Category: Customer service

Customer Service Heroes, Part 2

So a chef brought a great tasting chardonnay blend to a party, and I wanted to have more of it. Fortunately I’d saved the bottle (Novella Synergy 2007) and started checking with the usual Bay Area sources where a chef might buy his wine including Ferry Plaza Wines, K&L, Wine Warehouse and Jug Shop. No luck with any of these so I stopped by the eclectic and wonderful Bi-Rite Market on 18th St and spoke to Joshua the wine buyer who expressed interest because it is a Paso Robles wine (one we don’t see as often as others) and offered to see if he could get it.

The next day he called me at home and said he had telephoned the winery and learned that the entire vintage had been sold to… Trader Joe! Which of course is the Walmart of crunchy gourmet stores, threatening to put the independent Bi-Rites of the world out of business, so it was even more remarkable that he passed this info along. Of course I am going to go over to TJ and buy a case, but I am also going to make a far greater attempt to give Bi-Rite my business including their 10% off a case sale next month.

This is another example (the first was from Timbuk2) of a company giving extraordinary, old-fashioned personal service which is all the more distinctive, and consequently more valuable for both the customer and the vender, because others are dumbing down their service. Compare, for example, to this experience with Electronic Arts, when I found my 11 year old has discarded the paper with our CD key for an electronic game and asked EA if I could have a new one if I sent them the receipt and a photo of the original disks to prove we own them. They responded with an email that told me to go to a web page to read the response there, always a bad sign, where I found:

If you have not register the game and if the Registration code/Serial
Number/CD Key for the game has been lost or misplaced then you will need to
purchase another Registration code/Serial Number/CD Key from our warranty
department, please mail our Warranty department the following information:

-The [Proof of Purchase] page from the manual, or if that is not available
the game disk.
Note: If you send the game disk, please send it using a traceable method as
Electronic Arts is not responsible for products lost in transit.
-A letter explaining that you need a replacement serial number.
-A money order for $10.00 USD.
-Note: We do NOT accept cash, checks, or credit cards.

So EA is going to make me spend basically the original price of the game to get satisfaction, while Bi-Rite is sending me to a competitive store. The cost of the EA response was minimal, the cost of Bi-Rite’s probably $5 when you consider Joshua’s time and his phone calls. But in terms of future buying behavior from me that might result in profits to the vendor, Joshua’s approach makes far better sense. Bi-Rite is at 3639 18th St (parking difficult). If you need wine suggestions, call (415) 241-9760 and ask for Joshua.

Maintaining virtual relationships

When I made a move from Southern California to a small town in Oregon, back in 1990, I wondered how many clients I would lose from my freelance copywriting business. I’d promised everybody I would assiduously stay in touch via phone and fax (no email then), and to show up in person whenever needed. Even so, I did lose business—including one regular client who said she couldn’t possibly work with anyone who wasn’t local, even though her office was an hour away from me and I saw her maybe twice a year.

We have come a long way since then. It’s commonplace to have people on several continents on a conference call, and to maintain a virtual identity via email and chat. So much so, I think we may take our connectedness for granted and not realize that clients and colleagues don’t find us accessible enough and so don’t have as much confidence in working with us as they should.

I’m specifically thinking of a guy I have worked with for several years in a technical capacity. He’s brilliant, but I always felt like I was second-tier in his book because he was unresponsive to emails and phone calls. I’d voicemail and email several times and get no reply at all, even in the middle of a project. That obviously made me uncomfortable about working with him.

So we had a talk in the middle of a current project. Turns out that a/email is his preferred method of communication, so if you leave a voicemail he’s likely to respond by email and b/he was having some terrible problems with his email provider and ingoing and outgoing messages were simply disappearing without a trace.

He’s now changed email providers and is suddenly very accessible, sending me reports and checking in several times a week. My confidence in working with him has gone up exponentially though the service provided has not changed. Virtual relationships need to be maintained the same as physical ones.

Ann H, customer service hero

I love my Timbuk2 briefcase/messenger bag. It is nice that it is a San Francisco company with street cred that is good to its people. (A couple years ago, when they made more money than they expected, they distributed it to their piece goods workers… you don’t see that every day.) And I like even more that my orange bag is still intact after 2 years of heavy use. So, when I broke the buckle on the strap that holds it around your waist when you are riding a bike, I had to fix it.

