The deal, which was first reported by TechCrunch, has closed, our sources told us, but they would not disclose a sale price. More details should emerge in the coming weeks as Nuance prepares to make an official announcement.

CEO Alexandre Lebrun founded VirtuOz in 2002 in Paris, where it raised its initial funding from French VC Galileo Partners, but later relocated to the Bay Area. The company designs the increasingly common virtual agents that appear on companies’ websites to aid in marketing, sales and customer service support. To date, VirtuOz has raised about $20.4 million, and its investors include Mohr Davidow and Inventures Group as well as Galileo.

Nuance’s own virtual agent Nina is designed for mobile apps. Making heavy use of Nuance’s speech recognition and natural language understanding technology, Nina is designed to help customers perform what would usually be complex tasks with a single voice command. For instance, instead of going through multiple steps to make a $200 transfer from a checking account to a savings account, Nina can perform the task with a single voice prompt.

That makes the companies a good fit. VirtuOz has already built up a stable of customers including Symantec, Nestlé’s gourmet coffee business Espresso, French telco SFR and Michelin (yes, VirtuOz has created a virtual Michelin Man). According to its website its virtual agents engaged in 166 million customer conversations in 2012.

Meanwhile, Nuance has been trying to bring its speech technologies to the PC, striking deals with Intel to put its virtual assistant into ultrabooks as well as promoting its traditional PC products like Dragon Dictation. This deal, however, would allow Nuance to give a “voice” to enterprise’s online customer support and sales.

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In recent months, big names such as PayPal , VeriFone, NCR, Groupon and smaller competitors such as PayAnywhere have rolled out “Square killers” that all feature a notable service: live phone support. They are all hammering away at what they feel is a key difference between Square and their services.

Square’s customer support is built in the Silicon Valley style — favored by companies like Google or LinkedIn — of using online help tools instead of having dedicated workers sitting by a phone. There is no listed phone number for Square support; users are instead directed to email questions or visit a help center, which has more than 150 pages devoted to answering the most asked questions. Square also recently began rolling out YouTube videos on popular questions and also has a Twitter support feed that can take live questions from users. And in some cases when a phone call is the best channel, Square calls a merchant directly.

Competitors argue this approach doesn’t scale, especially as Square looks to acquire bigger merchants. While small time businesses and weekend sellers might not have a problem with online support, they say, everyday businesses expect more hands-on, live help.

“We spend a significant amount of investment in resources and technology to ensure that if people have a problem they can pick up phone or email and get a live person to talk to,” said Anuj Nayar, a spokesman for PayPal. “We think that’s critically important because we’re dealing with people’s money.”

Square doesn’t say how many customer support people it employs but the company has more than 400 employees. PayPal, by contrast, has 6,000 people in its customer service operations, which is its biggest department, Nayar said.

But Square doesn’t think its approach to customer service has become a problem. The company told me that its turnaround time for email inquiries is less than 24 hours and during business hours, the average time to turn around an email question is six hours. And with Twitter support, many questions are getting answered much faster.

Aaron Zamost, a spokesman for Square said the company measures itself by the number of support inquires it receives. It has worked to reduce that number by improving the product, making it more intuitive and easy to use.

“That’s a much more efficient and more useful way to address a customer issue,” he said. “Throwing an army of support representatives at a problem doesn’t fix the problem itself. It’s like measuring the quality of a car by the number of mechanics at the dealership. We’d rather build a better car.”

Square continues to work on how to make its customer support resources easier to use and discover. And it does employ contractors to help resolve issues for many of its businesses that take Pay with Square payments, a smaller subset of all of its merchants. But the company believes that its lean approach is part of its recipe for success. By being efficient with customer support, it can keep its costs down for customers. That is helpful in offering aggressive pricing plans like Square’s new no swiping fee monthly plan. Square’s COO Keith Rabois is speaking at GigaOM’s Mobilize Conference this week.

However, competitors say they are finding success in using customer support as a selling point. Brian Hamilton, VP, of SMB Commerce for VeriFone, said the customer service message has been there from the start with Sail. But the company has sharpened its focus on that angle because it’s resonating with customers.

Randall Stappenbeck, owner of Olive Chattanooga, an olive oil and balsamic vinegar tasting room, chose NCR Silver last month after looking at Square, PayPal Here and PayAnywhere. He said he preferred NCR’s customer service over Square’s reliance on email and support forums.

“If I have a customer here at my desk I can’t wait 24 hours or even two or three hours to hear back,” Stappenbeck said.

