Customer Loyalty – Page 3 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Customer Service Done Right: Amazon

I’ve been known to use the immense power of Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog to rip companies who either can’t or don’t feel like taking care of their customers. Today I want to salute one who got it right: Amazon.com.

My wife had a significant birthday this past weekend. As part of her gift, I ordered her the new Amazon Kindle. Although I ordered it nearly a month in advance, it was already on backorder, and they couldn’t give me a delivery date. As the birthday weekend got closer, I resigned myself to the probability that it wouldn’t arrive in time.

Until the Thursday before, when Amazon emailed me to say that the Kindle had shipped. I was delighted until I looked closer, and saw the deliver date of Tuesday, September 7. This was a problem, because:

1. As an Amazon Prime member, I was entitled to automatic two-day shipping on all orders. Two days from Thursday would have been Saturday.

2. With the birthday weekend upon me, the difference between Saturday delivery and Tuesday delivery was huge.

I called Amazon. The first person I spoke with explained that they had shipped the package via UPS ground, and since it was already en route, there was nothing she could do. So I asked for a supervisor.

This brought be to Tawny in Amazon’s “Leadership Team.” Tawny listened to my tale of woe, understood the implications right away, and put me on hold to check with UPS. When she came back, she said that she was “90 percent sure” that my package would be delivered on Saturday.

What about the other ten percent, I asked?

She said she was going to monitor the package through Friday, and that if it looked like they would miss the Saturday delivery, she’d have another Kindle sent via overnight shipping. She promised to call me with an update on Friday. I was dubious, but it seemed like my best option, so I thanked her and ended the call. My assumption was that she would forget all about it as soon as she hung up.

I was wrong.

Friday afternoon, my phone rang. Tawny was calling to say that she’d been tracking my package and didn’t trust UPS to deliver it on Saturday, so she was having it re-routed back to Amazon, and shipping out a replacement. Overnight delivery.

9:15 Saturday morning, my doorbell rang, and a driver handed me the Kindle. Problem solved, in the nick of time.

I suppose one could quibble: the argument could be made that I shouldn’t have had to ask for a supervisor. The customer service rep I initially spoke with should have been able to take care of this.

But there are plenty of places where multiple levels of management will shrug, apologize, and move on. When your group is called the “Leadership Team”, the expectations are a little higher.

Tawny’s empathy, hard work and follow-up lived up to and exceeded those expectations. Amazon is lucky to have her.

Wanna know what else I did for my wife’s birthday? Read this.

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Does Relentless Advertising Work?

One answer to this question comes from a study conducted a few years ago by the Stanford University School of Medicine and Packard Children’s Hospital. According to AdAge.com, kids 3 to 5 years old were fed two sets of identical foods — some in McDonald’s wrappers and some wrapped in plain paper.

They overwhelmingly preferred the stuff when it came with a Mickey-D’s logo.

“Each child was given chicken nuggets, a hamburger and french fries from McDonald’s, and baby carrots and milk from the grocery store… With one exception, significantly more children said the McDonald’s-labeled product tasted better.”

McDonald’s spends an enormous amount of money to advertise to children, and apparently they have purchased brand loyalty beginning at a very early age. If you’ve ever driven past a McDonald’s at lunchtime with a car full of kids, you’ve seen brand loyalty translate into sales.

McDonald’s has enough money to be seen and heard just about everywhere; the rest of us have to be more selective in choosing market segments and media opportunities we can afford to dominate. But even without a huge marketing budget, you can still follow the basic principles that have kept McDonald’s at the top of their category:

1. Have a consistent theme and spokesperson — the Golden Arches logo has been there forever, and Ronald McDonald has been a significant part of the marketing effort for decades.

2. Establish a long-term plan, and stick with it. The most successful markets map out a year at a time, and they don’t cancel their ads after a bad weekend.

3. Make an offer. A small portion of McDonald’s advertising is for image, but most of it gives the target consumer a specific benefit — a coupon, a new product, a movie tie-in — for doing business with them today.

It takes careful planning, patience, and money to establish a dominant position in your market. And attention spans are shorter than they’ve ever been. But the basic techniques for gaining the consumer’s attention, interest, desire, and action haven’t changed.

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Microsoft Takes a Page From the Singer Playbook

Knit blogger Pdxknitterati writes today about an old Singer miniature toy sewing machine that she encountered recently at her mother’s house. From about 1926 into the 50’s, Singer marketed these to little girls. They likely made a little money on each toy sewing machine. More important, Singer established the Singer brand early with these girls, and made a lot of money when they grew up and bought full-size Singers for themselves.

Microsoft is likely to get similar results from a new program they’ve established with the Employment Department in my home state of Oregon. Under the Elevate America program — which is also operating in other states — Microsoft will give out 16,000 vouchers good for free online training in the programs of the Microsoft Office Suite. To be eligible, recipients must have been unemployed for 45 days or longer.