I found the replacement piece on their website and ordered it. Got a cutesy email confirmation and then the piece arrived and it didn’t fit. That’s when the good stuff began. I replied to the cutesy email from customerservice@timbuk2.com and immediately got a reply from a real person, Ann H. She said, “I understand what you are talking about and I will look down in production for one for you.” Pretty impressive but what comes next was even better. She couldn’t find it and asked me to send a picture. The picture didn’t match so she wrote back, “Is it the cross strap or is it a waist belt? I can send you a whole new one if I know which one.”

And so she did. Turns out the buckle style had been changed (that’s why she couldn’t find it) but I just snapped off the old belt, put in the new one, and was good to go. And as Ann H said in a follow up email, “I am so happy to hear this. We do not want you to have an unhappy bag just sitting in the corner being neglected.”

Ann H may be one of a kind. But what’s reproducible and instructive about this is having my email go to a real live person, when I hit the reply button on my confirmation email. How many times have you done that and get a bounceback because the email address won’t accept incoming mail? What are they worried about? It’s logical that people would want to reply to an email from the company if they need further service, so why not let them do it… vs sending them to some kind of online form that may reduce the number of incoming inquiries, but also has an effect on overall customer satisfaction and future orders.

Let’s all DISCOVER!

We want to love the Discovery Channel Store. The shows are great, and by implication the stuff they sell should be good clean fun for kids. Unfortunately, much of it seems to fall apart at the slightest touch.

Last year my kid got a remote controlled airplane for Christmas from Discovery. It didn’t work. We took it back to the store and exchanged it for another which… also didn’t work. By this I mean that the mechanisms that communicate from a controller to the plane to its moving parts had some kind of disconnect. Finally, on the third try we got a plane that DID work and we succeeded in crashing it ourselves, end of RC airplane trauma.

Just now we’ve ordered again, thanks to a gift certificate. Specifically, RC Anthropods! Three bugs which scutter along as controlled by a twig with a battery hidden inside. But one of the bugs was missing its charger connector out of the box, and a second lost its connector (the thing that powers its internal battery, so it will move) as well as its scuttering wheels within 24 hours. It was at this point I contacted Discovery Online (the stores are all now closed) and asked for a refund.

As with the store experience last year, the reply was prompt and extremely polite: they’ve credited me with the full amount of the purchase and I don’t even have to return the defective toy. Of course, if they did this on every toy that was defective they might quickly shutter their online store too. Could it be their profit model to flood the market with evidently poor quality, but very cheap, product and hope that inertia keeps customers from asking for their money back?

The flaw with this is the difficulty of getting repeat business, which may be why the brick-and-mortar locations shut down (including one which had just opened in a pricey location at SF’s new Westfield Center). Right now the web store is heavily promoting—the RC Anthropods were yesterday’s special. Let’s see what happens after Christmas.. As my solicitious email from the customer service department concluded,

Thank you for shopping with us and LET’S ALL DISCOVER!

Into the customer service abyss

I just got back from a very inspiring ecommerce conference put on by a client. There were lots of stories of heroic customer service. My favorite was how Title 9 made some mistakes in sponsoring a women’s running event and decided to refund everybody’s entry fee. This was so overdoing it (and quite expensive) that it created a bunch of new customers.

Which made me wonder about companies who are NOT so ready to embrace today’s super proactive customer service models… how can they still compete? By good fortune or not, I had a couple of examples right here in my family’s daily life.

I missed the kids’ school picture day with LifeTouch. My bad, but at least there’s a number to call with customer service problems. And when I call that number I get a long message, in English and Spanish, instructing me to leave a voicemail and what I should put in the message… then after all that the voice mailbox turns out to be full. After 3 tries I DID leave a message, asking when the makeup photo day is. They promise a call back in 24 to 48 hours. Think I got that callback?

