Interview Questions for Every Customer Service Candidate

Short of inventing a time machine there’s no guaranteed method, which makes an interview one of the most important tools you have to vet a customer candidate.

The right interview questions reveal more useful information about a candidate than their work history, because they force interviewees to think on their feet, drawing on their experience to answer pointed questions. Seeing how they react speaks volumes about how they will handle real-life situations, and will help you avoid wasting time and energy on hiring the wrong person.

Divide these interview questions among your hiring team, and you’ll get the information you need to hire top customer service talent.

Structuring Your Interview Q&A

The best interviews are not strict question-and-answer patterns; they’re structured conversations that draw out candidates’ attitudes, strengths and challenges.

Encourage candidates to use a storytelling approach: Tell them you’re not looking for hypothetical “this is what I would do if that happened” answers. Ask for specific, detailed stories about their experiences and their behaviors in those situations.

Don’t be afraid to dig deeper: Your questions are only starting places for conversational topics. If the answer is interesting or concerning, ask follow-up questions to uncover more details.

It’s OK to ask similar questions: Often the best stories will come out when a candidate has had a few minutes to think about an earlier question. By revisiting important areas, you give them the best chance to reveal their character and skill to you.

Don’t rush to fill silence: It’s OK to let your candidates sit quietly before they answer a question. It can give them time to formulate their thoughts, and it can also result in them revealing more than they initially intended.

Customer service approach

1.What does good customer service mean to you?

2.What appeals to you about this role specifically?

3.What’s the best customer service you’ve ever received? Why?

4.Can you tell me about a time you received poor customer service?

5.Is there a difference between customer service and customer support?

Emotional intelligence, empathy and behavior

6.Can you tell me about a time when you were proud of the level of service you gave a customer?

7.Have you ever dealt with an unreasonable customer? How did you handle it, and how would you handle it today?

8.Have you ever bent the rules in assisting a customer? Tell me the situation and the outcome.

9.In your past work, have you ever received negative feedback from a customer? What did you do with that feedback?

10.Can you tell me about a customer that you found difficult to understand, and how you approached that interaction?

11.Can you describe a time when you had to say “no” to an important customer’s request?

12.What’s the best way to help a customer who has worked with multiple agents and hasn’t received the help they need?

Problem solving

13.Have you had a time when a customer was reporting a technical issue that you didn’t know the answer to? What was your approach, and how did it end up?

14.Can you tell me about a situation with a customer when there wasn’t a clear policy to use, and you needed to make a judgement call? How did you approach your decision, and what happened?

15.Can you give me an example of a situation where there were major problems with your product/service, and you needed to respond without having all the answers yet?

Communication skills

16.Can you give an example of how you handled alerting a customer when your product/service caused a major problem?

17.When responding to a customer, how do you decide what information to include, and what to leave out?

18.Can you tell me about a time when you needed to convince a customer or a teammate to change the way they were working (e.g., adopt a new procedure or modify their language), and how you went about that?

Attitude and approach to work

19.What’s the last new skill you learned? Why did you choose that skill, and how did you learn it?

20.Can you tell me about a time when you made a great contribution to your team?

21.What’s the next book I should read? Why?

22.What are you better at today than you were this time last year?

23.What do you think makes a good teammate?

Do you have unusual interview questions you’ve had success with in past interviews? Share in the comments below!

Why You Should Work With Video Marketing Companies

Many small businesses make the mistake of keeping things in-house when it comes to video marketing. With all the tools available to create, share and upload videos, there is no excuse not to have a digital marketing strategy in place when it comes to your video content.

Many brands are starting to realize the benefits of having a content creation team to help them create, manage and promote their video content. Whether it is a major source of marketing or just a small addition to your current campaigns, capturing a video audience can be invaluable for any industry.

Adopting Video Marketing

The best video content and strategies are constantly evolving. Video content will no doubt become more popular and easier to create, especially as companies begin to take advantage of new technology that has been introduced recently, such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. As technology evolves, video marketing companies will come up with new ways of delivering their services to potential clients, ensuring that your strategy will always hit a modern audience.

The content creation process that is used to deliver this content is also likely to evolve. As more companies use video marketing as a core part of their marketing strategy, a shift in how video content is created is occurring. Creating content via recent technology can sometimes be done in mere minutes or require almost no actual work beyond some basic graphic design and/or animation.

By using an established video marketing company, you get access to all of its skills, talent, tools, and techniques without having to set anything up yourself. Creating your own video marketing department can be expensive and difficult, especially for a smaller company that barely has enough employees to justify making a whole new marketing team.