Here’s the beauty of this program: not only is it genuinely helpful, but it also gives Microsoft the opportunity to use three of Robert Cialdini’s six “Weapons of Influence”:

Authority: Microsoft’s products get an implicit endorsement from the Employment Department, and the Governor
Social Proof: people will be more inclined to do something — like buying Microsoft software instead of using, say, Google Docs — if they see other people doing it
Reciprocity: when these people re-enter the work force, they will feel a debt of gratitude to Microsoft. If any of them wind up having responsibility over purchasing, Microsoft has the inside track.

Like the girls who learned to sew on Singer machines, there are 16,000 Oregonians who will be most comfortable with Microsoft Office when they get jobs again. So Microsoft isn’t just doing good — they’re going to do well.

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Customer Service Done Right: Soluna Grill Makes The Save

I wrote the other day about how companies handle a situation when something goes wrong — my newsletter company’s shrug still rankles. So it’s only fair to commend a local eatery who got it right.

Last night my wife and had dinner at Portland’s Soluna Grill. We were seated quickly, and a waitress came by with menus. But she didn’t come back to take our orders. We saw her moving back and forth from the kitchen, delivering food and checking in on other tables. But as the clock continued to tick and our hunger grew, she never made a move in our direction.

Finally I caught her attention, motioned her over, and told her we were ready to order. At this point, she was Soluna Grill’s marketing department — a small slice of neighborhood word-of-mouth (and although she didn’t know it, the immense power of Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog) was her responsibility.

This is where things got good. She immediately apologized, told us that she’d gotten mixed up on table assignments, and said, “I’m on the case now. What can I get you?” Minutes later, she was back with our wine, and informed us that drinks would be on the house.

From that moment on, the service was flawless, the food was superb (stay for dessert — Soluna’s Chocolate Bourbon Croissant Bread Pudding is a mind-blower). And, true to her word, there was a discount on the final bill that more than covered our drinks.

Here’s what she got right after something went wrong:

1. She immediately took responsibility for the problem, and for fixing it: “I’m sorry, it was my fault. I’m on the case now.”

2. She volunteered compensation. I don’t know whether she had to get management approval, or whether she was empowered to comp the drinks on her own. The ten minutes we’d lost seemed pretty minor to us, and we weren’t going to ask for anything — but it felt awfully good when she offered.

3. Once she made the offer, she followed through and made sure it was reflected on the bill.

4. Once she said she was on the case, she was on the case.

Her actions meant that instead of being focused on a snafu early in the experience, we could rave to our friends about the rest of the experience — the excellent seafood stew, the perfectly-cooked halibut… and that Chocolate Bourbon Croissant Bread Pudding.

Whatever it says on the organizational chart, your front-line employees are your Marketing Department. Mistakes happen. People are human. And customers will forgive an occasional stumble if you empower your employees to take responsibility and make amends quickly.

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What to Do When “Stuff Happens”

Nobody’s perfect, and customers generally don’t expect perfection.

Servers go down. Files get deleted, or misplaced. Messages are missed. Mistakes are made. As long as the snafus aren’t chronic, a good client will generally tolerate a problem once in a while. More important than whether something goes wrong is how you handle it.

The subject is on my mind because the Phil on Advertising E-Newsletter didn’t go out at its scheduled time this morning. One of the things that I like best about the company that distributes my newsletter is that I can write it in advance, schedule it to go out at a specific time in the future, and forget about it.

For nearly four years, the system has worked beautifully. But at 9:10 this morning, when Phil on Advertising was scheduled to land in Inboxes around the country, there was only silence. I checked again at 9:15 — nothing. 9:25 am… nada.

So I called the company — who will go nameless here because they’ve done a good job over the years — and asked the guy who answered to check it.

Him: “Oh. Yeah. We’ve been having this problem all week. We have to send everything out manually.”

Me: “So… could you send MINE out manually?”

Him: “Yeah, I’ll check with my I.T. guy and see if he can do it.”

A half hour later the newsletter was out (you can subscribe here), and I was still shaking my head. They knew they had a problem before I called. They knew that their customers would have newsletters to go out — after all, that’s what they do. And yet, “Phil on Advertising” would still be sitting in the Outbox if I hadn’t taken it upon myself to check it and call.

What do you do when stuff happens? Here are a few things that will increase the odds that your customers will stay with you.

1. Call your customers before they find out, and tell them. “Here’s what went wrong, and here’s what we’re doing to fix it.” Not necessarily a pleasant conversation, but much more pleasant than the conversation you’ll have when the client finds out on his own. In my case, an email in advance from the newsletter company would have given me a chance to warn them that I had an issue ready to go.

2. If you need some temporary help from the client to make sure everything runs smoothly, ask for it. Most will be happy to oblige. If my newsletter company had told me that for the next few days, they would have no way of knowing what would be going out, I’d have gladly called them and told them when to send mine.

3. Volunteer to compensate the customer for any inconvenience. The compensation doesn’t necessarily have to be anything big — the key is that you offer before the customer asks.

4. Apologize and let your clients know what steps you’ve taken to make sure it won’t happen again.

Marketing Consultant Paul Weyland once remarked that in the age of the Internet, you either need to make a disgruntled customer happy, or kill him and bury him in the backyard. The steps above will help ensure that you don’t have to start digging anytime soon.

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Got a question? Wanna argue? Email Phil Bernstein here.

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