Digital Marketing | Digital Strategy | This Digital World

LinkedIn Could do Better on Customer Empathy

Businesses that truly understand the needs of the customer tend to do well.  It's not a pre-requisite for success but it certainly helps.

I was recently left with a not so sweet taste in my mouth, when I tried to downgrade my premium LinkedIn account to a basic account.

For starters, if you allow customers to upgrade your account online then you should also allow them to downgrade their account.  Unless you are desperately concerned about the revenue risk (in which case you've got bigger problems), it is simply good practice. LinkedIn does a great job of telling you the benefits of a premium account and makes the sign up process simple, but if the customer tries the account and for whatever reason decides it's not for them, show some customer empathy and make it simple to downgrade!

For those of you that have premium accounts and have spent far too long trying to figure out how to do it, here is the link.  As far as I can see, it is only available in the help section when you do a search for 'downgrade'.  If you go into account settings you will see upgrade links but no downgrade links.

The actual process for completing the downgrade is here (from Linkedin's website):

To downgrade to a lower-level premium account: 
Click Contact us.
Complete the form.
In the "Question" field, tell us which premium account level you'd like to downgrade to (e.g. "I'd like to change to a Business account.")
We'll contact you after your request has been completed. You can still upgrade to a higher subscription level at any time.

All in all, quite a lot of hassle.

It took about 5 days before I got a reply.  It was a very nice email, although they refunded my last payment and changed my account immediately, whereas I actually wanted to keep my premium account until the end of the billing cycle and then downgrade. Meh. At least they came close but in my book, could do much much better.

 

Social Networks Now a Popular Hiring Tool

How do you find great talent for your business?  Recruitment firms do a lot of the legwork, but can also cost an 'arm and a leg'.  Traditional job sites like Monster may be cheap, but the lack of filtering can mean wading through hundreds of CVs.

So what about social networks?  According to new research by recruiting platform Jobvite, the traditional ways are now being challenged by social networks.

 Almost three quarters of companies that took the survey in June 2010 said that they now use social networks to hire staff.  Unsurprisingly, LinkedIn was top of the social networks for hiring, with 90% of new hires through social networks coming from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn's job search functionality has improved significantly in the last 18 months and provides a simple way for job seekers to find available jobs in their area as well as research companies that they might be interested in working for.  The killer feature though, is the ability to use your existing network to find a 'back door' into the organisation that is hiring.  Having people recommend you for a position is much more likely to get you noticed.

The survey showed that Facebook and Twitter were also growing in popularity as platforms to advertise open positions on.  And with half of those companies surveyed expecting to increase their spend on social media this year, now is the time to look at your own recruiting methods and decide whether social networks might be a more efficient way for you to find your rock stars.