The Cost of Video Marketing

With the number of options available to small businesses when it comes to creating, sharing, and posting video content, there are also plenty of options when it comes to the cost involved. With so much content being shared online, it can be easy to waste your budget on making the wrong thing or attempting something groundbreaking that will not actually work.

However, by partnering with the right video marketing agency, you can ensure your budget stays protected by relying on them to do the work. The cost of video marketing varies depending on the strategy that your video marketing agency employs, but you will be provided with a detailed quote as to how much your video marketing campaign will cost, as well as guidance to help you make the right choices concerning how you develop your marketing.

Customer Focus

The best video marketing agencies are all about the customer. They are your partners and the channel that will enable you to reach your clients, as well as an important source of knowledge and experience about how video content can be used as a marketing tool. This focus on the customer makes video marketing companies a great place to turn since they understand how to make content that sells.

In fact, video marketing agencies are the ones who enable you to understand your customers and their needs. It is the only way to grow a brand. Video marketing helps businesses expand their brand recognition and customer engagement through online videos, something that can become a very direct way of gathering customers or spreading brand awareness if done correctly.

In most cases, video content is more engaging than any other content, which is why it is becoming one of the leading online marketing channels. Many businesses are making a video content marketing strategy a big part of their online marketing campaign specifically because of how it can target customers and how new audiences can actually stumble across video content even if it is no longer being actively used as promotional material.

Versatility

Whether you are marketing a business, a product, or a service, video marketing is a great way to get the most out of your marketing budget because video content can work well for all of them.

Most younger people spend a lot of time using the internet, which means that they can easily find your brand and share it with their friends and followers – if you are able to provide them with something interesting to see and share. Plus, these people tend to be more tolerant of advertising than their predecessors were and will allow themselves to be targeted by the right message if it is presented in an engaging and positive way.

As a small business owner, the last thing you want to do is to spend money on marketing and then not see any results. However, if you have done the right thing and created a video content marketing strategy that appeals to your audience – and do it correctly – then you can often see high returns even from audiences that are historically hard to market towards.

Final Thoughts

Video marketing is one of the fastest-growing online marketing channels in history. Not only do many internet users linger on the same video platforms most of the time rather than moving between them, but they tend to be more tolerant of ads, especially if it is to support content creators that are sponsored or required to run ads on the platform.

If you have developed a basic video content marketing strategy but find that you do not see results, then video marketing agencies are the best option for you. At the end of the day, it will always be much more effective to have an agency create and promote video content for your business instead of spending your own time doing the same. Finding the right video marketing companies is not always easy, but the field is wide enough that you can often stumble across them just by looking online. Many marketing companies that handle video content are proud of their work, and that makes it very easy to track down examples of what they have made in the past – something that can really help you choose the right fit for your business.

Anita Campbell Growth Questions Businesses Need to Ask

ave you defined a business growth strategy? Is it a continuous process as your company tries to keep up with business change? You would be surprised how many of our clients say they are happy with their size and therefore don’t have a growth strategy. In this blog, we share some Anita Campbell growth questions that can stimulate your thinking.

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

–Peter Drucker

In the life of a business, there are only two options … you can either keep up or surpass your competitors through a business growth strategy or lose market share.

Business growth obviously can be planned in various degrees. If your business is at the size you desire, a minimum or status quo strategy may be the best for you. In any case, you need to execute some form of a growth strategy to at least maintain the status quo.

How often do you review your small business growth plan or strategy? In the life of a business, there are only two options … you can either keep up or surpass your competitors by business growth planning or lose market share. Are putting enough focus or getting ready as Henry Ford says?

Business growth obviously can be planned in various degrees. If your business is at the size you desire, a minimum or status quo strategy may be the best for you. In any case, you need to execute some form of a growth strategy.

In a time of overwhelming competition, the increasing rate of marketplace change, and significant marketing message noise and clutter, even maintaining your current customer base is difficult … and real growth even harder. We define growth capabilities as composed of four key components. These are customer focus, creative marketing, adaptation and innovation, and your team.

Related: Define a Competitive Business Growth Strategy like In-N-Out Burger

Here are some ideas and questions to help you frame your thinking to define your growth strategy:

Anita Campbell growth questions … customer focus

Build customer relationships and trust

Customers choose businesses based on their confidence, strength of relationships, and trust.

Today there are many communication channels to engage your customers, build communities, display your brand’s values, deliver on your promises and ultimately build relationships and trust.

Every customer touchpoint in each channel is an important marketing opportunity.

Customer-centric

Do you know who your customers are and your most valuable customer segments? Do you engage your customers to build your relationship and to gain valuable insights? Do you frequently rethink the question of potential new customer segments?

