Customer service Archives - Page 3 of 8

It’s almost 2014, and mail order retailers still haven’t figured out gift order options

If you give a gift, you want to be acknowledged, right? At the very least the recipient should know the package came from you and has a bit of thought behind it. Yet some of the largest mail order retailers are doing a very poor job of dealing with this issue at holiday 2013, long after they should have figured it out.

I’m not that experienced at web giving—I order a lot online, but it’s either for my personal consumption or to be packaged and presented in person. The idea of trusting a mass merchant to honor my earnest attempts to find and deliver the right gift has always made me queasy. And with good reason, it turns out.

I wanted to send somebody two pairs of flannel boxer shorts found on L.L. Bean… a somewhat whimsical yet practical gift. To gift these I would have to spend another $6 per pair of shorts (which on their own cost $16 per pair) and deliver them in two separate gift boxes. I don’t expect to have a live human running around and picking my order in 2013, but I do think it’s reasonable to expect the retailer to anticipate items that might be grouped, like this order, and offer combined packaging. Failing that, give me a substantial discount on gift boxing when I order multiple items sent to the same recipient.

That order abandoned, I went to Eddie Bauer where I found a well-priced duffel bag for the same recipient. Into my shopping bag, appropriate information entered, all the way to checkout, and I realize I’ve never been asked if this is a gift even though it’s to a second ship-to address. I try the chat function and it’s unavailable so I ask for instructions for handling a gift to be sent by email. Several hours later, the only email I’ve received is a notification that I better hurry and complete the order because my item might sell out. I never did find out how to specify a gift message or buy gift wrapping at Eddie Bauer, assuming these services exist.

Amazon, as usual, sets the bar on this. Gift options always available unless it’s clearly specified they are not (as on large items, like snowblowers), and the charges for gift wrap are reasonable. Folks complain about how Amazon is stifling competition but if Bean and Bauer refuse to perform at the same level I don’t think the complaint is justified.

The final element of the gift giving process is, of course, the delivery. Amazon will include a personalized gift greeting, as will my old friend Liberty Orchards which still offers the option of a handwritten gift card at no extra charge. Packages which have the giver’s name printed on the mailing label, and that’s it, are an embarrassment and betrayal of the well-meaning giver’s good intentions. Maybe next year I’ll self-order a bunch of gifts and see what kind of greeting I get. I don’t expect to be overly impressed.

Is that a telephone in your marketing program, or are you just glad to see me?

My early client Roy Chitwood of Max Sacks International told a funny story involving a rookie sales guy who loved to get busy signals on the phone because he could tally them as completed calls… “that’s one more out of the way”. But according to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, many of today’s younger salespeople no longer know what a telephone is (let alone a busy signal).

They’ll email when a previous generation would have called, even to someone in the next cubicle. This probably explains the profusion of chatty lead generation emails I get that are written to look as if they’re from a casual acquaintance, often “confirming” something (usually a webinar) that I supposedly had expressed interest in. Easy to send, even easier to get rid of with the delete button.

Direct Marketing Partners, a California-based outfit I’ve done some business with, has a different idea. They still use the telephone the old-fashioned way for marketing, and with spectacular results. It helps that their clients are typically selling expensive, complex products or services which justify a high cost per lead.

The first thing DMP does is a canvassing operation to get the telephone contact information for people on the business lists they rent or compile, and to confirm the recipient is the right person for the pitch. If not, they’ll find out who is the true buying authority and add that name, address and phone number to the list.

Then, a direct mail pack goes out which is intentionally “high impact” with features or a theme that is easy to recall. As an example, one recent promo I worked on with DMP (and Beasley Direct Marketing, their frequent collaborator) included a poster of the Curiosity Mars landing, rolled up in a clear plastic tube.

DMP follows up a couple of weeks later with people who did not respond to the direct mail offer. They open the call by asking, “do you remember that tube you got with the poster inside?” and a high percentage of prospects do indeed remember. Then they deliver the same pitch that was in the mailer, which usually concludes with the offer of a highly attractive premium in return for setting a sales appointment.

