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Throughout the years we’ve had Clients reaching out to us with a lot of compliments, but we’ve had our share of complaints too. It takes time to build up a company from scratch that will produce the lowest amount of complaints.

We’ve eventually reached a point where we believe we’ve made our share of mistakes and paid for them, but we have also come out with a better service in the end.

This post is about letting potential Clients and other agencies know about the process we’ve undertaken in White Shark Media. You can trust us to use your compliments and complaints to constructively move forward.

Below you’ll see some of the typical customer complaints we’ve received during the last couple of years and what we’ve done to avoid them from happening again in the future.

“I’ve Lost Touch With My AdWords Campaigns”

This is something that hit particularly close to home. We realized that the reporting procedures we had set up weren’t adequate enough to let small businesses´ owners easily review our reports or let them know what was going on.

To avoid this we now make sure that each Client is thoroughly explained the ins and outs of their new campaigns. By knowing your campaign before it starts you’re more likely to know where to go if you want to see the performance of a specific keyword or ad.

Below you’ll find more situations in which we had to improve communication and support to our Clients.

“I Don’t Feel Communication Is Good Enough”

As a consultancy agency communication is basically our most important task. It ranks just as high as providing meaningful results to our Clients.

In our early days many of our Clients didn’t feel that our communication was good enough and getting hold of their contact person was often frustrating as they needed to go through a receptionist.

To avoid this, we implemented:

1) Scheduled Monthly Status Calls With GoToMeeting

Every month, or as requested, each Client and SEM Strategist reviewed the results from the past 30 days as well as the monthly report that was sent out in advance of the meeting.

The meeting took place using GoToMeeting, which is an online conference tool. GoToMeeting allows us to share a screen, so we can easily go through the report and the AdWords account while the Client sees exactly the same thing we do.

This has proven highly effective and has been praised by many of our older Clients who had been working with us before this procedure was implemented.

2) Phone Systems With Direct Extensions

Allowing Clients to call their contact person directly has been a big relief for many of our Clients. Upon signing up you’ll get an email with all the necessary contact information for your contact person and the person’s supervisor. This allows for seamless communication in case your contact person is out of the office.

“My Old Campaigns Were Performing Better Than Your New ‘Optimized’ Campaigns”

As an AdWords agency this is of course a big criticism on our overall competency. If Clients come in and we don’t develop a better performing campaign within a couple of months we’re in big trouble.

To better ensure the success for every Client we increased the importance of the following procedures: In order to guarantee success for every client, we have given more importance to the following procedures:

1) The Existing Campaigns Are Actively In Use

We make sure to use all the successful aspects of any new Client’s existing campaign(s). We don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every single Client. The most important task we have is to produce a better performing campaign. If you already have a well-performing campaign, then we’ll use as much of it as we can in order to at least produce the same results in the first couple of months until our initiatives truly start producing results.

2) Experienced Supervisors Provide Feedback And Oversee All Campaign Management

Every SEM Strategist in White Shark Media is teamed up with a supervisor. The supervisors aren’t responsible for more than 3-5 SEM Strategists.

This allows each SEM Strategist to rely on a more experienced team to provide feedback on campaign performance and oversee all campaigns.

“I Would Love It If You Also Offered SEO services”

We have yet to offer SEO services. However, we’re more than competent to distinguish a good SEO company from a bad one.

In order to make sure you don’t lose a lot of money with an SEO vendor, we’re more than happy to review all SEO proposals and work provided by your SEO company.

Just send the material over to your SEM Strategist and he/she will ask our senior staff to help with the review.

“After Signing Up I got a Contact Person Who Wasn’t in Tune With My Needs“

We see this all the time at other companies. You sign up with the smooth guy who says all the right things, but after signing up you end up with a contact person who can’t explain himself properly nor relate to you in the same way.

In order to help in the transition phase, our Senior SEM Consultants actually follow each and every Client through the entire way, from initial sign-up to the optimization process. They’re no longer the primary form of contact, but they’re available for questions and they’re an active part of a Client’s lifetime cycle with us.

“The Campaign Is Created on Your Account – I don’t Like That”

In late 2012 we implemented a new procedure for new Clients. We now use a newly created AdWords account to make sure that we start as much from scratch as possible when developing new campaigns.

If your existing campaign is performing well, this process is counterproductive though. You’d be leaving a good environment to start up in a neutral environment.

We, therefore, offer the opportunity to continue working on your own account if you have a campaign that has performed well in the past.

“I Don’t Know How to Track my AdWords Performance”

Seeing that tracking the performance of your AdWords account is a big part of achieving success with AdWords we initiated an in-house process in which we’re able to install conversion tracking, call tracking and in some cases Google Analytics free of charge.

This is done in order to better track your results and to enable us to optimize your AdWords campaigns for better performance.

“The Majority of My Customers Are Coming Through the Phone”

We’ve recognized that a big part of our local Clients’ customer inquiries happen through the phone. In order to track these we’ve partnered with Marchex to provide Call Tracking to each and every Client who signs up with us.

Tracking phone calls is such an important step for us that we’ve made it mandatory for all local business Clients and included it in our AdWords management plans for free.