I ordered a video game from FamilyVideo. I could have bought the same game at Amazon with 2 day guaranteed shipping, but FamilyVideo had a discount offer for new customers (hmm, is the idea of that to incent them to order again?) and I decided to save $10 and wait 10 days for my item. After 10 days it’s still not here so now I go and check order status.. it’s still “in fulfillment”. So I sent them an email asking for an update. Their website promises a prompt reply. Guess what?

Yup, I’m still waiting in both cases and predict I will continue to do so until hell freezes over or I take further action on my my side, whichever happens first. Once upon a time, this kind of abysmal service was not that unusual. But the good guys are raising the bar. And here’s a worrisome theory: companies like this KNOW how non-competitive their service is, and have no plans to correct it, so rather than giving it their best shot they’ve simply thrown up their hands?

The Fedex rant

Here’s a first. Yesterday I needed to pay a Fedex bill and had lost the original invoice. I had the second sheet with the backup detail but there was no mailing address on it. Their return envelope just has a clear window for the address to show through, and unlike most remittance envelopes it was not preprinted with the bar code for the ZIP code, so that was no help.

So I went on fedex.com and tried “contact us” and searched for “mailing address” and “pay bill by mail”. No luck. So I called the 800 number, pushed 0 for an operator, told her I’d lost the address and needed it to pay the bill. She says “I’ll get that for you” and puts me on hold—for 5 minutes! By now I’ve done a search on Google and found a mailing address so I hang up.

How many layers of incompetence are at work here? The invoice printing people, the envelope printing department, the web folks, the telephone staff… not one had seen fit to solve a problem that must come up many times each day. It’s their money, folks, I wanted to send it to them!

Ask your payables department about Fedex and they’ll probably have a story like this. Every customer does. Good thing they’re better at shipping packages than at managing their own customer accounts.

Batteries not included.. neither is the lid for the battery case.

I just got through a holiday season filled with toys that required batteries, and something finally dawned on me. All of them now have battery covers that are attached with a tiny screw, rather than the slide-on-and-click-to-lock type that I remember.

I first assumed this was some kind of money saving move, and that somehow it cost less to use a screw than to mold a special plastic case that shuts tightly… higher quality plastic, tighter tolerances presumably being needed for the latter. But maybe not.

A bit of poking around the web suggests the screw-on battery cases are in fact for child safety and to keep kids from getting at the batteries so they can stick them in their mouths. Perhaps there’s new legislation requiring the manufacturers to use them. Anybody know?

I want to bring up a couple of points about this, which are completely random and unrelated:

* I can’t find anybody who is upset about what is really a pretty major change in toy design, no Amazon reviews or web postings by folks who are upset about the extra difficulty of dealing with the screws or the need to run out and buy a tiny screwdriver. (And by the way, in most cases these screws are really IN THERE and require a lot of torque to remove.) Suggesting as a nation we are a lot more handy than one might suspect. Wonder if there are any more hidden competencies lurking out there?

* It costs about a 1/10th of a mill (which is 1/10th of a cent) to add a little locking washer so the screw doesn’t fall out and get lost, and yet maybe 1 toy in 5 has it. So picture this. You’re trying to load the batteries while your child with trembling hands awaits. Of course the battery screw falls out and of course it disappears (possibly into the mouth of a smaller child). And now you have a lid with no way to secure it other than our old friend, Mr. Tape.

Progress?

Not so smart, J. Jill…

A woman of my acquaintance found she really, really liked the clothes from the mail order retailer J. Jill. She ordered so much that they asked if she’d like to have a credit account. Even though she had plenty of other cards, there were some minor incentives so she accepted and started getting a regular billing statement.

One month she mailed her payment late, and got a late fee. Then she left the country for two months, not realizing the late fee had been assessed. The next month there was a second late fee and the month after that she became officially a deadbeat. She begain receiving recorded calls several times a day, “please hold for a message about your J. Jill account.” The folks who were house-sitting would hang up, and the voice would call back an hour or two later. Without ever making any kind of threat or bullying statement, J.Jill simply rendered her phone unusable for incoming calls because one never knew who was on the line. Like a Boston Boot for credit.

Then she returned, found out about all this, and immediately paid all the late fees. And cancelled her account, and swore never to shop at J. Jill again. It’s illogical for J. Jill to lose a relationship over $30 in late fees, right? Yet likely J.Jill considers the whole matter a big success because they’ve discovered a new profit center in turning customers over to a credit issuer who’d pay for the privilege; after that they weren’t J.Jill customers any more, but the property and responsibility of the finance company. Not so smart.