The results of these campaigns can be spectacular—often the total number of leads generated is 3 to 5 times the initial number from the direct mailing. It helps that the DMP phone reps are intelligent and well spoken, and receive training in the product and the interests of their audience, so the call becomes a two-way conversation instead of an irritating canned pitch that might as well be recorded.

I also thinks it helps the DMP effort that so few of their competitors are using the telephone. (I’m not including robo-calls which are a worse plague than Lyme disease.) It’s become a novelty to get a call from a smart, involved person who is selling something you actually want to buy. Maybe more marketers should pick up that phone.

Obamacare with a New York accent

As a small business owner, I turn out to be one of those people who doesn’t get to keep the health insurance I like. We got the letter from our provider yesterday, advising us to go right to the New York State site thus avoiding the healthcare.gov train wreck. Unfortunately, mystateofhealth.ny.gov isn’t much better. I tried to register about 30 times each time getting the message that my session had expired as soon as I hit the “submit” button. It didn’t help that I had to get over a check of my preferred username to be sure no one else had it, and answer a particularly hard to read Captcha. Why in the world would they think bots would be trying to set up health accounts?

My wife had better luck today and got a good way through the application before the website went down. There were two drop-down menus at different points, one to identify our current health carrier and the other to identify our auto insurance provider (not sure why they need this info). And here’s the thing: the menu listings were in random order, vs. alphabetical. There were easily 100 health carriers and even more auto insurers so you just have to scroll back and forth till you find the one you’re looking for, and I bet there are lots of mistaken choices. My wife was able to find our health insurer. But when it got to auto insurance she scrolled and scrolled, back and forth, and finally realized our carrier (USAA) wasn’t on the list. So she put down “none” because that was the best choice available. Doesn’t exactly help the state exchange with the actuarial part.

Where do they get the people who code these sites? Isn’t there any kind of darwinism in government that rewards people who strive harder to do a good job? I know a lot of you will say “what a stupid question” but I really do try to have faith that people entrusted to help other people will take that responsibility seriously. So this is discouraging, and I hope we don’t get sick before we get insurance.

What’s a new customer worth, Fidelity?

A death in the family caused us to contact Fidelity Investments, where the deceased’s assets were held. Fidelity told us we’d need to sign a form for redistribution of assets, and it would arrive in five business days. When about two weeks had elapsed, and no form, a family member called Fidelity and was told a/they had no way of tracking the form or even verifying it had been sent and b/mailing the form was unnecessary since it was available online. We then downloaded the form, completed it, and were done. 19 days after the original request (so 15 business days) the forms finally arrived in the mail. Two days after that, a second set of forms arrived in the mail.

There were three people involved on the recipient end. One of them had previous experience with Fidelity through a lump sum disbursement of a retirement account and commented “Fidelity… I should have known.” The second had no previous experience with Fidelity and is unlikely to establish a relationship on the basis of this experience. The third was me, who has had his business at Fidelity for many years and has always been delighted with the service and so was baffled by this Keystone Kops routine.

So, is there a double standard, where existing customers are treated better than potential new customers? In a perfect world, that’s the way it would be. But how much does it cost to gain a new customer? Wouldn’t it have been better to woo these two prospects rather than driving them away?

In a word, yes. Customers die, change their focus or get lured away by a more aggressive competitor. You ALWAYS need new business, and if you can acquire it at low cost that gives you more resources to use for pampering existing customers. Fidelity should get its departments talking to one another so fiascos like this aren’t the face of the company to prospective customers.

No thank you to Citi “Thank You Points”

I used a Citi “Thank You” card as my main purchasing vehicle for maybe 10 years. Its attraction was that it credited travel points for miles on any airline (at the time, unheard of) and I amassed some 300,000 points and paid the $75 annual fee each of those ten years. Then, about a year ago, I happened to have a question about my account and the telephone rep told me that virtually all my points were expiring in 90 days. I could purchase travel for a future date but if I didn’t buy something before the deadline they were gone.

