When I first met Heike I had just started my marketing business, Ruff Draft Solutions. She delivered a wonderful presentation on the value of networking and LinkedIn while guest speaking at Annapolis Rotaract Club in April 2014. 

I followed up with her that evening and she shared a number of resources, including SCORE, LinkAnnapolis, The Small Business Administration and Meetup.com. 

After meeting with Heike for a free consultation, I knew committing to her business coaching would be an invaluable investment in order to grow my business. Heike helped me prioritize and establish short and long-term goals to keep me focused and motivated each week. When starting a new businesses, you feel as though you need to wear many hats – be the sales and marketing team as well as the secretary, accountant, IT provider and then actually get some work done for your clients. Heike does a great job with establishing how to effectively implement block scheduling to balance all tasks to have productive days. She even provided me tips on how to stay motivated by regularly recording a list of accomplishments to review on the days when nothing seems to be going my way. 

Heike provides wonderful advice on how to be more efficient using technology. She suggested that I take advantage of a CRM system to better manage leads and current clients, helped me establish an effective system to organize business cards using Evernote and how to properly send e-mail follow ups after networking events. 

I attended Heike’s LinkedIn seminar that provided detailed statistics, tips and tricks, dos and don’ts and how to design your profile to set  you apart from the competition. After applying what I learned, Heike spent a coaching session with me reviewing my LinkedIn page in depth, providing individualized suggestions and improvements.

I really appreciate Heike’s ability to be reached and her prompt e-mail responses to the variety of questions I had outside of our coaching sessions. 

She helped restore my confidence to approach and land large-scale clientele and corporations, how to handle companies that are not a good fit for me and whether to pursue employment at marketing firms versus freelancing. Heike also provided me many helpful documents to prepare for our sessions, including a vision statement, mission statement and business plan. 

With Heike’s passion to see her clients succeed combined with her business expertise, I highly recommend individuals and businesses to pursue her coaching services to reach their full potential.


This blog post was written by Jenna Soneira, Owner of Ruff Draft Solutions.

This post is based on a personal experience.

I found a charge on my latest credit card statement that I didn't make and called the card company to request having it removed. This resulted in a 54 minute odyssey through three departments and well over 30 minutes on hold. 

Aggravating factors:

• Each time I was transferred I had to answer multiple security questions about my account - as if I was going to morph from a legitimate customer to a fraudster during a phone transfer. Really?
  
• When I asked if they could call me back instead of keeping me on hold, they just kept asking me to hold. They could learn from Southwest Airlines. They actually offer to call people back when the airline deems the hold time too long.
  
• They could not figure out where the charge came from as it was missing some sort of code. Scary: a credit card company cannot verify where a charge came from? Doesn't make me feel "safe" having them handle my account.
  
• One single melody played over and over and over any time I was put on hold. When I asked the latest person who answered the phone, she indicated that she was aware of the fact that they only play one melody and apologized. To make matters worse, the sound track was so bad it appeared to be recorded off a bad radio transmission with lots of static. Apparently this is one way the company uses to discourage customers with a legitimate issue from filing such a claim.
  

If this company was focused on customer service, they could have made this a much better experience by:

• Allowing one department to handle the situation instead of three.
  
• Having someone available who could actually identify where this charge came from.
  
• Giving customer service the authority to put a hold on a charge while the matter is being investigated further.
  
• Allowing customer service to return a call to a customer instead of keeping the customer on the phone.
  

If a brief time on hold was truly necessary:

• Having a variety of melodies available
  
• Ensuring high sound quality

With the right training and authorization in place, this call could have been handled in a matter of 5 minutes and could have made me a more loyal customer. Instead it took almost 55 and has me looking for other options.

Does your company treat their customers like unwelcome interruptions or make the process of filing a claim easy?