But many of Square customers haven’t been fazed by the company’s approach to support. Jesse Kramer, co-owner of the Brooklyn Taco Company said he’s had a handful of small issues that he’s resolved through email support within six to 12 hours.

“I can email them and they get back to me pretty quickly and answer my questions and take my suggestions,” Kramer said.

With Square now processing $8 billion on an annualized basis, up from $1 billion a year ago and $200 million in new Series D funding, it doesn’t seem like customer support has been slowing it down. But it won’t stop competitors from trying to raise it as an issue.

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The man responsible for the decision to experiment with a new “staffing formula” that cut employee hours and fired new hires is British retail veteran John Browett. He was hired earlier this year, after an exhaustive search, to take over the reins from Ron Johnson. And Browett’s approach to “bloated” staffing caused such consternation that Apple was forced to make a rare apology and admit that the changes were a mistake.

”Making these changes was a mistake and the changes are being reversed. … Our employees are our most important asset and the ones who provide the world-class service our customers deserve.”

Remember when Cook unveiled Browett as his first senior hire after taking the CEO job? Back in January, I wrote about the appointment and noted Browett’s experience at pile-em-high, sell-em-cheap retailers — a philosophy very much at odds with Apple’s.

As well as running electronics retail conglomerate DSG, which runs 1,200 large but not exactly liked stores in Britain, I pointed out his other connections and experience:

Browett cut his teeth with Tesco, the world’s third-largest retailer and a dominant force in British supermarket retailing. He was the man responsible for building Tesco’s online presence, creating a leading web-based grocery outlet and delivery service, and he also expanded the company’s ranges way beyond food. He’s also been on the board of EasyJet, the low-cost airline that became famous for its cheap and cheerful approach to flying, for the past five years.

Sure, Ron Johnson had made his name at Target, but it was hard to see how Browett’s cost-cutting approach meshed with Apple’s approach. And at the time, defending the appointment, Cook himself stepped up and said that “our retail stores are all about customer service” and that Browett “shares that commitment like no one else we’ve met.”

At the time, to anybody who had customer-level experience of the empires that Browett commanded, that rang false. Today, it looks like a bit of a joke.

The pressure’s surely going to be on him now. But he’s only doing what many of us expected — and it will be interesting to see how Cook responds.

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Called Nina, the new virtual assistant software is targeted at the growing number of customer service apps companies are stockpiling in the iTunes and Google Play stores with a particular focus on mobile banking apps. According to Nuance VP and GM Robert Gary, customer-facing mobile apps have become increasingly complex which makes navigating the multiple layers of options available all the more difficult.

Nina aims to cut through that clutter, allowing a user to perform thousands of different tasks within a customer care app by simply stating what he wants to do, Gary said. For instance a simple credit card payment could require a dozen different actions on a mobile app: navigating to the payments section, selecting the card receiving payment and the account the transfer comes from, entering the date of the transaction and finally amount being paid.

Nina can reduce all of those steps down to a single simple command: “Pay $300 to my gold card from my checking account.” Nuance’s speech servers not only understand the words, but also mines them for as much information and context as possible. Whatever additional information Nina needs, it prompts the user with spoken follow-up questions. So in the example above, Nina would immediately navigate to the appropriate payment screen and populate the fields for a $300 transfer from the customer’s checking account to his gold card. Nina would only need to ask the customer whether he wanted to make the payment immediately or schedule it for a future date.

Nuance is offering Nina to customers as a white-label service they can customize and embed into their applications. In the demo I saw, Nina’s voice was that of Siri – Apple licenses the Siri’s audio library from Nuance – but Nuance has library of 40 different voices it plans to offer to developers so everyone doesn’t wind up with the same Siri clone. Enterprise customers can hire their own voice “talent” to further differentiate their virtual assistants from the field.

Nina’s first customer will be USAA, the financial services provider of the U.S. military. It plans to launch the voice assistant as part of pilot within its mobile banking app this month and then offer it to all of its members by early next year.

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You could say I was shocked, stunned and horrified. To clear a few things up: No, as I told my inquiring editor, tequila shots were not involved. Yes, I realize it’s just a phone. But I don’t make a habit out of carelessly destroying expensive things — especially when I’m so close to the end of my AT&T two-year contract and looking forward to a no-penalty upgrade to a new phone circa, say, October.

