If customers are searching for your company’s customer service, they need to find you and not a third party website.

One surprising source of visitors to this site is people who actually think that I am the official representative of the company they want to reach.

For example, I get lots of people searching for “huggies customer service” and they land on a post I wrote about my good experience with Huggies four years ago. Why do they find my site? Because, last I checked, I showed up first when you Google that search phrase.

Shouldn’t Huggies be number one? Absolutely.

I also get questions about DiGiorno pizzas. Why? Because I’ve written about DiGiorno in the past, too.

These examples highlight an area of concern that your business needs to worry about:

Your customers are looking for support and your customer service contacts. Can customers find you by searching for you on Google?

If they can’t, then you are invisible. Not only invisible, but vulnerable to what others are saying in your place.

You will be replaced by someone else, not at your company, that is blogging about you or talking about you in an online forum.

Your customers will not always be able to tell that a third party site they visit isn’t yours.

So today’s action item is to google your company name, and especially “your-company-name customer service.” Are you showing up in the results?

Your business needs to be where people are looking. Additionally, you need to be where customers are talking. Be sure to monitor customer word of mouth and stay on top of any issues that arise.

New customers to your business may not be familiar with the products or services you are offering. This can cause great confusion and even indecision when they are reviewing your offerings.

To be successful in selling to customers, you need to transport the customer from their current state of mind to an understanding of what you are selling. You need to speak the same language as the customer.

My wife and I recently ventured into a local Mexican restaurant, Tio Dan’s Puffy Tacos. We’d never been to this restaurant before and aside from the name of the place, which clearly told us what their specialty was, we didn’t know anything about it.

Tio Dan’s menu was a full color, laminated, self-proclaimed “food book” that had pictures of every single entree they serve. These weren’t fake marketing pictures; they were real pictures of actual food they had prepared.

By looking at the menu, you got a good sense of what you’d be eating. You didn’t have to guess what a particular dish was based on an unfamiliar name because what you saw is what you’d get.

Tio Dan understands that not every customer that comes through his door knows what he sells or what the items on his menu are. He helps overcome that hurdle by showing customers what they can buy in terms they can understand.

How can you help your customers better understand your product or service? Perhaps you can show them the end result (a picture of food in our example). Or use an mental anchor that connects what you offer to something the customer already understands.