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Originally posted on Forbes.com on June 29th, 2020.

One of the key lessons of marketing in the last decade is that customers value their experience with businesses. Customer experience has become such a significant factor in business interactions that avoiding it leads to lower customer retention.

The most effective way to keep buyers coming back is to give them a customer experience they aren’t likely to forget. How can a company seek to improve its customer-facing procedures? These 12 experts from Forbes Agency Council chime in on a few changes that a company can implement to create an unforgettable customer experience for their consumers.

1. Personalize At Scale

Consumer expectations keep rising. On top of wanting brands to be available 24/7 across their platforms of preference, consumers expect to be treated as real people, not mere ticket numbers. Not long ago, personalization at scale might have sounded like a lofty goal, but with the rise of artificial intelligence and automation, brands can now scale their teams overnight to provide an always-on, white-glove service. – Etienne Mérineau, Heyday.ai

2. Be Your Brand Evangelist

Brand experience starts with your front-line staff. Be your brand evangelist and lead by example. Reward behaviors that build your brand and constantly promote the importance of being brand-aware. Above all, be authentic with your staff and your customers. Give staff the freedom to use common sense and do what is right for the customer. – Jason Wilson, Strategy, LLC

3. Let Your Customers Be Your Guide

Let your customers be your guide. Customers are on the front line with your product. By taking the time to ask for and listen to customer feedback, both positive and negative, you’ll gain valuable insights to continuously improve CX. And more importantly, you’ll strengthen relationships with your most engaged customers, who can then become advocates for your brand. – Aliza Freud, SheSpeaks, Inc.

4. Improve The Employee Experience First

Businesses often fail to consider the correlation between customer and employee experience. When staff love their job and workplace, customers who interact with them will be more drawn to the brand. The passion of an engaged employee makes for better connections with customers and a stronger desire for them to become brand-loyal. Do more for your employees, and they’ll do more for your customers. – Philip A. Nardone, PAN Communications

5. Focus On What Your Customer Needs

Consider the consumer perspective in every conversation. Brands usually think about what they want to say. Instead, try focusing on what your consumer needs and how you can provide it. Seek to offer inspiration, advice, entertainment or information that will truly better their day or life — from your very first touchpoint. – Kate Weidner , SRW

6. Educate Your Consumer

Educate your consumer. People become deeply connected with specific moments that spark their interest, educate them or show them a new perspective. These moments become memories attributed to your brand experience. Be truthful, educative and transparent with your audience to create stronger bonds that make your consumers loyalists. – Alex Quin, UADV

7. Focus On Relationship-Building

Focus on customer relationship-building. Start by remembering details and occasions, and asking questions to learn more about them to be able to make the customers feel special. When clients feel a part of a brand and that the brand listens and communicates with them, it creates trust and builds brand. Focus on going deep, not just wide, when it comes to customer experience. Make your customer feel special. – Tony Pec, Y Not You Media

8. Make Sure CX Meets Expectations

Great advertising builds anticipation of what interaction with a brand would look like. Once CX meets the expectations, it builds trust and sets a consumer on a path to brand loyalty. If a brand adds to a personal image, the recommendations to friends might follow. Approaching the CX through the consumers’ eyes, rather than the production cycle and supply chain, is the key to success. – Oksana Matviichuk, Zenith

9. Offer Them A Platform To Tell Their Stories

Offer your customers a platform to tell their stories in this environment. As the brand, you can certainly place some guardrails on the type of content that’s admissible — how your brand helped them get through an experience, the first thing they are going to do with your brand when we get past the current crises, etc. Seek to inspire them, acknowledge them and reward them for sharing compelling content. – Dean Trevelino, Trevelino/Keller

10. Collect And Leverage First-Party Data

Collect and leverage first-party data. Our customers share large volumes of information with us, and they expect us to hear them and use that information to deliver a personalized experience. Develop systems that allow you to collect, store and apply the data you have on each customer to give them an intuitive experience. It is the expectation and they are frustrated when brands miss the mark. – Korena Keys, KeyMedia Solutions

11. Focus On Your Post-Sale Process

The real work begins after the purchase. Brands may invest heavily in driving attention and traffic to get the sale, but you must have a follow-up plan to nurture customers after checkout. Follow up on their product or service experience promptly. Address questions or concerns quickly. Remember that real success comes from the lifetime value of the customer, not the one-and-done purchase. – Bernard May, National Positions

12. Hire From Within Your Target Demographic

If you want to consider your customer experience, you need insight from your target demographic. Make sure you’re getting insight directly from the source, not just what you think is hitting the mark. – Kelly Samuel, Kelly Samuel

*This post originally appeared on Forbes. To read the original, visit Forbes.com. 

Have you experienced a social media troll or seen unwanted solicitations appear on your Facebook page? Chances are good that if this has not yet happened to you, it will. Soon. So what do you do about it?

Today, it is critical to be prepared with a plan to respond when a social media crisis occurs – because it will likely happen sooner or later.

Prepare For The Worst, Hope For The Best

Next week, lock your key stakeholders in a conference room and don’t let them out until they have completed this exercise. While that may seem extreme, it is that important! Developing a clear plan of action – identifying all possible negative events and writing out the company response will save you time, stress and unneeded negativity in the event that something happens. While this sounds daunting, it can be pretty simple, and maybe even a little fun with the right attitude.