I’ll jump forward to the end: this is a happy story. I walked out of the Apple Store in Center City Philadelphia at 7 p.m. the following day with a brand new iPhone 4. But the journey was very impressive considering the level of service I received for a product that is not a refrigerator or pricey household appliance. Remember, we’re talking about a phone. (Note: I did not disclose my profession to the Apple Store staff for obvious reasons. Nor do I think every customer does or would have the same experience I did — your mileage at the Genius Bar may vary.)

Apple is famous for customer satisfaction — it scores tops among cell phone owners and computer owners, according to the American Customer Service Index. It’s probably no coincidence that high customer satisfaction scores – and offering professional and prompt technical help goes a long way towards ensuring satisfaction — are happening at the same time as the historic expansion of Apple’s business and the ascendance of its stock price.

After my Genius Bar appointment, Apple sent me its standard follow-up customer survey asking me about my experience. And since I write about Apple, I figured I’d share my answers here, in survey form. I was asked to rate my satisfaction with various aspects of Apple’s service on a scale of very dissatisfied to very satisfied.

Overall, how satisfied were you with your in-store repair experience?

Very satisfied. The morning after the fateful accident, I walked into the Center City store without an appointment. I was immediately greeted and told to come back for the next available time slot at the Genius Bar in 20 minutes. When I returned, I waited about a minute and 30 seconds before my designated Genius, Dan, walked up.

That wait was the only thing about my experience that was short — but we’ll get to that in a minute. Despite a somewhat complicated situation due to a failed iCloud backup, I was consistently updated on what was going on with my device. And the employees acted like they cared about solving my problem. Customer service isn’t necessarily the most rewarding job, so it’s gratifying when an employee understands that your presence means there is a problem and that getting it fixed is important. (Apple has just over 34,000 retail employees, with about 100 assigned to each store. Horace Dediu at Asymco calculated that Apple retail sales employees make from $9 to $15 per hour, but Genius Bar workers can make up to $30 per hour.)

Overall, how would you rate the professionalism and technical ability of the store employees responsible for your repair?

Very satisfied. This was somewhat of an emergency situation for me — it’s hard to get work done as a reporter when your only phone is unusable for calls or apps you might be writing about. The Apple Store employees made me feel like getting a new iPhone right away was a priority for them.

They also were very straightforward with me. They made sure I knew what my options were from the start: I could use my AT&T upgrade for a new iPhone 4S, which would start my two-year contract over again (no thanks), purchase a new iPhone 4S off contract for $500 (eek); or, if I left my broken device with Apple, they’d replace my same model with a new iPhone 4 for $149. I chose the latter.

They also let me know that this is fairly routine. Dropping a phone three stories? Not weird at all — they’ve seen and heard worse. The phone’s screen had a lot of scary-looking shards of glass sticking up from it, and when I apologized for its state, my designated Genius shrugged: “I have chefs’ fingers. I deal with cracked screens like this all the time.”

How many times were you contacted about the state of your repair?

At least 10 times, and I hadn’t even left the store. While my new phone was re-syncing Dan would attend to his other Genius Bar appointments, but he’d continually pop back over to update me on the status of my phone. This went a long way toward making me feel like the situation was resolvable and that they cared about getting me a satisfactory outcome.

Once your repaired product was returned to you, what happened?

This actually wasn’t a simple get-a-replacement-phone-and-resync-it-with-my-latest-iCloud-backup situation. Turns out, after 25 minutes of syncing my new phone, none of my roughly 3,000 photos copied over. This was, you might say, problematic. After some troubleshooting, Dan said iCloud was the culprit: my last iCloud backup had failed. He said I should bring my computer that my phone was synced with in and he’d try again, and made me another appointment later that day.

When I returned with my MacBook Air and my new iPhone, he battled further issues: iPhoto kept crashing, and the latest iTunes backup wouldn’t sync. He tried a few different approaches, and finally ended up finding a solution. This troubleshooting took almost an hour, again, thanks to the sheer number of photos I had on my device. Then once he figured out the fix, it was a least another 45 minutes of syncing.

From the start of the discussion, how long was your interaction at the Genius Bar?

Over the course of two different appointments, I spent just under four hours getting in-person tech support from the Apple Store. While that might sound excruciating, Dan was seriously heroic, never got flustered, and even took time to discuss one of my favorite topics while we were waiting: where to procure Philly’s best pizza. (Osteria on North Broad Street, if you’re wondering.) As someone who works from home or remote locations regularly, it wasn’t really a problem to be nearby the Apple Store all day. But that might be harder for people who have to report to offices.

