I had a client who was concerned that the information she was collecting on a registration page was going to be a potential problem because people are registering to win a prize and if they do win a prize then a/they might not want to receive it at work (which is the address we’re asking for, this being a B2B mailing) or b/they might have given a fictitious address as some people do because they don’t want to get advertising contacts yet they have to put something in the fields.
This same client had a problem at a previous company, which was the cause for her concern. She was giving away iPod shuffles (then selling for $59) to qualified prospects in return for their time to sit through a demo and apparently many people did not get their shuffles. I say “apparently” because it could also have happened that someone lied in order to get an additional shuffle…. dishonest, but hard to prove. Anyway, once bitten she wants to be sure this time.
My response (before caving, of course) was that there are always going to be a few idiots and outliers in your audience who are not going to play by the rules no matter what you tell them. And you should not do anything that is going to make your offer more complex to the vast majority, such as adding additional information on the reg page to deal with this issue by requesting an alternate shipping address in case they win. (Everybody who has ever designed an online survey or reg form knows that each additional field or question causes a certain number of people to drop out.) Suppose they fill in the form with their preferred address but, being idiots, they write it down wrong. What do you do then?
Along the same lines, I had a client back in my “suit” days who wanted to know if it was a good idea to pay a 1.5% commission based on the value of all sales paid by check in return for this supplier’s guarantee to make good any bad checks. This one was easy to figure out. Do bad checks cost more than 1.5% of revenue from all checks? No. Then this apparent insurance service is a money-losing sinkhole. Plus, cheats are cheats. If a customer has it in their heart to trick you out of money, they’ll just find another way to do it.
Today’s moral is, the customer is not always right, not when they are idiots and outliers. Don’t screw up the rest of your promotion by making accommodations for a few wingnuts.
This is really good advice! I”ve been a customer service professional for over 10 years and I’m always amazed at how companies will bend over backwards to either accomodate or avoid the “idiots and outliers” as you put it. It’s refreshing to see that someone feels the same way I do.
Thanks for the comment, Rose. This post was written a while back but I don’t see any shortage of idiots today. You can accommodate them or ignore them but the key is: don’t let your marketing to idiots get in the way of collecting business and revenue from your good customers.