So, my wife and kid went to visit friends in Germany in high season at a ridiculous price and we used more points on a family vacation. There were still tens of thousands of points left over so I transferred them to a new, no-fee Thank You card and cancelled the paid card. A few months later that card’s points are about to expire so I have been scheming to get some value out of them. It’s an expensive time to book travel so I’m looking to buy gift cards for places where I spend money. Meanwhile, from Citi’s perspective, I’ve transitioned from a presumably profitable customer paying a high annual fee to a fee-free and soon to be ex-customer.

While I’ve been spending way too much time negotiating with the Thank You folks, I have wondered whether there are any useful marketing lessons to be gleaned. Certainly the strangest policy is to let points expire without notifying the customer. It’s not like you get an AAdvantage statement where you can see that you need to book travel before a certain date to keep your old points; the whole procedure is invisible unless you log onto their website. Why in the world don’t they send me notices that warn, “your points are about to expire, here are some great offers from our partners”?

And about that website. You can check your points from your Citi card login which takes you to a rather promotional and unhelpful website, but there is a shadow thankyou.com website that you will never see unless you establish a separate log-in with a username and password that have different rules from your Citi card login. Yet this secret handshake is required for certain privileges, such as redeeming for Amazon purchases which they offered me recently (that’s how I found out about the separate website). And I don’t consider myself a web troglodyte. What happens with people who barely know how to log on, or still do their business by phone?

Thus, when I got an invitation to take a survey and say how happy I was with Thank You Points, you can bet I swooped down on it like a hawk on a chicken. A few days later I got an email from a certain [redacted], inviting me to call her and explain why I would not recommend Thank You to a friend. Apparently she had tried repeatedly to reach me by phone, which is peculiar because my cell is listed in my Citi contact information and there is no record of calls from unidentified callers. I called her back and left a message, also emailed her, and she did not return my call or respond to the email. But I was more than ready to share my opinion, so I am doing it here. [UPDATE: she finally did call me. See the comment for an update, plus why it took so long.]

What can marketers learn from all this? First, the points expiration seems ridiculous, but any expiration must be treated as an opportunity to contact your customer. Not doing that is just crazy. It’s lost revenue and lost good will.

Second, byzantine websites that require the user to decode your intentions are not okay. (If you want to book travel, the main reason I got the card, that link is buried in the bottom menu of the page of “rewards” below bubbly cross-promotions.) If you aren’t willing to meet your customer’s needs with clean and logical navigation, they will go find somebody who will.

Third, don’t play games by telling me you’ve tried to contact me when you haven’t and then not responding to my calls and emails. That’s middle school stuff.

To be fair, I haven’t reported some nice transactions with Citi folks on the phone trying to solve these problems but neither have I described every problem I’ve had with this program; there’s lots more. Also, full disclosure, I bought Citi stock when it was in the toilet and have made enough to pay for the points I lost. But not for the aggravation.

Priceline cancellation process… smart, or sneakily stupid?

Priceline Change reservation Page — Can you find the cancellation link on this page?

[This post is preserved for historical reasons only. See UPDATE below.]

I booked a hotel through Priceline’s Booking.com subsidiary where you don’t have to pay up front but do have to give them a credit card with advance notice required if you cancel. Then I did need to cancel and found it surprisingly difficult.

The email confirmation made no mention of a cancellation procedure. I went back to the confirmation page on Priceline and there was nothing there about cancellation either. I poked around with searches for “cancel” on the Priceline website without success. I emailed the hotel at the address in my confirmation email and got no response. Finally, I called the hotel and they had no record of the reservation. They said since it was made through booking.com I’d have to go back through them.

So I did go on the booking.com website and entered the reservation number and PIN I’d been given and it took me to the page shown here. Notice there’s no cancellation option, just the choice to “change” my booking. I chose that and was then able to cancel without further difficulty.

I’m wondering if Priceline has run the numbers on the effects of this process, which is definitely more sneaky than what I’ve encountered on hotel sites and also on other aggregators like Expedia. On the one hand, there are probably people who, faced with the difficulty to cancel, just say screw it, I’ll stay there after all. But how often does that happen? Don’t you generally have a good specific reason when you cancel a reservation?