1. Create a social media crisis management document.

Brainstorm all possible events that could negatively impact your business. Your plan should include the various potential crisis scenarios; the complaint origin and its reach, who is impacted in each situation (individuals, current customers, potential customers, general public, staff), the classification of the complaint (more on this later), who is responsible for responding (marketing, public relations, agency, management), and the recommended response, including the verbiage, tone and location of the response. As for potential scenarios, include everything from company embezzlement to negative press to an angry customer or sabotaging competitor.

Last February, my agency was were working with a very popular wedding planner. Just before Valentine’s Day, she posted a lighthearted blog post on why she doesn’t like Valentine’s Day – commercialization, overpriced flowers, forced gifts in schools. It took about 10 minutes for the outcry of texts, Facebook messages and comments to begin. While this was an unforeseen response, it caused immediate chaos. She elected to remove the blog from her website and social pages and issue private apologies to those offended.

2. Identify the origin of the complaint.

Is it really a crisis? Where did the crisis initiate? Which channels are fueling the crisis? For our wedding planner, a full-on crisis was averted by taking quick action: The negative attention died as soon as the post was removed. If you are facing a potential event, gauge the depth and breadth. Is it one person on one network? Or has the conversation (awareness) spread into the mainstream media?

3. Identify who it could impact.

There are two primary audiences during a crisis: those directly affected and those whose attitudes about the company could be influenced. Determine which group is being impacted the most and what that impact could possibly be for each situation.

To see this in action, monitor Twitter when a local cable provider has an outage; you will see who was directly impacted by a situation. How the cable provider responds will determine if there will be a lasting impact on the brand.

4. Categorize the commenter.

In general, there are five types of posts (widespread criticism, individual solution-seekers, trolls, solicitors and fan-to-fan interaction) that could cause problems on your social profiles, which Rodney Hess outlines in a “Practical Ecommerce” article.

I recently came across a fan-to-fan interaction that influenced my buying decision: I was interested in a swimwear brand until I read through the comments on a sponsored post. There were about 50 comments of frustrated customers (no refunds, slow shipping, poor quality products, unresponsive customer service). This lack of customer service was reinforced when the company had elected to ignore all comments; not one of the 50-plus comments came from the company.

5. Formulate your response to each situation.

Provide honest and straightforward answers that reflect your brand’s voice, beliefs and culture. Avoid pointing the blame. You will gain respect if you talk about how you plan to fix the issue before going into what, how and why it happened.

Once this is completed, share the document with your legal counsel, public relations, marketing and management teams. Gain buy-in across all departments. The more rapid the response, the lower the risk of the crisis getting out of hand. A quick, appropriate response can turn a dissatisfied customer into a brand advocate.

Beyond this crisis management document, there are a few additional actions that you can put in place to prevent some issues from ever arising:

• Post a public commenting policy on your social media accounts and blog to provide guidelines for others wanting to comment on your posts. (Here is a good example of one on Travel Oregon’s Facebook page.)
• Have a social media policy within your company handbook that clearly states the expectations of employees on what they can and cannot say on corporate pages and personal pages.
• Assign at least one person to monitor your social media accounts, reviews and web mentions. Having a trusted individual (or team) that understands your brand values, products, and the appropriate response to situations will mitigate issues quickly. Empower them to respond quickly.

While I hope you never experience a crisis, you will sleep better at night knowing you are prepared.

*This post originally appeared on Forbes. To read the original, visit Forbes.com.

I’m sure at some point you’ve received the phone call or email from an unknown contact with some variation of this statement:

“We’ve reviewed your website and you do not show up on the first page on Google for your keywords. Call me today and we can guarantee the top spot.”

I certainly see this all the time, as a founder of my own agency. While many reputable businesses are legitimately doing a great job of helping their clients, there is also a large number of companies that are taking advantage of business owners using questionable practices.

To start at the beginning, search engine optimization — or SEO — is defined as a “process of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the number of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine – such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.”

The most common practices include updates to on-page factors such as:

• The mobile-readiness of the website;
• Updates to the code that make the site easily read by search engines; and
• A review of the text (content), images and off-page factors, such as incoming links to the site and qualified connections with other trusted websites.

If you are like most businesses today, you are contracting a service to monitor your website and move you up to page one in the rankings. But how do you know if you are working with a qualified firm, or if you’ve hired a hack? Here are a few of my best practices:

1. Clearly identify what the company will do for you and what the deliverable will be. Set reasonable timelines and then follow up on them.
2. Ask them to recommend a list of keywords and to explain why these terms were chosen. This will force them to fully understand not only your company, but also your competition.
3. Ask for a plan, or better yet an audit. Has your SEO company identified the primary issues, and do they have a plan for correcting them? Secure a copy of their analysis and strategy.
4. Expect a proposal that includes one-time fixes and ongoing efforts. Be leery of a flat monthly fee for updates, as most projects involve a lot of work up front and considerably less effort as time passes.
5. Require a monthly report. This report should include a detailed explanation of the work that was performed the previous month, and the results of that effort. There should also be a recommendation of what needs to be done next to achieve the desired result and ranking.
6. Demand accessibility. Your SEO team should be available to answer questions and explain the report data.

Finally, as is true in all aspects of business, you get what you pay for. You will not be able to hire an “expert” at $100 per month and expect they are actually doing anything more than taking your money. If budget is a concern, hire an experienced firm to perform an audit. Instead of paying for ongoing monitoring, review the identified issues and work to fix these items. Skip the long-term contracts and monthly fees.

Ultimately, the best way to protect your company from a bad vendor is to establish clear goals, ask a lot of questions, demand progress reports, check reviews and hold the company accountable — just like you would with any other vendor you hire.