I’ve been thinking the last few days about what attribute I would like my business to be known for. What do people think of our small business? Are we a trustworthy business? What does it mean, and take, to be trustworthy?

Trustworthy has a lot of synonyms that mean similar things; but first, let’s look at the definition of trustworthy. According to the Encarta Dictionary: English (North America) that is included in Word 2007, “trustworthy means reliable, deserving trust or able to be trusted.” Some synonyms are dependable, reliable, responsible, truthful, honest, constant and honorable.

As we work with colleagues in the industry we’re in, my partner and I would like to think that Borlok VA is a model for other aspiring virtual assistants – whether or not they are just starting out or have been in business for many years. In order to be worthy of trust, we need to demonstrate certain characteristics and traits that would show that we are dependable.

As a company that works in the highly competitive virtual assistance industry, we would hope that our friends, clients, staff and colleagues view us as being fair and dependable, that we have a good track record and that we’re knowledgeable. But, along with those qualities are the unwritten connotations that we are profitable, up to date in trends, skilled and credible.

So what are some ways that you can ensure your small business is trustworthy? Let’s take a look:

• Be honest all the time with yourself and with others – Be sincere and truthful in your dealings with vendors, colleagues and clients and friends. Go above and beyond to foster that precious relationship that you can have with your customers — and everyone else.
• Be consistent – To me, this means that our clients should be treated the same; and in our case, that means to provide global expert services with quality and on-time delivery. In addition, provide excellent customer service to ensure you don’t have issues with client retention.
• Deliver on your promise – if you say you are going to meet a specific deadline, meet it; but better yet, exceed it.
• Say what you mean and mean what you say; then follow through by walking the talk – there’s no room here for being wishy, washy, is there?
• Have an open door policy – no one should be afraid to speak with you. Foster collaboration.
• Honor your contracts – if you have a non-compete clause in your contract, make sure you honor it. The same would go for a non-disclosure agreement and all other aspects of that contract.

Becoming trustworthy doesn’t happen overnight. It takes working at it 365 days a year. The benefits of being trustworthy mean you get – and keep – more clients and build a solid reputation. So, is your small business trustworthy?
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Pam Lokker is a master writer and proficient virtual assistant. Borlok Virtual Assistants is the place to get global expert VA services with quality and on-time delivery.

Why is it that when we see a word a phrase that we really like that we grab it and use them forever? Do you ever stop to think about the words you are using in a proposal? Are they overused and full of consultant-speak speech? Well, let’s check out some words or phrases to consider stripping out of your proposals.

Overused Superlatives

What the heck are superlatives? I don’t use them. Are you sure? Do you really know what a superlative is? Let’s check out Dictionary.com for some help.

1. of the highest kind, quality, or order; surpassing all else or others; supreme; extreme: superlative wisdom.
2. Grammar . of, pertaining to, or noting the highest degree of the comparison of adjectives and adverbs, as smallest, best, and most carefully, the superlative forms of small, good, and carefully.
3. being more than is proper or normal; exaggerated in language or style.

Let me give you five examples from random sites that I looked at:

• the biggest benefit
• the best managed
• need us the most
• the most notable
• the least promising

There’s nothing wrong with using words like unrivaled, easiest, highest, shortest, unique in other types of content. You just want to try and limit your use of superlatives in proposals.

Overused Buzzwords

Buzzwords are overused a lot in proposals, and even in all types of content. Buzzwords are usually trendy words that are specific to a certain group. For example, in the Internet Technology (IT) industry, common buzzwords are SBS, MSP, VAR. In the Virtual Assistant (VA) world, one might speak of EA or VA or PA. Be careful that what you are talking about can be understood by the person it is intended for. Spell it out as I have done with IT or VA or leave it out.

Other types of buzzwords that are just used too much are popular words specific to a particular industry. Have any of these examples cropped up in your proposal writing?

• Thinking outside the box
• value-added
• alignment
• win-win

If you tend to use the words above, it would be to your advantage to leave them out of your proposal. (Buzzwords Gone Bad)

Pronoun Overabundance

There are better ways to write proposals than using an overabundance of ‘I’, ‘you’ and the rest of the pronouns. In my opinion, it doesn’t show any creativity and is extremely boring. Quit it!

