Category: Customer Service

Yarn Harlot Outperforms KFC: What to Do When a Promotion Goes Wrong

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 the organizers’ ability to handle the traffic. But unlike KFC, Sock Summit bounced back with a very effective response.

There are lessons here for all marketers in how to handle a promotion that goes south.

For those among my readers who aren’t familiar with the needle arts, Sock Summit is a knitting convention with workshops, classes, and a marketplace, organized by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (who writes the Yarn Harlot blog) and Tina Newton of Blue Moon Fiber Arts. As this story develops, it’s important to know that:

1. There is a very large, very passionate knitting community in this country. They read blogs, buy product, and spend money in huge numbers.

2. The lineup of speakers and teachers at Sock Summit is full of big-time names. Really big-time names. If Sock Summit were a basketball camp, the instructors would be folks like LeBron James, Shaquille O’Neal, Dwight Howard, and Brandon Roy.

It’s a first-year event. Registration was to be online. The organizers looked at other knitting conferences, tried to calculate the number of people who would register, and then put together a system designed to handle a much bigger number.

The response was much bigger than they ever dreamed. The server crashed. Some people were kicked out of the system before they could complete their registrations. When they were able to get back in, many classes were full.

I mentioned earlier that the knitting community is both large and passionate. When they found that they couldn’t get the classes they wanted, some got cranky. Really cranky.

Angry emails poured into the organizers’ mailbox, and into  various knitting blogs and forums.

After getting the server back up and taking care of as many registrations as they could, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee posted an explanation, apology and general response on her blog.

You can read the full post here.

And you should. It’s long, but it’s really, really good. Where KFC got it almost completely wrong, Yarn Harlot got it right.

  • It’s personal. Where KFC President Roger Eaton’s message appeared to have been composed by a committee of lawyers and PR flacks (“Everyone wants to get the great taste of our new product, so we can’t redeem your free coupon at this time”), Yarn Harlot’s message was clearly written by a human being. An embarrassed, frustrated human being who wants to do the right thing.
  • It explains the problem. Pearl-McPhee spells out the thinking and preparation that went into the system they built, their surprise when the system crashed, and their efforts to get it back up and running.
  • It clearly explains what they’re doing about the problem. KFC made a vague offer of a rain check that could be redeemed at some point in the future. Yarn Harlot takes personal responsibility for repairing the damage, and gives consumers an easy way to communicate with them:

We’ve decided to make sure that everything is accurate by doing it all MANUALLY, ourselves. That means that if you have trouble, you should write to us on the Contact us page with as many details as you can, and we’ll sort it. If you already wrote us, we’re on it. The first refunds went out today, and we have all our staff working only on this, and we hired more staff, and the IT company is lending us staff. It should go fast, but please be patient. We’ll sort everybody out as best we can, as quickly as we can.

It acknowledges that there are limits to what they can do. All of their efforts do not eliminate the fact that there is considerably more demand than supply.

I might quarrel with Pearl-McPhee’s attempt to put the issue in perspective

We’d like you to remember, before you email… that your problem is that you didn’t get into a knitting conference. It is actually not like Tina and I napalmed a village of orphan babies and then ate their puppies and it is up to you to exact revenge.

Although she is absolutely right about this, she risks appearing to belittle her customers’ frustration. I’ll give her a pass, though — the line is in character with the tone she often takes on her blog, and her readers likely will accept it in the proper spirit.

The honest, heartfelt message appears to have done its job. In the days following this post, many people deleted their comments from the message boards (email, alas, is forever), and some folks even donated money to Doctors Without Borders, a favorite Yarn Harlot charity.

Nobody’s perfect. If you’re in business for any length of time, something will go wrong in an interaction with a customer, or a group of customers. KFC and Sock Summit offer instructive examples — one negative and one positive — in how to treat customers after the fact.

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Unhappy Customers Don’t Need the Internet to Hurt You

I’ve written several times on the ways that the web has given consumers unprecendented influence on how companies are perceived. An angry customer an internet connection can tell his side of the story to thousands by posting it on a blog, a consumer forum, or the company’s own web site.

I’ve done it myself — hello, Superbookdeals!

Some consumers are still doing it the old-fashioned way. In the Oregonian’s “Complaint Desk” column, Laura Gunderson tells the story of David Haskew, a cable customer in Cornelius, Oregon. Haskew was unable to resolve an audio problem through the company’s regular channels (he chose not to name the company when recounting the story)

Finally, after seeing one of the company’s trucks drive by, he got an idea. That afternoon he knocked a sign into his front yard saying, “An unhappy customers of (mystery company name) lives here”. Maybe, he thought, an employee would see the sign and get the message to a big shot.

