Month: December 2011

3 Who Did It Right: A Year-End Customer Service Salute

I’ve spent some time on bad customer service lately — Best Buy, Ocean Marketing and Penny Arcade, and, of course, SuperBookDeals have offered plenty of material.

So it’s only fair to salute three companies — two national, one local — who did some small things that made things just a little bit nicer. In December alone:

  • The folks at the Lloyd Center Mens Wearhouse in my hometown of Portland called me last week to remind me that I had a $150 credit that would expire at the end of the year. Yesterday I went to the store and burned $149.49 of it.
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  • ZipCar sent me an email reminding me that my drivers license was about to expire. I’d received a notice from the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles about a month ago, and had forgotten about it. Since I’m a ZipCar member, they had my license info on file. Somebody was smart enough to realize that this kind of reminder would be quite valuable, and made it part of their automated database program. My license is now up to date.
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  • And finally, a thank you goes out to Phil Schlaadt, who runs the Portland MyDoor Dry Cleaning franchise. MyDoor does dry-cleaning pickup and delivery, one of the great time-saving inventions of modern life.
    –
    Phil Schlaadt had given his customers plenty of warning that there would be no pickup or delivery the week after Christmas. At least one of his customers (umm… Phil Bernstein) had forgotten this until late last week. I emailed him asking for a recommendation for a cleaner who’d be open.
    –
    He had one, and went me one better — he picked up my bag of laundry last Friday and dropped it off for me at a local shop he uses. Yesterday I went by that shop and picked my laundry up. Crisis averted.

Yes, Virginia, there are people out there doing it right, and they don’t get nearly enough credit. Thank you, and Happy New Year — see you in 2012.

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Penny Arcade, Ocean Marketing, and an Email Lesson

Let’s start with the lesson: email is social media.

Even if it starts out private, it can be made public. Extremely public.

The short version: in November, a guy named Dave orders a pair of PS3 controllers from an outfit called Ocean Marketing. The controllers don’t arrive. In mid-December, Dave writes to the company asking what’s going on.

He hears back from a guy named Paul Christoforo. Paul’s initial reply is not particularly helpful. Dave gets irritated, and Paul gets insulting. My favorite:

…put on your big boy hat and wait it out like everyone else.

At some point, Dave forwards the email chain to Penny Arcade — a website/webcomic devoted to the gaming industry that has, according to Wikipedia, about 3.5 million readers

Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade enters the conversation, and Paul insults Mike. Mike then publishes the whole exchange on Penny Arcade (did I mention that they have 3. 5 million readers?)  and the real fun begins.

I am not a gamer, and was familiar with neither Penny Arcade or Ocean Marketing until reading the story. But a quick look at Ocean Marketing’s website reveals that their primary business is… social media marketing!

So here, in three parts, is the lesson I hope Ocean Marketing has learned today:

1. If you accept money for an order, ship the product on time.

2. If the product gets delayed for reasons beyond your control, be pro-active and notify the customer.

3. Apologize.

4. “Put on your big boy hat and wait it out like everyone else” is not an apology.

5. If you’re going to insult your customers, remember that emails can be forwarded.

For further reading, Google “Penny Arcade Ocean Marketing”. It just keeps getting better.

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Email Phil Bernstein here.

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Public Relations Pros: How Would You Help Best Buy?

You are a public relations professional, specializing in crisis management. Your client, Best Buy, took a whole bunch of orders online, and now can’t deliver.

What advice would you give them? Comment below.

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Email Phil Bernstein here.

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Email Marketing That Misses the Mark

I received an email this morning from a woman named Ophelia, who works for an SEO company that offers “professional link building” services.*Excerpts follow:

Hello, my name is Ophelia  and I am an Internet Rankings Engineer. I performed a Google search for the keyword pedicure portland oregon and upon perusing past the first page, i ran across your website philbernstein.com. I see that your website is currently not listed on the first page for this keyword search.

The fact is that your ranking and search engine positioning is easily correctable. There is no reason that your website cannot be ranked in the top three positions for the keyword pedicure portland oregon based on your website’s very quality content and solid structure. You have a very good website that is built to convert when it can be found.

I was baffled as to why an advertising and marketing blog would want to be ranked well in the pedicure category… until I remembered that in 2008, I’d written a facetious  post about the short-lived phenomenon of fish pedicures.

My new friend Ophelia — or more likely, her automated system — had searched for the word “pedicure”, found my post, scraped my email address, and offered me a service I neither wanted nor needed.

Had she bothered to look at my website, she would have realized that I write about advertising and marketing — quite well, I might add.

I don’t mind a well-directed piece of direct mail, whether it’s via the postal service or a digital channel such as email. But online or offline, you need to at least attempt to match the message to the market.

If you don’t, you’re not a savvy online marketer — you’re a spammer.

*I’ve redacted her last name and will not name her firm here, since it would either embarrass her, give her firm a link it doesn’t deserve, or both.

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SuperBookDeals and the Limits of Crowd Power

Alternate title: “Some Companies Just Don’t Care”

People in the customer-service advice-giving business love to tell the story of United Airlines and Dave Carroll. It’s a very entertaining tale of a customer who, having felt mistreated, used the power of the internet to do an enormous amount of damage to a large company’s reputation.

It’s an article of faith to many of us that in the age of the internet, poor customer service will result us a huge loss of good will, and money. As Mike Frichol of Marketance put it,

Companies that don’t pay attention to what their customers are saying about their business/brands/products/services/solutions via social media sites pay a serious penalty in bad publicity and lost revenues.

Your business/brands/products/services/solutions reputation is open to positive and negative social media discussion online. This is your reputation – you need to be engaged – you need to monitor what’s going on – you need to respond appropriately.

But then, there’s SuperBookDeals, an online book dealer who sells books  via their own site, along with partners such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. In 2008, I had an extremely bad experience with SuperBookDeals and wrote about it here. I wondered whether SuperBookDeals would see the post — and whether their concern for their online reputation would cause them to reach out to me.

They didn’t.

Nearly four years later, a Google search for SuperBookDeals returns this:

The top listing is the company site, which is fair. But the Number Two listing when you look up the company is a consumer review site, Reseller Ratings. There are 80 reviews on the site, and almost all of them are extremely negative. A quick sampling:

“I will NEVER EVER order from here again!!!!! I order a book for school and was advised i would recv it in 14 days which would have been on the 16th of sept. Did i get it ?? ummmmm.NO!”

“Horrible, horrible horrible.”

“Do not order from this company.”

It goes on for page after page — dozens of angry consumers complaining bitterly about the books they ordered and did not receive… and the complete disdain they did receive when they tried to find out what happened to their merchandise.

More important, perhaps, than the stories themselves is this notation at the top of the review site:

Superbookdeals does NOT actively participate at Reseller Ratings to monitor feedback and resolve your issues. Are you this merchant? Help your customers!

In spite of 82 separate reviews — 81 of them extremely negative… in spite of the fact that this is the second listing on the page when someone Googles the company name… SuperBookDeals ignores it.

Meanwhile, my nearly four-year-old blog posts appear at #3 and #6 on the page. Although both posts get regular traffic and occasional comments, SuperBookDeals has not bothered to contact me, either.

So, this appears to be a case study in a company — an online seller, at that — completely ignoring its online reputation. Anyone wondering whether to do business with them can look them up and easily determine that they should not. Has this cost them anything?

As of this morning, SuperBookDeals still in business, still angering customers on a daily basis, and laughing all the way to the bank.

So the question for the group is this: how important is your online reputation? Leave a comment below.

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Email Phil Bernstein here.

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