Take nothing for granted

Don’t take a customer’s loyalty for granted, especially when dealing with a first-time buyer. The key to customer loyalty is not just by providing a quality service or product, but how you service and support it.

Meeting customer expectations in a first sale may not be enough. First-time buyers want to know you care. For loyalty to endure, it must be noticed and acknowledged.

Delivery channels

Are you considering ways to broaden your reach to more customers and improve your customer service by adding a new delivery channel? If so, are you thinking about how to integrate the customer experience across the channels effectively?

Anita Campbell growth questions … creative marketing

Integrated marketing strategy

Creating marketing messages that will be heard, remembered, and, most important, talked about, is very difficult in a world where customers have precious little time to listen.

Achieving creativity in your marketing messages delivery is essential to winning your customers’ choices, and then their loyalty.

Remarkable growth lessons … marketing initiatives

Are you adding new, collaborative ways to communicate with your customers? Do you consistently refresh your value proposition to ensure your discrimination is still valued, deliverable, and believable to customers?

Business Information: How to Completely Change Your Success Priorities

Anita Campbell growth questions … adaptation and innovation

Adaptability

The digital and network revolutions have unleashed rapid and significant marketplace changes that impact your ability to engage customers, and the rate and amount of change are accelerating.

Businesses must interpret and understand the implications of these changes and rapidly respond to creative ideas and innovations to maintain their competitive edge.

Learn from key competitors

Do you frequently observe what your key competitors are doing in the market space? Have they spotted a key trend that you have missed? What changes are they making to their merchandising and their value proposition?

Observing trends

Are you sensitive to the changes in your customer segments and to developing market trends? Do you consider how you might capitalize on these trends?

Do you frequently observe what your key competitors are doing in the market space? Have they spotted a key trend that you have missed? What changes are they making to their merchandising and their value proposition?

New white space opportunities

Do you combine your customer insights with your competitor and trend observations to derive new white space opportunities? Do you innovate on your business model and your product and services? Have you considered collaborating with local businesses and your customers?

Anita Campbell growth questions … your team

Building an effective team

Your team is your business, quite literally. It is only as good as the weakest link and your ability to provide strong and effective leadership.

You, as a business leader, must be a talent hound for future hiring, be a strong mentor and coach, and continually work to build your leadership skills and a staff that works effectively as a team.

Takeaways

As a business, you can either grow or shrink … where is your small business growth focus?

Are you satisfied with your progress? Do you have a growth story to share?

Lots of ideas on business growth here that can be easily replicated … which ones do you feel could benefit your business?

How could you improve the social media marketing campaign for your business?

There are many great business growth campaigns we can learn from. Please post your comments below, offering questions or your great examples of business growth strategies.

Customer engagement improvements are worth the effort.

Need some help in finding ways to grow your customers? Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your business learning?

Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

Check out these additional articles on business and its performance in our library:

Retail Design …11 Ways Businesses Are Responding to the Future

7 Surprising Things to Know About the Zillow Business Model

10 Lessons for Successful Entrepreneurs You Need to Know

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Business Success Enablers: 16 Mind=Blowing Facts about These

Are you happy with your business success enablers and growth? Or are you struggling to keep up with your competitors? You would be surprised how many of our clients say they are happy with their success and size and therefore don’t have a growth or success strategy for remarkable business success. To exploit change as an opportunity, like Peter Drucker would say?

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

– Peter Drucker

Related: Peter Drucker’s Crash Course with These Management Lessons

Remember this: whatever got you where you are today will not be sufficient to keep you there. A rapidly changing environment is the regular background against which organizations must develop. We can all dream about what it takes to make our startup a success. Dreams are important, but not without a success plan and its execution.

business success enablers — Business success enablers.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve long been fascinated by the forces that drive business success. It’s been 5 years since I founded Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing agency that focuses on helping to improve business success. In interacting with will be entrepreneurs, start-up business owners, or small businesses, I have noted that it is not too uncommon for them to want to spend lots of valuable time and energy thinking about appearance rather than spend their time demonstrating that they can win new customers, and more importantly, keep them.

Here are the top five most important success factors to a winning business that we use most often with our clients (listed in order of importance):

Business success enablers … your people are your business

Your team is your business, quite literally. It is only as good as the weakest link and your ability to provide strong and effective leadership.

You, as a business leader, must be a talent hound for future hiring, be a strong mentor and coach for people development, continually work to build your leadership skills, and build and maintain a staff that collaborates effectively as a team.

Digital Spark Marketing offers workshops and useful blogs in all of these areas.

Start with customer focus

key enablers for business growth — Key enablers for business growth.

