For All The Companies Who Don't Believe in "SUCS", There's...

[TaxGuy]

Customer Service Phone Number | Customer Service Numbers | CustomerServiceNumbers.com

I've had issues with both Craigslist and Yelp recently and was able to pull up contact phone numbers for both at that site. Granted, CL phone goes to the sales dept and same with Yelp(whose message actually says "We are email based and do not provide phone customer service" although they're glad to take sales calls at this number :smxE

Hopefully this will help someone else on the forum who is having an issue with one of these big web companies who don't believe in the need for customer service(or that they can just outsource it to India/China/Philippines etc).

And let this be a reminder to all you business owners- DO NOT DO THIS!

This is why our business believes in availability via phone, email, Skype, etc. Customer service is and should always be #1, no matter how "good" your product is there will always be someone out there willing to provide the customer service to make up for the difference in product quality and if not, there's entrepreneurs out there who have some work to do.

With that said, anyone know of good alternatives to both Craigslist and Yelp?

We have a free ad listed on Facebook Marketplace(aka Oodle) and directory listings in several places, namely Merchant Circle, however, they don't seem to get the traffic/response rate that CL and Yelp get so for now I'm stuck using their services until a viable alternative presents itself.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

For the big web companies, "customer service" is an oxymoron ... it's every man for himself.

 

[Likwid24]

It's sad that Customer Service has become a lost art in the U.S. Most big companies could care less about their customers these days. I'm surprised they still have any.

Wayfair.com is a perfect example of this. Even though they have a number, they made a huge mistake on a recent order and admitted fault, yet still did nothing to fix the problem. They make you feel like your just one customer and they have millions more so you mean nothing. Very Sad.

 

[kwerner]

What kind of issues did you have with craigslist?? Just your ads not showing up?

 

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[TaxGuy]

Kasey- My ads keep getting flagged, apparently I am violating TOS by posting 2 different ads on different days and using HTML code in my ads while there are many competitors who are posting more ads, two of whom have 16 and 11 ads up respectively, both of which with links and the same "html" markup that I'm "guilty" of...

I sent another email straight to the top after getting a response from Craig N himself a week ago and assurance that his Customer Service Mgr(who is also named Clint) would follow-through and he still hasn't

 

[kwerner]

It's probably your competitors flagging your ads, haha.

I'm not sure Craigslist is the best place to try and drum up leads unless you're offering super cheap tax returns, which I don't believe you are. But if you want to test it, try making 3 identical landing pages on your site and 3 different ads for Craigslist. If it were me, I'd make them IMAGES, not 500 words of text. But with each ad try a different theme or picture or whatever. Include your phone number in the ad and also have each ad link to its own landing page.

Ad 1 -> Landing Page 1
Ad 2 -> Landing Page 2
Ad 3 -> Landing Page 3

Then once you have a winner of the 3 ads, change another thing and test 3 variations of those ads and keep doing this. After you're getting a decent clickthru on your ads, then you can try variations of the landing pages on your site. Testing is the only way that you'll ever know what ad & landing page combination works best. But if it were me, I'd test all this with Google adwords instead of craigslist; maybe both.

Really though, if you're targeting businesses & people that need to get their taxes done by March 15 / April 15, I'm not even sure that you'll have enough time to do all this testing; but this is the basics of how you would test something like this.

 

[TaxGuy]

Wow Kasey, I should've checked this before I messaged you on FB!

I just sent the Craigslist Ad copy that we are currently running that I was looking to get feedback on in the Private Forums, but couldn't b/c the forum spam filters

 

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[kwerner]

Forgot to ad this yesterday (brain fart), but the reason for the 3 separate landing pages on your site should primarily be to track which ads are converting from phone calls. So obviously you'll need 3 phone numbers, one for each landing page. Just forward them all to your main number.

Another thing about converting while on the topic, be sure that this is what you're ultimately keeping track of. It doesn't matter if you get 200 visitors to your site from an ad if none of them call or fill out your form.

Hope this helps.


EDIT: Also, after your testing is finished, be sure to delete two of those landing pages and 301 redirect them to the live one. Don't need a google penalty for having dup content.

 

[LightHouse]

Forgot to ad this yesterday (brain fart), but the reason for the 3 separate landing pages on your site should primarily be to track which ads are converting from phone calls. So obviously you'll need 3 phone numbers, one for each landing page. Just forward them all to your main number.

Another thing about converting while on the topic, be sure that this is what you're ultimately keeping track of. It doesn't matter if you get 200 visitors to your site from an ad if none of them call or fill out your form.

Hope this helps.


EDIT: Also, after your testing is finished, be sure to delete two of those landing pages and 301 redirect them to the live one. Don't need a google penalty for having dup content.

Or better yet, if they are used for advertising like that, don't index them at all. Its not optimized for search anyway. You alwways connect the ad with the LP. if it shows up in search, it will be disconnected and you will have too many pages to leave up to google to decide which to rank.

 

[kwerner]

I've heard of people using a robots .txt file to keep those pages from being indexed, but how to do that's over my head. :\

 

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[GTC1187]

I hate GoDaddy myself!
I talk to them almost every day, and they screw me like every time I call!
Had to talk to their floor manager yesterday and still wasn't satisfied!!!

 

[LightHouse]

I've heard of people using a robots .txt file to keep those pages from being indexed, but how to do that's over my head. :\

There are tools online that cna help you create the line you need to add to robots.txt. or you can add it in the metadata area of the page. or you can go inot webmaster tools and have it help you create the line you need. once you learn it, it becomes pretty valuable!

 

[bernieshawn]

Put this in the header of your landing pages to keep them out of the Google index:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">

 

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