Our Charges - an overview

Dialogue has been working for clients for two years now - and we have had an immense amount of feedback on our charging structure. We are using this blog post to explain how this now works, but first a word of reassurance for existing clients - none of this will change the basis on which you became a client; we are enormously grateful to those of you who 'had faith' in the early days of Dialogue, particularly as it is you that have enabled us to prove its effectiveness!

The basis of charging for Dialogue:

As our existing clients know: Dialogue is much more than just a very effective 'piece of software', every post is read by one of our moderators and negative posts require intensive input from our client services team: they monitor both sides of the conversation between our clients and their customer. Input is often needed in both directions: advice form us to your customer on how best to phrase their concern, and advice to our clients on how best to respond. All leading to the incredibly high success rate of Resolution*.

The second 'tier' of advice we provide to clients is in proactively making the very best of Dialogue in their marketing. Karen and her team provide advice and support to all our clients on this - examples include:

• effective placing of the Dialogue 'module' on clients' websites - e.g. on multiple pages
• bespoke designs for the module
• tailoring the questions asked
• varying the email inviting the review to increase response
• other techniques to increase response - e.g. follow-up
• ways of incorporating Dialogue into the sales process
• ways of incorporating Dialogue into marketing campaigns
• ways of incorporating Dialogue into advertising
• dovetailing Dialogue with your social media strategies
• incorporating Dialogue into POS strategies

and, perhaps most important of all - sharing your fellow clients' experiences.

So - to summarise - there is the software that simply hums away in the background (which, in itself, is in a constant state of development and improvement) and the 'management, support and advice' provided by our client services team under Karen Hutchings.

So we have developed a charging structure that, as far as possible reflects our own costs in providing market leading software and ongoing support. This relates to the volume of work predicted - setting up, and ongoing management and support - in its most basic sense: 'the number of reviews we will be processing'.

For new clients:

We establish a 'guestimate' of the volume of work and then prepare an individual quotation. This consists of a one-off fee for design and implementation, a basic monthly fee and the standard charge for processing each negative (Resolution™).

This charging structure will be guaranteed for the first 18 months. For the first six months there is no contract, after six months we will conduct a client review with you: and the first objective of this review will be to establish that Dialogue has been a profitable exercise;  we will make suggestions for improvements (if any) to processes and the way you are using Dialogue and and ask you for two things:

1. to sign a contract for the next 12 months
2. to give us a review of your experience so far with Dialogue

We hope this helps - if you have any questions at all please don't hesitate to contact Karen Hutchings (karen.hutchings@helphound.com) or your business member advisor.

 *Resolution - a success story all of its own: so far in 2012 over 97% of cases that have gone through the Resolution process have resulted in no final review being posted. Why? Because Resolution has enabled our clients to have an off-line conversation with their customer and resolve whatever issue has been raised. A win for the client, a win for the customer - and more often than not resulting in a customer who might otherwise have sought to move their business elsewhere (whether hotel guest or and estate agent's landlord client) being retained.