Plus, when his shift ended at 6 p.m., he found another Genius to check in on me while we waited for my syncing to finish so they’d be sure my problem was entirely fixed before I left the store.

In the end, yes, it took a while, and iCloud has some serious issues to work out. But I left with a new phone, only $160 and some change poorer. And, perhaps more importantly, a lot of customer goodwill — an asset that even the most valuable company in the world can’t put a price on.

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When all is said and done, T-Mobile will be 1,900 employees smaller and will lose about 5 percent of its U.S. workforce.

“Concentrating call centers is an important step to achieve competitive cost structures to successfully compete as [a] Challenger and value player in the wireless market,” CEO and President Philipp Humm said in a statement.  “These are not easy steps to take, but they are necessary to realize efficiency in order to invest for growth.”

The centers to be padlocked are in Allentown, Penn.; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Frisco and Brownsville, Texas; Lenexa, Kan.; Thornton, Col.; and Redmond, Ore. T-Mobile said its employees at the seven facilities can transfer to another call center if they wish and that it would help those workers with relocation expenses.

Image by sxc.hu user thadz.

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1. Social media revenue conversion measures how many people become customers through social media referral channels.

Challenges: Social media is great for creating awareness and engagement, but it is hard to measure how many people convert to customers. Facebook’s last click attribution attempts to measure customer conversions by tracking which Facebook links sent people to other websites. However, this doesn’t work well either because there is a delay in the conversion.

For example, someone might see that a friend has posted a link to a brand’s website on Facebook. However, the brand has no way of tracking who clicked on the link, or finding out the social influence of her friends, or if she ultimately made a purchase. Privacy rules also limit companies’ ability to track the entire social shopping cycle. And unfortunately, Facebook Insights (which provides Facebook page metrics) does not offer any context to help the brand discover what motivated someone to click on a link.

Best practice: As the associate director of social practice at Moxie Interactive, Daniel Cho has tackled the problem of measuring social media conversion. When Moxie was tasked with developing social media programs for Verizon Wireless, Cho says, “We focused on total ROI. We put a social metrics layer on top of web metrics. We measured social media conversation volume, sentiments and engagement, which is the number of comments, links and Facebook shares.”

Cho used Wildfire to build a Facebook tab for a Verizon Wireless sweepstakes promotion. Although he could not measure which channel was a better referral channel, he was able to successfully track the social media conversion rates. To do this, he used the number of sweepstakes entries as his main metric. For the secondary metric, he used Wildfire and Google Analytics to calculate the number of tab visits (equivalent to impressions) and opt-in emails.

2. Facebook engagement measures a brand’s ability to communicate successfully with their customers on the social network.

Challenges: Most global brands have multiple Facebook fan pages. Different products and specific regions have their own pages, which are managed by different groups within the company. Businesses need an integrated view of engagement across all fan pages and Facebook app campaigns, so that they can understand what increases their numbers of fans and how this growth compares with industry standards.

Best practice: Many companies use a hybrid solution to track fan page engagement, such as Mediaplex or Google Analytics tags embedded in their Facebook apps combined with Facebook Insights.

SocialBakers the only provider of social media analytics tools that offers an integrated Facebook leaderboard for all brand pages. Their key engagement metric, called “page score,” consists of a combined index score of Facebook page fan growth, content quality and post quality for each fan page.

Ami M. Blaire, senior vice president of marketing at Social Games International, says, “The engagement ratings, the ability to test against and within a competitive set from SocialBakers as well as the contextual metrics are the most valuable tools. Secondarily, the ability to segment by territory and market is and will continue to play a valuable role as we define the best set of programming and promotions.”

3. Social customer support metrics measure the impact of customer support on brand health and the cost of staffing a social support program.

Challenges: Today, people expect their favorite brands to have customer service representatives available on Twitter and Facebook. Companies are trying to figure out how many staff members they need to devote to social customer support and how to best measure the success of such programs. There are several tools commonly used by companies that measure the ROI by counting the number of users supported via social media, but this does not reflect success at a strategic level.

Best practice: Best Buy provides support via Twitter and measures customers’ feedback on the quality of support through a proprietary survey.

Gina Debogovich, a social media lead at Best Buy, told me about how the business shifted focused from measuring return on invested capital to return on engagement.

In 2009, 3,000 Best Buy employees volunteered to answer customer questions on Twitter (@twelpforce) as part of their daily work responsibilities. Through this program, Best Buy was able to estimate the volume of questions from customers and develop consistent, quality answers from its employees. In three years, 50,000 questions were answered. The concept of using employee engagement as a key metric led to the residual value of highly-engaged employees becoming a great social support staff and customers becoming evangelists for Best Buy.