Collecting and employing customer insights

We are definitely in the age of the customer … ignore this at the peril of your business. While the customer is not always right, he always has the right to choose. Building customers into advocates is perhaps your most important task. It all starts by listening to your customers.

Do you listen more than you talk?

Do you know who your most important customers are? Your influencers? And why they come back to do business with you? These are important questions whose answers provide valuable insights to your business.

Examples of business enablers … engage customers

Why engage customers? The answer is pretty simple. Customers remember and value personal experiences that demonstrate deep understanding and respect for their needs. There is a fine line between a bad, good, and great customer experience. You need to know your customers and understand your touchpoints well to build great customer experiences. Great customers experiences are the foundation for great customer service … both are essential in building advocates and influencers.

Smile, listen, connect, and thanks = engage customers

DSM Marketing Agency is skilled in understanding and improving customer touchpoints in ways that make positive impacts on customer experience and service. Our goal is to make your customer experience and service discriminate your business from its competitors.

Do you need the ‘spark’ to set your business apart … if so, call for a free consultation today.

Responsive customer service

Businesses need to take their customer service to the next level. The best approaches are by being more responsive and proactive, delivering on their promises, and listening and observing to gain insights and then acting on them.

The ability for a business to serve its customers in a responsive way that is consistent with meeting or beating their expectations will prove to be the ultimate differentiator separating the winners from the losers.

Be social, yes, but above all, be responsive.

When companies learn how to deliver and evolve differentiated customer service, they build strong, enduring customer relationships and trust.

Does your business strive to create world-class customer service? DSM Agency can help you build your roadmap.

Building customer relationships and trust

Few things as critical as building customer relationships.

Customers choose businesses based on their confidence, strength of relationships, and trust.

Today there are many communication channels to engage your customers, build communities, display your brand’s values, deliver on your promises and building customer relationships and trust. Use those that represent where the majority of your target customers reside.

Creative marketing

Creating an integrated marketing strategy and messages that will be heard, remembered, and, most important, talked about, is very difficult in a world where customers have precious little time to listen. Achieving creativity in your marketing messages delivery is essential to winning your customers choices, and then their loyalty.

The DSM Agency will collaborate with you and your team to design winning marketing campaigns to effectively deliver your messages.

Creative marketing messages

Your job as a business entrepreneur is to establish your expertise with your target customers … both on-line and off-line. You must know more than your customer communities know and use this knowledge to help them in their decision making. Use creative messaging to achieve these goals

Winning value propositions

With the amount of competition in the marketplace and the number of choices a consumer is given, the creation of a winning value proposition is difficult … but all the more necessary.

How does your business make a difference to customers who have infinite choice? The DSM Agency has been building successful discrimination and value propositions for the past several decades … we will be happy to collaborate with you on yours.

Brand marketing

Give your advocates and influencers good things to talk about. Focus on the advocates and influencers and let them take your messages to their friends and do your market branding for you. Everyone who touches a customer has a role to play in positively influencing a customer and strengthening your brand … so it’s their job to deliver the right kinds of communications and influence.

Social media and word of mouth campaigns

A community is a social network of people who interact amongst themselves about a specific topic. An audience is people who interact with a service. You can buy an audience, but you can’t buy a community. Focus on building communities through your use of integrated social media. We have many excellent examples we can discuss with you … it starts with a simple call.

There are many new components of a successful marketing campaign … such as social and mobile, and many more channels created by social media. The world of marketing is in a constant state of change, growing more personal, dynamic and local.

Is your business ready for the world of real time marketing? It is certainly an area that requires your attention. Let us discuss some of our ideas with you.

Integrated marketing campaigns

Marketing campaigns are not one dimensional. You have many customers, lots of messages, and several value propositions. You engage customers wherever they are … and they are on many channels. A campaign must effectively integrate your messages, their delivery and timing in a way that optimizes your ability to engage and not bombard your customers.

Innovation

What do you think: are innovators born or made? Surely, those who spawn ideas that change the world are special – different than the rest of us. Take one look at an Einstein, a Steve Jobs or a Da Vinci and it seems that they were bequeathed with something unique.

But are we looking in the right direction? I believe the biggest secret of innovation is that anyone can do it. The reason is simple: It’s just not that hard. Look up the word “innovate” in any dictionary and see what it actually means, instead of what you think it means. You’ll find something like this:

To innovate is to introduce something new.

That’s it. It doesn’t say you need to be a creative genius, or a workaholic. It’s just three little words: introduce something new.

The key word in the definition is “new.” The common trap about newness is the assumption that new means something the universe has never seen before. This turns out to be a very bad assumption.