And the net effect on me is that, similar to CarRentals.com with its deceptive pricing policy, I’m much less likely to use booking.com in the future. How is that a good thing for them?

UPDATE as of June 2015. I used booking.com for a recent stay, and had to cancel. Happy to say that the cancellation procedure is completely transparent. There’s now a prominent link on your confirmation email that says “manage your booking” and when you click to that page there’s a prominent (red) “Cancel” button. Very pleased with this change in policy, which I assume was made by Priceline not out of the goodness of their heart but because it makes sound business sense to be up front with your customers.

Is Amazon messing with its Prime program?

I was an early adopter of Amazon Prime, the membership program where you get unlimited 2-day shipping at no extra charge for an annual fee of $79. The program has over the years been enhanced with a limited selection of free instant videos and free Kindle books, but the shipping is what I really like. It’s a great feeling to be able to see something, want it, and know I’ll have it in 48 hours without paying express shipping. It’s definitely led to some impulse buys which were probably better for Amazon than for me. And it’s conditioned my family (immediate family members also get the free shipping, though not the other features) to look at Amazon as their primary shopping modality.

So with all those mutual benefits, I haven’t felt more than a tinge of guilt about buying the occasional five dollar item knowing Amazon is probably paying more to ship it than I’m paying for it. But now that seems to be changing. Some low priced items (I’ve noticed this in their grocery and baby departments) are now “add on” items where you get free shipping only if you combine them with another purchase. And others have been raised to outrageous price points: a box of kosher salt, which costs $3.29 at the supermarket, is now $10 at Amazon. I’m not sure who would buy it at this price so wonder what purpose it serves to even offer it.

The net result is that I’m now questioning my relationship with Prime. I don’t have an alternative in mind… nobody else offers such a loyalty program combined with a huge selection to make it meaningful… but that means my roving eye should be all the more troubling for Jeff Bezos and crew. It’s hard to break such an ingrained shopping habit, but I’m thinking it may be worth the trouble. And I’ve definitely got my eyes open for a price increase or other future limitations, so I won’t be automatically renewing as I have in the past.

If a lot of other Prime customers feel as I do, Amazon may want to do some rethinking.

Fulfillment lessons from the Container Store

Container Store fulfillment materials — Packing tape and portfolio from my Container Store shipment

My wife loves the Container Store. She has a closet full of Elfa components and various other elements that roll around or sit under shelves. Recently she bought four big stacking wire baskets to hold mittens, hats and other snow gear, one for each family member. The box arrived (several days before the promised date, by the way) and it was as big as a steamer trunk. I’d assumed that shipping, an unhappy necessity for those who don’t live near a store, was similar to what they charge at Ikea—an arm and a leg. Not so; this was shipped at a flat rate of $19.95.

Before I knew this I had opened the package and became somewhat intrigued by a couple of its features. First, there was a special heavy-duty fiber tape used to seal the box which had CS’s “7 Foundation Principles” printed on it in an endless loop. These can be found on the website along with lots of comments and inspiring videos. CS is consistently voted one of the best places to work in America and its employees are fervent in their mission. To me the dialog seems a bit cultish but that’s just my perspective and I do not begrudge the employees or their customers their enthusiasm.

Second, the bill of lading was packaged in a little blue portfolio including a thank you from the President. It was at this point I decided shipping must be REALLY expensive so I peeked inside and there were no prices on the receipt. Then I went online and discovered how reasonable their shipping actually is.

Bottom line, this is a great fulfillment effort that extends the Container Store brand right into the home as the package arrives. The cost of the special tape and the card-stock portfolio are not insignificant but my guess is they haven’t been tested against a generic approach. Container Store felt this is the way to communicate with their customers, and that’s the end of it.

The whole experience puts to shame mass produced efforts like Lands End, from whence your coveted fashions arrive in a plastic sack and a return label is printed on your shipping document as if they assume you’re already having second thoughts. Amazon with its non-recyclable receipts, in which the UPC code for the package is printed on peel-off paper and then switched to the outside of the package leaving a blank spot on the receipt, isn’t much better. Not as bad as Applebee’s decision to just throw it in a box, but not great.