Sudha Jamthe is a social media strategist at eBay, where she focuses on social commerce and social metrics. She has built social media teams, organizations and partnerships for PayPal, AOL/Bebo, Intuit and Network World. She blogs at coolastory.com and tweets as @sujamthe.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Steinhardt.

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One of the selling points of the original Apple Store was the red “hot line” that the Genius staff could use if they were stumped on a problem. After a time, that phone disappeared.  Turns out, Apple didn’t want customers tying up the bar trying to play stump the genius (a surprisingly amusing pastime). What they actually wanted was for the Genius bar to take care of problems on the spot, and delight the customer with excellent, attentive service.

Over and over, Apple has been willing to change things up, experiment, make adjustments, and even throw away things that don’t work. Here are some other examples of those changes, large and small:

• The Genius Bar originally didn’t have appointments. You just walked in, wrote your name down on a piece of paper, and you were given a pager to tell you when it was your turn. Apple migrated to an electronic waiting list and then implemented appointment times. After the iPhone, the service queue was split up into separate Mac and iPhone/iPod lines.
• The Genius Bar originally did all the product training in the store. Apple later rolled out ProCare with training sessions included, and then split training off from ProCare into One to One. Now One to One is only available for new Mac purchases, and group training has been emphasized.
• Theaters were installed in all stores for product demonstrations and education. Theaters remain in the flagship stores, but the floor space has been given over to the Genius Bar and Creative training areas in smaller stores.
• The Rhonda app on all of the display machines would turn the screen a certain color so that staff would be alerted to a customer waiting for help (Help Me Rhonda. Help, Help Me Rhonda!). This was later dropped.
• Stores were directed to get average repair turnaround times under 2 days. In order to meet the challenge, stores started to keep parts for quick repairs on hand so that they could get some done on the spot.
• The original store layout had several cash drawer stations around the store where customers would queue up to make purchases. EasyPay changed that so all credit card transactions could be handled on the floor. Cash drawers started to disappear and many stores only have one for the occasional check or cash payment. The EasyPay system migrated from a Windows CEapplication running on Symbol hardware to an iPod touch outfitted with a card swipe reader and bar code scanner.
• With the cash drawers gone, stores started posting greeters at the front to direct customers and introduce them to the way things worked. This position was formalized into a special Concierge position. Later the concierge would check you in for your Genius Bar or One to One appointment with an iPod touch or iPad app.
• Apple installed receipt printers under tables throughout the store which meant sales staff could stay closer to the customer. Staff can now request product to be delivered from the back room, so the customer can continue to ask questions or receive help.

After 10 years and billions of dollars in profits, it is easy to look back and think that Apple Retail was an inevitable success. But Apple has had its finger on the pulse of consumer desire for all that time, and the ability to identify changes in that pulse and adapt quickly is a quality that should help Apple continue to succeed in the coming decade as well.

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1. Make sure your website is a true representation of you, your working style and your work.

When prospective clients visit your website, it’s important that they get a clear picture of what you can do for them. Anything less than that is a disservice to both prospective clients and you. Your website is there not only to market your business, but also to screen prospective clients to find those that are well-suited for you. The more information you put on your website and the more accurate and thorough it is, the more likely you are to find clients who will be very satisfied with your work. Why? They knew exactly what you could do before signing up with you.

2. Be upfront and direct.

If a prospective client does something that is not acceptable to you or requests something that you cannot provide, say so (and the sooner, the better). Be clear, open and honest about when and where you’re not willing to bend your policies and with the services you provide so that there’s no room for miscommunication or misunderstanding.

3. Clearly communicate what you can and cannot do.

With every new client, even if you feel like you’re repeating yourself, it’s important to clearly define what services you do and do not provide. Even making sure to outline what is and what is not included in your fee is important for maintaining solid relations between you and your clients, so take the time to communicate those details as early on as possible.

4. Set out the terms of your arrangement clearly.

Don’t just say what you can and cannot do or what’s included in your fee and what is not; put it all in black and white. Whether in an email, a contract (recommended), and/or on your website, it’s important to spell out in writing, not just verbally, exactly what you will and won’t do and what’s covered in the cost.

