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 […]
A few weeks ago I blogged about the KFC Free Grilled Chicken Fiasco. KFC not only screwed up the promotion — they couldn’t even get the apology right. My wife, PDX Knitterati, alerted me to a similar kerfuffle in the knitting community over an event called Sock Summit. Like the KFC promotion, consumer demand overwhelmed […]
There was a message on our answering machine when we returned from a trip this weekend. Hello, this is your local Fred Meyer store with an important announcement. We wanted to alert you that you may have purchased Private Selection 10-ounce Shelled Pistachios that have been recalled. You should not consume the product. You may […]
While most of you were out having a wild Saturday night, I was home reading one of Dan Kennedy’s marketing newsletters. Go ahead. Envy me. In the newsletter, Dan described the “dry cleaner’s secret” — a method that a dry cleaning franchise operation used to ramp up its business, quickly. Using a series of carefully-designed […]
When I wrote recently about the ethics and advisability of rebate offers, local reader and attorney Kevin Spence had this to say: Gift cards, rebates and vouchers are all kind of a scam in my opinion. They are all designed with a certain failure rate. Whether the failure is caused by the recipient losing it […]