Fulfillment is the last mile in your relationship with your customer. There may be sound economic reasons that you can’t be as effusive as the Container Store. But consider their example, and learn from it.

Survey worst practices from American Express

Landing page of the Amex survey — Landing page of my American Express survey

I got a survey invitation the other day from American Express that exhibited a number of worst practices. I’ll share highlights so we can hopefully learn from it.

1. The survey arrived too late. The email started, “Our records indicate you logged on to americanexpress.com on September 19, 2012, and we would like feedback about your on-line experience.” Problem: the email didn’t reach me till September 24. How am I supposed to remember something I did online 5 days ago?

2. The survey offered no incentive. It’s a sad but true fact that you have to give people a reward to participate in these days, simply because everybody else is doing it. It doesn’t have to be much … how about just a chance to win a $100 American Express Gift Card?

3. The survey is poorly written. The landing page starts, “As a valued American Express® customer, your views on how we can improve our service are extremely important. “ My views aren’t the customer, I am. That’s a dangling prepositional phrase and it’s distracting.

4. The survey doesn’t promise that it will be a quick and easy experience. The landing page simply states, in bold type, “The survey takes a few minutes to complete.” In context, that feels like a very long time.

5. The survey demands an explanation on each question of why I answered the way I did, written in free text. Eg, “What could have been done to make you more likely to recommend American Express to a friend or colleague?” (More bad or awkward writing.) Nothing really… I was just paying my bill! And it won’t let me leave the field blank. I have to type something, even if it’s nonsense, otherwise the page reloads.

6. The survey asks questions it already knows the answer to, in this case why I was on the website and what I did there. (It could have ben spun into a “do you recall what actions you performed while on the website” question which would have had more apparent validity since it appears to be testing the intensity of my recollection.)

7. The survey asks a question I can’t answer: “Please rate your satisfaction with the ease of navigating the American Express website, americanexpress.com.” Yo! The site I go to is called “Open Savings”. It does resolve (I just checked) to americanexpress.com but a consumer I shouldn’t be expected to know that. Why mention the URL at all?

8. The survey communication wasn’t sufficiently personalized. After I abandoned the survey for all the irritations described above I got an email “reminder” which was the same as the first email with this additional superscript: If you have already completed the survey, thank you and please accept our apology for the additional e-mail. But when I returned to the survey I was deposited where I left off.

What’s happening here is that they are automatically sending a follow up email to EVERYBODY who received the first email, and not removing or acknowledging the completions or people who started and then abandoned it. How irritating is that?

The “independent research company” that provides this survey is researchhq.com. Autofills on the search panel suggest they’ve also done surveys for Wells Fargo and Allstate. Good luck with that.

Fumbles in fulfillment: Applebee’s Lunch Decoy

So I am now the proud owner of an Applebee’s Lunch Decoy, which I ordered pursuant to the previous post. Notice anything wrong? Yup, they sent a gal decoy instead of the guy promised on Amazon. No way my boss is going to be tricked into thinking that’s me. So much for sneaking out for that Lunch Deal.

But there’s actually something more serious about this fumble, which is the lack of follow-through from the ad campaign. Is there anything to promote it on the outside of the package? No, not even the Applebee’s name. And the little mock-instruction sheet is great, but how about including a $5 off coupon since this recipient is obviously a heavy user?

So many campaigns start with a great idea and it’s forgotten that an actual element needs to be fulfilled. It’s a total afterthought and it ends up like this. And guess what creative geniuses: when you enter this campaign for an award you’re going to need to include a sample of the fulfillment pack, and that will be a bit of an embarrassment, won’t it?

Speaking of non-followthrough, a chap named Craig Murray emailed me and asked if I’d consider running a guest post for an infographic if he created one to my specifications. I could tell it was a mass solicitation but the idea interested me so I replied. Do you think Craig has followed up? Nope. And how does that inaction help him make sales? Don’t you think, if he contacts me again, I’d be less likely to consider his offer rather than more?

Dot your i’s and mind your p’s and q’s. That’s my small lesson for today.