Identifying your real customers and keeping them well informed fast
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-11-02 13:58:49 - Graham Ellis
"We don't sell that at the moment, but we'll be reviewing it early next year. Please keep coming back to our website, where we'll be announcing it". Now - have I got something wrong there, or should "customer service", who gave me that answer, added me on to the list of probably hundreds of people who have been enquiring - this is a multinational company that's offered the particular product a number of times in the past ... Customer service to me means giving people the opportunity of being contacted again if they specifically ask for updates. If you've gone to the trouble to ask about a product, you shouldn't have to keep making repeat enquiries just to get an update - the supplier should keep you in the picture if he wants your custom.
I was reminded of that "grrrr" from a few weeks ago as I wondered how to deal with the continuing rise in spam signup requests to our forum on train travel in the South West / South Wales - the Coffee Shop. It's a very popular forum, with 117,000 separate posts since we started, and virtually all on-topic. Want to find out about what's going on with public transport in the area - trains especially? You're likely to learn a lot here - as did 13,000 different visitors last month alone.
You can sign up for free and ask questions too. But one of our problems is that lots of people want to sign up to market their own products, to send messages to all of our members, and to place their information / data onto our pages. After all, we're highly visited, highly ranked and (I believe) highly regarded. Indeed, each month we get thousands of sign-up requests from people who we describe as "forum spammers".
We know the profile of our members, and of likely new members ... and we've got elements within our signup procedure to help highlight to the administrators which signups are obviously genuine, and which are obviously spammers. These procedures have been tuned over the last year or two to help provide the admins with more data on each application, and to format the way the requests are presented to the admins so that very quick and clear decisions can be made in all but a tiny number of cases. I'm being careful what I write here - I'm not going into what we actually look for in these profiles. But I can tell you that the proportion of requests which are doubtful cases has dropped to a very low level indeed.
But, alas, an admin still has to sign in every few hours so see what's going on, clear out the rogues, and approve any genuine cases ... who have (sod's law) probably been waiting since 5 minutes after the last admin came by. And I'm reminded of the statement I started this post with, about having to keep coming back and check ... that should NOT be necessary for our admins. Over the next few days, we'll be moving onto a system where signups that are clearly genuine, OR which are doubtful, will result in a personal message or email being sent to the admin team. That will save the admin team the trouble of having to go "look / see" every few hours, and it will mean that genuine new members will be welcomed in minutes, rather than hours.
I was reminded of that "grrrr" from a few weeks ago as I wondered how to deal with the continuing rise in spam signup requests to our forum on train travel in the South West / South Wales - the Coffee Shop. It's a very popular forum, with 117,000 separate posts since we started, and virtually all on-topic. Want to find out about what's going on with public transport in the area - trains especially? You're likely to learn a lot here - as did 13,000 different visitors last month alone.