Category: Customer Service

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.
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    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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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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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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More Choice = Less Action

I recently walked into a McDonald’s in Orlando, Florida carrying a simple set of instructions: return to the hotel with three Egg McMuffins and three orders of hash browns.

I walked up to the counter and placed my order.

Me: Three Egg McMuffins and three orders of hash browns, please.

Woman at counter: Our Egg McMuffins are $2.59 each or two for $3.00.

Me: Okay, give me four.

Woman: How about the hash browns? They’re a dollar each or two for $1.50.

Me (thinking furiously): Umm… okay, I’ll just take two.

A few minutes went by, and then she was back.

Woman: We’re short one round egg, and cooking one will take a few minutes. Or you can have a folded egg now.

Me: I’ll take the folded egg.

When she brought out my food she threw a couple of apple turnovers into the bag at no charge — “for the inconvenience.”

Two thoughts occurred to me as I returned to the hotel:

1. I had just gotten a screamin’ deal: four Egg McMuffins, two orders of hash browns, and two apple turnovers for about nine bucks.

2. The next time I’m in Orlando, I will go out of my way to avoid that particular McDonald’s.

The woman behind the counter probably believed that she was helping me by offering the discounts.

In reality, she was making my life difficult. I wanted a nice, simple transaction, and instead I got something complicated.

The experience stuck in my mind a few days later when I was asked to evaluate a TV commercial for an aesthetic medicine practice. The ad suggested two possible actions: call on the phone for an appointment, or log onto the practice’s web site.

I advised the clinic to simplify the message and just give viewers instructions to call on the phone. Advertisers often find that just making this simple change significantly increases the response from the campaign.

The strategy seems counter-intuitive, but the reasoning is sound: a viewer faced with a phone number and a web address in 30 seconds won’t have the time or mental bandwidth to write down both. Faced with a decision about which one to remember, many people wind up remembering neither.

In “The Paradox of Choice”, Barry Schwartz discussed a series of studies in which car buyers were offered an array of choices:

Even though their decision was purely hypothetical, participants experienced substantial negative emotion when choosing between Cars A and B. And if the experimental procedure gave them the opportunity, they refused to make the decision at all. So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.

Participants in these studies showed the pattern of reluctance to make trade-offs whether the stakes were high or low. Confronting any trade-off, it seems, is incredibly unsettling. And as the available alternatives increase, the extent to which choices will require trade-offs will increase as well.

What, then, do people do if virtually all decisions involve trade-offs and people resist making them? One option is to postpone or avoid the decision.

The last thing you want when you advertise is for your prospect to postpone or avoid a decision. Paradoxical though it may seem, offering one choice instead of two will increase the likelihood that your prospect will actually take action.

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Email Phil Bernstein here.

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