One of the purposes of a proposal is to justify unspoken decisions in the preliminary stages of the sales process. Instead of using overused consultant-speak, make your proposal believable by supplying facts to back statements up. Get rid of overused superlatives and buzzwords and leave the pronouns back in your office

Provide concrete evidence that your company can solve a client’s need, but do it without saying “our company is the best qualified to provide you a variety of MSP solutions because I say so.”
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Pam Lokker is a skillful writer and proficient virtual assistant. Borlok Virtual Assistants is the place to get global expert VA services with quality and on-time delivery.

Nowadays, keeping your clients with you is critical to the well-being of Small to Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs). It’s not always easy to work with those clients that ask for the moon but give you impossible demands that eat up your time and money. So what can you do with those cantankerous clients, especially if they get ticked off at you? Let’s take a look:

Give careful thought on whether to keep them or set them free.

Sometimes, we know right from the get-go that we’re going to have trouble with a particular client. You just get this tightening in your belly as they speak with you during your free consultation that maybe they could be trouble. For goodness sake, pay attention to your intuition. Most of the time, your intuition won’t lead you astray.

If those cantankerous so-and-sos get too ornery, it’s going to take you bucking up and deciding whether they’re just too much trouble to make it worthwhile to continue the relationship with them. It’s okay – if your decision is to let them go, go ahead. Just make sure you weigh all the risks.

Set their expectations early.

Unfortunately, we’ve only had to learn this through hard knocks through the years. Set realistic expectations for them and get their expectations of what they want from you. Doing so will hopefully keep you from wanting to kick yourself in the butt because you neglected to do that.

Don’t burn your bridges.

If you decide to let a client go, or even if they decide to leave your services, make sure that it is in an equitable way. Burned bridges can cause unnecessary stress and hard-feelings that could develop into something more serious like bad-mouthing of you on the social media networks or even lead to lawsuits.

Stroke the feathers of the good clients and keep them happy.

Make sure that your client relationship management is above reproach. A happy client can be a long-term client.

To many times, SMBs will stroke the wrong feathers. What I mean is that they will bend over backwards for the brand new client while they let their old clients fall by the wayside. Folks, that’s just plain silly — your older clients are your bread and butter; they had been tried, tested and proved to be reliable. Now why in the world would you want to go mess that up?
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Pam Lokker is a skillful writer and proficient virtual assistant. Borlok Virtual Assistants is the place to get global expert VA services with quality and on-time delivery.

See how virtual assistants can get back lost customers.

A Small to Medium-sized Business (SMB) is usually very busy during the day, and they need a good phone they can use to communicate with clients. But is there such a phone? I mean, after all, Straight Talk is a pre-paid cell plan – not an actual phone. Is there hope that such a phone exists?

Meet the Samsung Prepaid Phone with Keyboard, R451C

The Straight Talk Samsung Prepaid Cell Phone has a wide variety of features that you can use to communicate with clients — all without having to sign a contract. That means you don’t have to worry about extra fees for things such as activation, reactivation, cancellation, daily access or overage.

Features

This attractive-looking phone has some of the features that all your other cell phones have like a slider QWERTY keyboard, bluetooth wireless technology, a 1.3 -megapixel camera, Mobile Web services, Voicemail and Call Waiting, Battery talk time up to 4 hours, Standby time up to 14 days, and the charger and services guide. You will need to purchase the Service Talk Service Plan (minutes, text, data and service days) in order for you to use the phone.

Advantages

Let’s take a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of this phone.

1) Economical - I went to Walmart’s online website and searched for “straight talk phone.” There are several there, but the Samsung R451C listed for $79.88. You will find others there that might appeal more to your taste; however, you will pay more for them with the exception of the Samsung R355C. You will need to purchase a Straight Talk Service plan to activate it.