Here’s why I conclude this: name any great innovator and I guarantee they borrowed and reused ideas from the past to make whatever it is they are famous for.

Innovation principles and process

Companies often ask themselves why their innovation principles seem to produce so few truly game-changing ideas. Why are they mostly getting only lukewarm suggestions for incremental improvements rather than radical new concepts for revolutionizing their industries? How can an organization get dramatically better at generating big, breakthrough ideas?
What are missing in most companies are innovation principles that translate ideas into winning ideas.

Crowdsourcing

Does your company do crowdsourcing in any form? Have you done any recent reading or research on crowdsourcing design? We follow this topic quite closely and have written several blogs on the topic and the businesses that employ it.

Crowdsourcing design is not just for new entrants challenging established players; the latter can also leverage crowdsourcing to their advantage, enabling users to design new products and test the demand at the same time.

Times of marketplace change

In a time of overwhelming competition, increasing rate of marketplace change, and significant marketing message noise and clutter, even maintaining your current customer base is difficult … and real growth even harder. Digital Spark Marketing Agency defines growth capabilities, as shown below, and provides services in each area. We add value in problem understanding, marketing campaign design, designing changes for market trends, and team training.

Adaptability to change

The digital and network revolutions have unleashed rapid and significant marketplace changes that impact your ability to engage customers … and the rate and amount of change is accelerating. Businesses must interpret and understand the implications of these changes and rapidly respond with creative ideas and innovations to maintain their competitive edge.

The survivor is the one most adaptable to change

Need some help in finding ways to grow your customers? Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your business learning?

Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.

Client Satisfaction …10 Secrets to Improve Customer Experience

Customer Orientation … the Worst Customer Experience Mistakes

Customer Experience Optimization … 10 Employee Actions that Lower It

Building a Customer Experience Strategy for Business Success

Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements

10 Ways to Employ Customer Experience for Influence

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

10 Secrets to Select the Best Customer Focus Employees

What do you think is the most important factor in how your business puts attention to customer focus and engages its customers? Like many things in your business, we believe the answer to this question is the quality of your customer facing employees.

Check out our thoughts on team leverage.

How customer facing employees engage customers can make or break any business. It all depends on how employees relate to customers. We say it many times to our clients, this problem is solved by getting the right employees into the business (75% of the required solution) and then training and empowering these employees (25% of the required solution). Today we will focus on how to select the best customer facing employees.

Here is an excellent short video on recruiting tips.

So what skills and qualities are required facilitate positive initial engagements with customers? Here are the recommendations we give our clients:

Flexible as a customer facing employee

When dealing with customers, things can go bad often at the wrong time. Employees have to be adaptable enough to roll with the punches and think outside the box when meeting customer needs.

Customer focus … multitasking abilities

Often employees must to deal with multiple customers and their questions and needs, and at the same time, attend to their other store duties. You need your staff to keep cool and do well with multitasking at all times.

Customer focus examples … patience

Dealing with unruly customers means that you will have to take the good with the bad. Your customer facing employees must have the composure to deal with all types of stressful customer situations without ‘losing it’. That composure is vital.

Confidence

The confidence to make eye contact and strike up a conversation with strangers is absolutely essential … there is no substitute. It takes all-out determination at all times.

Friendliness

Customers don’t want to deal with personnel who don’t seem to care to be friendly. Unfriendly is the quickest way to close customers.

Understandable

Your staff must have the ability to be conversational and, at the same time, have the ability to formulate answers and provide easily understood information when asked.

Customer focus competency … initiative

It’s never a good idea to wait until a customer is stressed or agitated before offering assistance. Being one step ahead to gauge when someone needs help is the best way to minimize a brewing situation. It is also a great way to show a customer you care.

Respectful

Customers might not always be right, but they always have the right to choose. Customers must be treated with respect, even if they are rude and unruly, in the most challenging situations.

Positivity

The ability to smile in the face of a long and possibly chaotic day can make a world of difference to customers. Losing it at the end of an otherwise great day is not acceptable.

Rapport

Being able to look at a situation through the eyes of a customer is an extremely valuable skill that can enable you to provide customer rapport and the highest degree of service. It takes a great deal of patience as well as practice.

At the end of the day, it’s all about how an employee interacts with a customer.

How that interaction goes will ultimately determine if that customer will buy and recommend the store to her friends and family, or turn around and walk out, never to return again.

So you can NOT accept unacceptable or average employees. If you do that is where your business will end up.

Remember, to lead is to measurably help others succeed.

Need some help in finding ways to hire the best employees? Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential competitors? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Do you have a lesson about making your continuous learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

13 Daring, Yet Most Effective Interview Questions

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.