Ask Denise GriffittsVirtual Assistance Industry » Ask Denise Griffitts

We Are Hiring!

Denise Griffitts — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:07:36 +0000

We are looking for Virtual Assistants or other virtual service providers who are proficient in ClickBank and PayDotCom.com.

If you have worked in one or both of these systems and are confident that your skill sets are proficient to expert, please email me at info @ virtualassistantindustry.com, subject line “Click Bank”.

Please feel free to send this information to someone you know who is expert in these systems.

Thank you!

Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert

This is What Superb Customer Service Looks Like!

Denise Griffitts — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:18:17 +0000

Superb customer service is the lifeblood of any business, be it brick and mortar or a business that operates largely online. You can hang coupons on my door all day long but if I have had poor customer experiences at the hands of your employees, the response is quite simple. My business goes elsewhere.

Great customer service lets your customers and clients know that you value them and you want them to be happy enough with your customer service to refer you to their circle of friends, family and customers. In short, great customer service is about reaching out and forming a relationship. How do you go about forming such a relationship? By remembering the one true secret of good customer service and acting accordingly; “You will be judged by what you do, not what you say.”

These are examples of some truly great customer service experiences that I had lately and wanted to share with you.

Grasshopper Virtual Phone System for Entrepreneurs

Grasshopper

Hi, this message is for Denise Griffitts, (Click here to play message from Grasshopper)

This is Jonathan Kay, I am the Ambassador of Buzz here at Grasshopper. I actually just left you a voicemail but wanted to follow up with an email as well. I wanted to reach out to you as I really enjoyed your article “Does Your Small or Online Business Have a Toll Free Number”. First off, it was important to me that I connected and thanked you. Really appreciate you giving us the vote of confidence. I feel like people really don’t take enough time to just say “thank you”, so that is what I wanted to do.

I was excited when I saw your article as I was not familiar with The Virtual Assistant Industry prior to it! What else do you guys work on? Anything at all I could be a resource for, or something I could help with?

Thanks again.

Jonathan

(I did call Jonathan back to thank him and we had a great free-ranging chat on business, customer service, blogging and the Virtual Assistance Industry. Thank you Jonathan!)

Dominoes Pizza

A week or so my husband and I were both down with a miserable (and lingering) case of the flu but knew we were going to survive it when hunger pangs in the form of a rabid desire for pizza hit us both. I don’t normally like to order pizza but our survival that day clearly depended on somebody besides me cooking food for us.

It was a cold and rainy day and we didn’t want to infect the poor delivery person with what ailed us, so left this envelope on the door with a tip. The lady ran back to her car in the rain, grabbed a pen and some masking tape and put this back on our door and then gave a quick ring on the doorbell to let us know that our order had arrived. I was impressed! Now that is customer service and we definitely let the manager of her store know how much we appreciated that very kind gesture.

I would really like to hear of superb customer service that you have received. Please share!

Those Ubiquitous Yellow Stickies

Denise Griffitts — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:35:08 +0000

Stickies. Those ubiquitous rectangular yellow pieces of paper that we all use to keep track of what is going on with our lives and our businesses. The eternal “to do” reminder.

We all use them either physically or in my case, on my various desktops. Truly, I would be lost without them!

Why you should download this FREE program.

Once on screen, stickies will remain where placed until closed, even through reboots

Stickies appearance can be customised; fonts, colours and buttons may be changed, and styles saved. Stickies can be resized.

Stickies can store text or images

Stickies can snap to each other and to the sides of the screen to keep them neatly lined up

Stickies can be attached to a web site, document or folder so they only show when it’s on screen

Stickies can be transferred from one machine to another either over a TCP/IP network connection, or by using an SMTP mail server or MAPI client:

Hierarchical friends list, which may be automatically transferred from other friends
Play a sound file on receive
Signature for transmitted or emailed stickies
Favourite friends, and custom lists can be made

Stickies can be hidden for a certain period, until a specified date and time, or to wake every day, week or month, to act as reminders.

Stickies can have alarms set to ensure you notice them at a point you choose

Stickies can be transferred to and from your Palm or PPC PDA.

International language, Unicode and RTL text support

Stickies works with Windows Vista and Windows 7

Stickies is small and simple, it writes to a single text file, and does not alter the registry

AD network administrators can use Group Policy to control settings

API to allow integration with other applications

…and Stickies is completely free!

To train with Denise Griffitts to become a highly technically savvy, highly paid, highly sought-after Virtual Assistant please visit Virtual Assistance University.

Weekly Recommended Resource

Denise Griffitts — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:53:58 +0000

I get so many requests for tips and advice on the resources that my Virtual Assistance and Web Development companies use that it seems a great idea to publish a weekly resource.

These are online resources that will help you develop, gain knowledge, find new information and absorb new ideas.

Enjoy!

This Weeks Recommended Resource

WordPress Tip of the Day is a free video podcast from the “Internet Genius” Ben Cope that delivers high-quality video training for WordPress in 5 minutes or less every day in a format that is easy to follow, easy to understand, and always free!

FREE Online Press Release Tool

Denise Griffitts — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:50:44 +0000

I love to share tools that make our workloads easier!