The Service plans come two 30-day Service Plans: the $30 All You Need Plan with 1000 Minutes, 1000 Messages plus 30MB of data, or you can also choose the $45 Unlimited Plan with Unlimited Minutes, Unlimited Messages & Unlimited Mobile Web Access. Okay, so you want more versatility? Choose one of the 3 additional Unlimited Plans which offer unlimited talk, text, and/or multimedia messages and Mobile Web Access during 90, 180 days and 1 year of Service.

2) Phone capabilities are multiple - You can call out, receive calls, view calls that you missed, view the call that is incoming, and use your own voice to dial. In addition, you can text.

3) Size – This cell phone is small enough that you can slip into your pocket. It measures about 2″ x 4.5″

4) This CDMA phone uses the Verizon towers, although I did find that if you have any questions about calls dropping, users of this phone found that Verizon support was not a help.

5) What if you don’t like the ringtones that come with the phone. Can you download ringtones to your computer and transfer them to your phone? The answer is yes. You can also swap ringtones with your friends.

6) The Samsung R451C does not have a sim card, although Walmart does offer the R451G which does have a sim card.

Disadvantages

1) Currently, if you are a small business owner and need to make or receive an international call, you are going to be out of luck as Straight Talk only allows nationwide calls.

2) There is no capability to record videos.

3) A busy businessperson will not have any way to install any apps, so you won’t be able to install JAVA files for internet messaging, etc. The phone has a very limited internet browser.

4) Text messages you send are a minute size of only 160 characters and are not saved in streamed or chat format meaning they are saved individual text messages appear in your inbox and are not threaded.

While this article is not meant to be an all-inclusive review of whether or not Straight Talk has a prepaid cell phone that SMBs can use to communicate with clients, it does give you a view of the Straight Talk Samsung R451C. Would I recommend this for a small business owner? I can’t advise you on that; you have to make your own decision. Personally, I would do more research to see if there might be something better.

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Pam Lokker is a skillful writer and proficient virtual assistant. Borlok Virtual Assistants is the place to get global expert VA services with quality and on-time delivery.

Samsung R451C + Unlimited Plan

Summary: For whatever reason, virtual assistants (and small businesses in general) come to the realization that their customer list is dropping. Are you doing all you can to get those customers to come back to you?

What we have found is that customers can and will come back to you if you follow three steps to get back those customers that seem to be lost. Let’s take a look at each of them individually.

Own the mistake

What this means is that you can’t blame the customer for a falling out. You need to take ownership (at least part of it) for what caused them to go to another provider. Were you rude? Maybe you irritated them by always pushing ‘I’ instead of ‘you.’ Maybe the customer left because of personal reasons. Trying showing a little empathy.

Do a reality check

Have you checked back with the customer to see how they’re doing? Do a reality check — ask them for their input as to what could have been done differently if they felt the falling out was due to something that you did. Clients generally are very good about giving you feedback about what ‘coulda, shoulda’ been done.

Our virtual assistant small business has come to realize that customer feedback is great because the client appreciates being included in decisions (makes them less cranky when something’s not going their way). Not only that, what a wealth of information you could receive to help you improve how you operate your business. Who knows; maybe their answers won’t hurt as bad as any solution you would have implemented.

Go above and beyond to fix what YOU did

Personally, if the customer shows you that you or your small business was the culprit in helping them to make the decision to leave, apologize. That’s right; I said apologize. Then discuss with the customer a possible action plan that you can implement that will ensure a healthy business relationship with you should they agree to return. Make sure that you are integrating a good comprehensive customer service action plan. Finally — Follow through on that action plan.

Clients (and/or customers) are the core of any virtual assistant’s or small business. Take care to provide A-1 customer service and satisfaction to those clients you have. However, if a client should tend to stray and go to another small business provider, be proactive and contact them. First, own up to any mistakes you might have made if they should suggest that you were the problem. Do a reality check and get their advice on how they think things could have gone better. As a last step, go above and beyond to fix what you did. By following these three steps, virtual assistants can get back those customers that seem to be lost. Being lost doesn’t mean they have to stay lost.
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Pam Lokker is a skillful writer and proficient virtual assistant. She is co-owner of Borlok Virtual Assistants, the place to get global expert VA services with quality and on-time delivery.

Reward your customers with comprehensive customer service tactics in order to improve customer satisfaction.