At my last company ( MyPublisher ), I became very interested in what people were saying about our products and services. In order to research what was being said along with who was saying it, I started to collect a list of sites where people commonly posted about products in our category and searching for posts there etc. Every time someone linked to an external blog I would bookmark that so that I could check on it periodically. Finally, I used Google to search for a few key terms, including the company name, and would browse through the results. The issue with all of this was that there was no way to immediately tell if I had visited a link or not. Nor could I tell that I had forgotten to check one of my sources. I spent an inordinate amount of time reviewing old information only to realize 100 words in, that I had read it already.
Enter Google Alerts.
One day, I was clicking around in my Gmail account and I ran across the my services link. Right at the top of the list was the mysterious Google Alerts feature. Google describes them as:
… email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.
The configuration only requires you to plug in a search term and select how often you want Google to tell you about new things that it has found that match. It literally saved me a couple of hours a month. Not a lot of time in abstract, but keep in mind that those hours were previously completely wasted and totally annoying. Now I use it to keep track of a bunch of companies and people who I like to keep tabs on.
Every once in a while, it really helps me at work by letting me know about something really good ( or really bad ) that is going on with our customers. By getting and staying informed, I am armed in the battle for excellent customer service with the weapon that is timely relevant information.
For example, I have a Google Alert configured to tell me once a day about anything new that references Fog Creek Software. Recently, it informed me of a blog post (one that I would very likely have never seen otherwise) which detailed the poor experience of one of our Copilot users. I used this information to reach out to a customer who rightfully complained about a bad experience that was the result of a bug in our software. He not only responded positively to my effort to apologize but also made himself available to troubleshoot the problem he experienced. I helped him by recognizing the issue and compensating him for the trouble. He is helping us by providing us with a source of information, should we need it, about a bug in our software. In addition, I would hope that it may lead to some repeat business for us in the future. In my opinion, it represents a small but important victory in an effort to ensure a truly enjoyable customer experience.
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