Also, if the client wants to do something that falls outside of the terms of your arrangement, be sure to communicate that fact quickly and directly so that you stay within the scope of your agreement. This is one place where you absolutely want to be a stickler for detail, because one slip could cost you considerably. If your client wants to modify your agreement and the request is something you’re willing to accommodate, say something like, “I’m happy to create a change order, but the revision will cause [x change] to the cost [and/or time frame].”

5. Explain how you work and what can be expected of you.

Create an “Ideal Service Provider Credo” and post it somewhere on your website so that clients and prospects know exactly what you’re promising to do and deliver. Include things like:

• “I will communicate with you by email a minimum of once per week to keep you informed of where we are with your project,”
• “I will notify you immediately if circumstances arise that will affect the cost or time required to complete your project,” and
• “I will respond to all emails and voice mails within [x time frame].”

By outlining what clients can expect from you, not only will you better manage their expectations, but you’ll also provide a little added assurance that you take your role as their service provider very seriously and that customer service and clear communication is important to you.

How do you manage client expectations to keep projects running smoothly and clients happy and coming back to you?

Photo by Flickr user Jeff Denberg, licensed under CC 2.0

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Recently, I stumbled across a new service called Alice that lets you buy all of your household essentials online, things like toilet paper, toothpaste, trash bags and so on. Alice is awesome, and as soon as I figured out just exactly how awesome Alice was, I couldn’t wait to tell everyone I knew about the service.

Identify Your Customers’ Pain Points

I hate grocery shopping, especially for household items. I can be out of aluminum foil or coffee creamer for weeks before finally convincing myself to go to the store. There are many reasons why I dislike it so much, but here are the main two:

1. I hate making grocery lists. It takes too long. I have to think of everything I’ve been running low on or out of for the past month or so, and I inevitably forget something, which means I either have to go without out the item until the next time I convince myself to do this chore, usually two or three months later, or I have to go back to get the item. Plus, the list must be organized, or else I’ll end up running from one end of a 20,000 sq.ft. store to the other (which, let’s face it, ends up happening at least once per shopping trip anyway, because of some big conspiracy going on at the big box stores).
2. I hate the experience. I have to get ready and drive out to no less than two stores, because it’s impossible to get everything at one place, unless I go to one of the really unpleasant big box stores, which is a nightmare. Once I get there, I have to deal with parking, rude people, frustrated employees, long lines, price checks, loading the cart with the groceries, unloading the cart to check out, reloading the cart after checkout, and finally unloading the cart into my car, and then I get to go home, unload my car, and put all the groceries away, only to realize that I’ve forgotten something and to be discouraged, because I spent more money than I had planned, and a week later, I’ll need to do the entire process all over again.

Remove the Pain and Make Them Love You

Enter Alice (cue sound of choir). Alice solves my problems:

1. Alice knows me very well. When I signed up for my account, I got to go through and pick out all of my favorite and commonly-used household items and put them into my own custom, always-there product shelf. When I’m ready to shop, all my favorite items and brands are waiting for me, and all I have to do is load them into my cart and check out (if I haven’t scheduled them to be delivered automatically).
2. Alice will shop for me — automatically. I can set up my products to be delivered at specific times (say, toothpaste every two months and coffee filters every three). Alice will send me my items at preset times so that I no longer run out of things. Even if I do forget something, it only takes two or three business days for delivery, which is usually how long it takes me to convince myself to go to the store anyway.
3. The price is right. Manufacturers can sell directly to me through Alice and as there are no inventory costs as with regular retailers, the savings are passed on to me. However, even if the items were priced the same, I still don’t have to take time out to worry about restocking the toothpaste. Plus, there are no shipping fees, so I save on gas, not to mention the aggravation.
4. Alice looks after me. Just before checkout, Alice offers me some custom deals and coupons that I wouldn’t have otherwise found. Even if I don’t need the items just yet, Alice will save the discounts for me for a set time so that I can use them later.

But is It Real Love?

I could go on and on about Alice, and that’s really the point: I love this service and plan to tell everyone I know about it. Rarely do I get so excited about a company that I can’t wait to rave about them. That rarity is something that, if we’re smart, we can capitalize on within our own companies.

Make sure your customers love you, and I mean really love you:

• To the point that they literally have trouble listing all of the ways,
• To the point that they can’t wait to tell friends and family about you at every available opportunity, and
• To the point that they would hate to have to live without you.

Find your customers’ pain points and solve them. More than that, turn something they once dreaded into something they actually enjoy.

What companies do you love and rave about at every opportunity, and why?

Photo by Flickr user aussiegall, licensed under CC 2.0

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