Thank you for your business. Now goodbye.

The 5/22 mail brought a letter from AT&T Universal Card. I almost didn’t open it because it was preprinted “OPEN IMMEDIATELY: Important Account Notice” and had a preprinted first class indicia. Obviously, another of the cash advance check mailings I receive 4x a year or so.

But no. The letter inside began: “Citi, the issuer of your AT&T Universal Cash Rewards Card, has decided to discontinue this credit card for business reasons. Therefore, your account will be closed on 6/30/06. This letter outlines important information about he closing of your account.” And so it did… several single spaced paragraphs to inform me what happens to my cardmember benefits (mostly going away) and outstanding balance (it’s still there) before a final “thank you for your business” at the end.

Now let’s see here. I’ve had this card for maybe 20 years. As I recall it was a pioneer—the first high limit, fee free MasterCard. Over the years it changed hands several times and various institutions paid what would add up to several billion dollars for the customer portfolio and brand identification. And now suddenly it’s worth no more than a curt “thank you for your business” ?

Ironically, the very same day brought an email from AT&T Universal Card. They want to let me know that I should refinance my home at a low home equity rate through them because, as a Universal Card customer, “you’ve earned it!”

That quotidian email is an example of why marketers believe business relationships have value—especially when you have the kind of relationship that gives you legal permission to send an email solicitation to your customer list. Yet, I’m assuming this will be the last I hear from my friends at Universal Card. (The deadline for my loan application is 6/30, which makes sense because my card relationship goes kablooie then.)

Citi evidently believes the Universal Card no longer has any business value. I disagree. Anybody want to join me and take up a collection to buy the brand? I’m hoping $1000 will do it.

The price of security

I was recently a victim of identity theft. First, my credit card company called me wondering why I had been charging so much at walmart.com. When I said I hadn’t used my walmart.com account since 2004 (which I know because I keep all my old emails), they suggested somebody had gotten hold of my credit card info and suggested I cancel my account and get a new card. Which I did.

Then, a few days later, another call. Had I changed my billing address to somewhere in Arizona? No, I hadn’t, and the ability to do so meant that somebody had hacked my online account with the bank in a major way. This set off alarm bells requiring cancellation of the new card, plus alerts to the credit reporting bureaus of which maybe the worse repercussion for me, as a marketer, is that I am automatically removed from credit card solicitation lists for the next 5 years. (No more Capital One swipe samples for me!)

I thought the whole matter was handled just about right by CitiBank. They were efficient, not accusatory, and the paperwork required (two notarized statements from me) was tedious but reasonable under the circumstances. That got me thinking about what is the right balance between companies protecting themselves and providing benefits to consumers.

A serious lack of such balance was exhibited in my first purchase recently of a “digital edition” from Amazon. It came with onerous digital rights management (DRM) protection that requires me to go through a complex registration process, where I sign in with Adobe online, simply to be able to read the document I have paid for on my computer. It simply ain’t worth it, folks. I asked for my money back. Their rights are protected but they lose a sale. Good deal? Not for me, not for the publisher, certainly not for the author who probably has no idea this is going on.

Back in my “suit” days, I had a client who asked me if it would be a good idea to sign up with a bad check protection service which would make good any bogus paper in return for a 1.5 percent commission on ALL checks received. Sounded somewhat plausible until we did the math and found that the bad check problem was actually costing considerably less than 1.5% of sales.

People who make their living trying to cheat other people and businesses will probably find a way to do so, at least some of the time. A business needs to find a balance where it makes things somewhat more difficult for the bad guys without penalizing the average customer with unreasonable security measures. This is the same logic that applies when we talk to our clients about money-back guaranteed, isn’t it?

A money back guarantee, especially on a mail order or internet purchase, answers the big objection “what if I get it and I don’t like it after I see it?” Marketers who are reluctant to make guarantees are afraid that somebody is going to take advantage of them. But the bad guys will anyway… and meanwhile they’ve scared off a lot of potential customers who were on the fence.