Sure enough, he said, an executive called within 48 hours. A service call was scheduled and, 10 minutes later, the problem was fixed.

So today’s lesson is simple. Yes, you should closely monitor web chatter about your company. But don’t forget to look for lawn signs.

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Can a Frequent-Shopper Program Save Lives?

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 return the product or receipt to a store for a full refund or replacement [the speaker then gave a phone number for more information, and continued]

This message is possible because you are one of our loyal shoppers, and used your shopper’s card to make this purchase. Thank you for being a Fred Meyer customer.

Turns out there’s been a recall of pistachios because of a salmonella outbreak. And we had some in the cupboard.

It may be a little creepy that they’re keeping such close tabs (note to self: do not use Rewards Card when purchasing murder weapon), but this is a real benefit to customers who might otherwise suffer some serious health consequences. Fred Meyer handled it beautifully:

  • Gave an exact name of the product so it was easy to figure out what to look for
  • Gave sufficient reason to stop eating it (it’s been recalled) without creating undue alarm
  • Gave a toll-free number to call for more information
  • Offered a full refund without onerous restrictions — you can bring back the product or just the receipt
  • Reminded customers that this is a benefit of using the Rewards Card
  • Thanked us for shopping at Fred Meyer

It does raise an interesting question, though:

This procedure works perfectly for a relatively innocuous product  — a husband isn’t likely to be upset if his wife hears a voice mail about the pistachios he picked up on his lunch hour. But the store sells other items that might require a little more delicacy.

Would they leave a similar message in the event of a condom recall?

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Girl Scout Cookies Online — Good Entrepreneurship, or Sign of the Apocalypse?

My son Tyler won his Cub Scout Pack wreath-selling championship three years in a row. He did it the old-fashioned way — by personally calling his relatives and parents’ friends, and personally touring his dad’s office every year asking for the order. His younger brother Ryan followed that up by winning the Pack wreath sale trophy twice more.

The most innovative technology they had available to them was the telephone.

So it was with great interest that I read Newsweek’s article on 8-year-old Wild Freeborn, a Girl Scout in North Carolina. With her father’s help, Wild set up an online cookie sales operation, complete with YouTube video.

In a short time, she received 700 online orders for cookies. And, of course, other parents complained to the authorities. It turns out that the Girl Scouts prohibit online cookie sales.

There are several conflicting interests at work here: There is a great deal of value in teaching kids how to sell face-to-face or on the phone. That’s a skill that, if learned properly, will serve them all their lives. And some issues of fairness exist as well, since some families don’t have access to the technology that would allow online sales.

The other side of the argument was offered in the article:

“First of all, selling things online is no less safe,” says Peter Fader, a director of the Interactive Media Initiative at Wharton, the business school at the University of Pennsylvania. “And if we want to teach our kids to be able to operate in society as responsible adults, online savviness is going to be part of the overall portfolio.”

In addition to losing a teaching moment, Fader says the Girl Scouts are missing out on a sales opportunity. “It wouldn’t even be a transition—it’d be an expansion,” he says, noting that the program could allow cookie sales online through personal Web pages hosted by area councils. With some troops reporting sales down by as much as 19 percent this year, getting online would be a simple step that could invigorate the locally minded fundraising goals of the program.

My kids are long past their wreath-selling years, so I don’t have a personal rooting interest in this. But I’m interested in your thoughts.

Should the Girl Scouts, and other fundraising organizations, allow online sales? Why or why not?

Please leave your thoughts in the comment field below.

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The Value — and Risk — of Rebate Offers

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 in the wash the cost of the voucher to the business is less than the value of cash. Gift cards are particularly bad in my opinion.

Why people are convinced that buying a gift card to a particular store is better than giving cash that can be used in countless different ways is beyond me. Add to that the limitations and fees that are placed on some gift cards and I’m left scratching my head.

In the Oregonian, Laura Gunderson recently tackled the same topic:

Although some companies nationwide have veered away from redemption programs in recent years, many remain and are legitimate. Typically, marketing experts say, the easier a deal is to fulfill, the more trustworthy and beneficial it is — for customers and the company.

In Oregon, the legal bar on promotions is rather low. Offers that are inherently misleading — even simply confusing — can trigger an investigation.

In my work with car dealers and, in one memorable case, a siding company, I’ve had a chance to talk at length with Eugene Ebersole of the Oregon Department of Justice. Gunderson’s warning is correct — Oregon has always had some pretty explicit and strict rules concerning advertising and promotion. Those rules became even stricter about a year ago.

Considering a rebate or gift-with-purchase offer? Doing it wrong may not only anger your customers — it may get you a subpoena from the D.O.J.

Call me first.

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Click here to learn the shocking truth about Phil Bernstein

Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.