ponder, as posed by Seth Godin, “What would happen if you fired (nicely) the very few customers that take your best effort but rarely appreciate it or spread the word?”

I think you’ll be happier, your employees will be happier and it will be easier to delight the customers you keep . After all, sometimes, “It’s not me, it’s you!“

Don’t be caught off guard by negative reports about you, your company or the products and services you offer. Likewise, don’t fail to take advantage of the positive buzz that the online community generates on your behalf.

Failure to track and react to the negative as soon as it appears limits your opportunities to control the damage while not tracking and leveraging the latter can be a waste of golden opportunities. It’s one thing when we say something nice about ourselves, it’s exponentially more powerful when it’s said by an unbiased 3rd party.

The web presents us with a wonderful array of tracking tools and services. Google Alert is one such service that will track whatever topics you specify for you. They offer a limited free service as well as more robust personal and professional paid offerings. Do-it-yourselfers can achieve the same results by merely searching on their name or product names at Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN Search and whatever other search engines you feel are relevant. Don’t forget to search news services, blogs and social book marking sites.

A few resources to use in tracking your reputation online:

• News :: Google News
• Blogs :: Google Blog Search, Technorati
• Social bookmarking :: Digg, del.icio.us

Don’t be the last to know when someone says something bad, or good, about you on the web. Be proactive, not reactive in managing your and your company’s reputation.