How can your company provide the best customer service possible while protecting your brand? Easy, by monitoring the Internet and not let any customer complaints go unanswered. When a customer is not happy with a company, they generally tell their friends about it. With the Internet, it has become a lot easier to spread the word to thousands of other people. Take Twitter for example. Someone with 5,000 followers could tweet that they are not happy with a particular business and share that bad publicity to their 5,000 followers. This does not even include other social media sites like Facebook. How can you turn this into something positive for your company? By using Google Alerts.

What you would do is create an alert using your company name. Google will then notify you whenever it has indexed or found any new content anywhere in the world with your company name in it. This includes all web sites on the Internet. It does not matter if your company name appears in the content, comments section of a blog post or in a tweet. Google will notify you the second it finds anything new on the web with your company name in it. If someone has posted something negative about your company, you can take the opportunity to rectify the situation by posting a response. Not only can this turn that once unsatisfied customer into a happy one, but it will show others that you truly care for your customers and will do everything in your power to make things right.  It does not matter if you are an Internet business or a retail merchant. The Internet can be used to spread good or bad information about any company and you should use that same technology to monitor and protect it.

You can also use this same tool to keep an eye on your top competitors as well.

Creating a Google alert is very simple. Go here and create one. If you do not have a Google account, you will not be able to manage, modify or change your alerts.

I recommend the following settings:

Search terms: Your company name. Use quotes ("like this")  in your query to match them exactly.

Type: Comprehensive

How often: As-it-happens or once a day

Email length: Up to 50 results

Deliver to: Your email or your feed reader

It is also a great way to find out if there are any positive information posted about your company, like a recent review from a review site!

Curtis Stevens founded a company called Gotmerchant.com. They give merchants the ability to accept credit cards through their free point of sale system. Some of their other products include a free cash register.