I will be interviewing Lisa Manyon of Write On Creative next month on the Your Partner In Success Radio Show. Lisa shared a wonderful online tool that she has created that helps you create a professional press release for you and your clients.

Lisa’s free online tool Write On Creative Press Release Producer gives you a beautifully formatted press release in two simple steps. All you have to do is imput your information in the form fields and hit the “display My Press Release”. Lisa also gives you some great free goodies when you use her free press release tool.

Lisa Manyon Press Release Case Study

Where To Post Your Press Release

There are several free and not so free press release sites that can drive a lot of traffic to your website. Just Google the phrase “press release distribution” and you will find links to free and paid services. Here are a few that we use.

Free Press Release — Be sure to read their tips page before posting.

PR Log

PR Web – Sign up is free, but press release distribution is not. See this page for pricing information.

I get a lot of targeted responses from press releases that we post on Fast Pitch! It is free to join Fast Pitch, but to use some of the tools such as press, events, etc. you do need to upgrade to their paid subscription. I highly recommend upgrading!

I would love to see press releases you create with this tool so please feel free to come back here and post a link to it!

To train with Denise Griffitts to become a highly technically savvy, highly paid, highly sought-after Virtual Assistant please visit Virtual Assistance University.

**You have permission to reprint in your publication or to your website/blog any articles by Denise Griffitts found on this Website as long as Denise Griffitt’s name and contact information is included. Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert, http://askdenisegriffitts.com, info @ virtualassistantindustry.com, 888-719-6711.

Does Your Business Phone Accept All Callers?

Denise Griffitts — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:35:01 +0000

Quick question. Does your small or home-based business lose potential business or miss connections with a potential client by refusing to answers callers with a blocked number?

This post is going to explore how accessible your business phone should be.

Recently I was given a couple of recommendations for (insert service here) by somebody whose judgment I trust. I called both people and had no problems at all connecting with the first person on that very short list.

However, the second recommended business person would not allow my blocked number call to go through. Now understand that my phone number is blocked for some very legitimate reasons, one being that if my direct phone number became widely known, I would never get anything done. That number is given to my clients and team members. Period. My toll free number is published on all my websites/blogs and is embedded into my business emails. We are easy to get in touch with!

Now, I really did want to speak with this person about a project for a client and just kept going down the numbers given me until I reached a toll free number where I was relieved to be able to leave a message. That was three days ago.

This is where the accessibility question comes in.

Today my call was finally returned and when I mildly expressed my concern with not being able to reach this person’s business phone I was treated to fairly huffy explanation of their reasons. When I explained why my number is blocked (remember now, I have several reasons, all of them legitimate) the response was, “Well that’s weird.” Not a great start to a working relationship.

So my question is, why would a business, whether brick and mortar, or home-based block callers who may not want to show their phone number right away? Isn’t this where voice mail become a wonderful business tool? I have to wonder just how much potential business this person is actively turning away by refusing to accept calls.

Your thoughts?

**You have permission to reprint in your publication or to your website/blog any articles by Denise Griffitts found on this Website as long as Denise Griffitt’s name and contact information is included. Denise Griffitts, Virtual Assistance Industry Expert, http://askdenisegriffitts.com’ info @ virtualassistantindustry.com, 888-719-6711.

Manage Your Team by Tracking Productivity

Denise Griffitts — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 13:53:32 +0000

We’ve all heard time and time again that to get things done, business owners must start delegating and outsourcing. This sound advice has its own darker side – time you spend tracking your team members’ and vendors’ performance and evaluating their productivity. To run our businesses more effectively we need to become very aware of how our teams use their time performing assigned tasks and use this knowledge to manage them appropriately.

For example, one of your vendors or contractors might not charge much per hour, but will take longer to complete each task, thus costing you more than a more expensive, but more efficient vendor. Or you might discover that small changes to communication process and work flow result in large productivity gains.

By tracking your team’s productivity, you will know when your team members are overworked and when they are underworked and adjust their work loads accordingly. You will also be able to identify and eliminate various online time-wasters and distractions your team deals with. Finally, by tracking how much time your team spent on each task, you can better quantify and analyze each task’s ROI.

Another benefit of productivity and time tracking in a team environment is that you will build a knowledge base of time requirements for different types of tasks and projects. This will help you create very accurate time and budget estimates for future projects.

I use an online productivity tool called Rescue Time (available for Mac and Windows) that allows me to easily and effortlessly track how productive my team members are each day.

Rescue Time actually allows you to specify a period of time you want to focus on the projects at hand and will block the parts of the web that you tend to go to without thinking or planning. You can set the number of hours you want to spend in a day on a particular site and Rescue Time will alert you on your email, RSS reader, or by SMS when you run out of time. You can create groups and compare your online stats with other users. There are Rescue Time widgets for blogs, iGoogle, and Netvibes. You can also create a white-list of sites that you want Rescue Time to pay attention to.

Check out the free trial here and please be sure to let me know your thoughts on this tool after you have used it for a while.

* To train with Virtual Assistance Industry Expert Denise Griffitts to become a highly paid, highly sought after Virtual Assistant Professional call 888-719-6711 or visit Virtual Assistance University.