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.

Incidental Marketing

Contact lens wearers are a savvy lot. They know that once they’ve found the lens for the right eye, the other lens will inevitably fit the left eye. Thus there’s no reason to label the two sides of the contact lens case “L” and “R” as in the top example. You could call the second lid “not R”, or you could leave it blank… or you could use it for MARKETING, like the smart folks at Alcon in the lower example.

This example gets 100 points for incidental marketing, in which we use an available medium to communicate with consumers where otherwise an opportunity would be lost. Contact users see their contact lens cases every time they put in their lenses… what a great reason to remind them of the contact lens cleaner to buy next time. Unfortunately, this example gets 0 points for branding because the name of the brand actually isn’t Alcon. It’s “Opti-Free Express”. Oh well.

The middle manager

Early in my career I was direct marketing manager at a department store. The post office announced its first-ever presort discount (this tells you how long ago it was) but gave no instructions on how to prepare a mailing list to get the discount. An enterprising software company wrote an application to do the presort and they were willing to let me use it—for a finders fee of half the savings in postage.

I turned it down without a second thought, even though I could have still saved thousands of dollars. The prospect of looking like a sucker to my superiors far outweighed the financial gain. And of course the gain was to the company, while the looking foolish was on me personally.

I remembered this recently when a client wanted to do some email promotions. I did a bit of research and recommended several services that work with small lists. Then she came back to me with an objection that never would have occurred to me—what if somebody at the email service decides to steal their mailing list? Although highly unlikely, this was a big internal concern at the company and it stopped the email program in its tracks.

The concerns of middle managers are very different than those of higher up folks who have responsibility and maybe get a share of P&L. Managers are reviewed for being on time and on budget, with no unpleasant surprises. This is something to keep in mind in marketing, and also when dealing with them in person because often a direct marketing manager is your immediate client as a freelancer.

When writing a marketing letter to a middle manager, it’s a good idea to stress the absolute lack of negatives. Testimonials are priceless—your reader doesn’t want to be the first to take the plunge. Benefits like “make your job easier” and “stop users from complaining” are far more relevant than “help your company grow its revenue”.

And when you’re delivering your copy to the real-life middle manager, be on time!

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!

Path of least resistance

I bought a vintage table saw last summer and almost immediately broke the vintage drive belts. Wonder of wonders, somebody had done the same thing and posted pictures of his repair online. However, my saw’s setup looked different than the photos. I spent a good 8 hours patiently jockeying the loose parts into alignment without success.  Then it dawned on me: it just can’t be this hard. I took a fresh look at my saw and realized one of the bearings had popped out of its housing. I cleaned the parts, popped it back in and was done in 20 minutes.

Another story with the same outcome: many years ago I was driving a VW bus on a very bad road in southern Mexico when a shock absorber came loose behind one of the wheels. I spent a couple hours trying to get it back on as a steadily growing audience of local indigenous men watched me. Finally one got impatient and pointed something out with sign language. The bolts that went into the top and the bottom mounts were different. And you could easily tell what was the bottom bolt because it had more road grit on it.

The lesson is, there’s usually a logical way to do things and people who are not bogged down by intellectual musings will find that way automatically by following the path of least resistance. Good designers of mechanical things know that and design accordingly (a notable exception being 1970s and 80s Detroit cars, where they’d often create special tools to make up for the fact their engine compartments were inaccessible) and ad writers should do the same.

If a reader has made the commitment to proceed through your letter or other body copy, they are fully intending to follow that path of least resistance. They know that A is followed by B, or supposed to be. Put a surprise in the road when they’re about to get to B—a special offer, or a new benefit—and it will get maximum attention. Change course without adding a benefit, and you’ll confuse and irritate and lose the reader. Keep this in mind when you’re framing out your next project.

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?

“Will it last for 30 years?”

This past weekend I ran across a historical display for Southwest Airlines in a Dallas Museum. The promotional materials and “LUV Potions” cocktail menu from the 1971 launch look amusingly dated, but the planes themselves are a dead ringer for the 737 I flew home the next

The first Southwest Airlines plane.
The first Southwest Airlines plane.

day—same design pattern, same color scheme. They’re fulfilling one of David Ogilvy’s key tests for a good concept: will it last for 30 years?

It got me thinking about what a consistent brand Southwest has been over the years—not just in design but in its irreverent voice that pokes fun at itself, the flying experience, and especially mandatory FAA announcements. (My favorite example of this humorous approach was the air sickness bag with a recruiting message on it: “sick of your job?”) This is heavy lifting from the marketing department and a key reason people who don’t generally “like” airlines go out of their way to fly Southwest.

Interestingly, Southwest itself has itself gotten a little tired of its consistency recently and is moving things around. Its website was recently redesigned with a color scheme that is a reasonable evolution from its beginnings, but with broad horizontal elements and an anonymous san serif type face that remind me on one of those sites you wind up on by mistake where somebody is squatting on a URL and wants to make it look like a “real” website with links and search.

Advice to Southwest: don’t get bored with success. Remember Henry Ford’s alleged complaint to his marketing director: “I like that campaign of yours but does it have to appear so dang often?” To which the marketing director replied, “Mr. Ford, the campaign has yet to appear in print!” Continue reading ““Will it last for 30 years?””

Beauty in everyday things

You know the standard desktop picture that comes with Windows XP? The rolling green hillside and blue cloud-streaked sky? I happen to love the thing. The scene reminds me of a farm in Oregon’s Applegate Valley where I spent some happy times (the picture was actually shot in Sonoma County, California).

That's blissWhat’s nice is the harmony—a visual harmony between the angle of the clouds and the roll of the hill, but also a harmony between man and nature. It’s obvious that this is a domesticated setting—the green hillside has been mown, and there are traces of a road at its base—but the human touch enhances the setting, rather than blighting it.

Here’s something I also love: the statement in the ads for satellite TV companies that you need “a clear view of the southern sky” to get service. How poetic—who wouldn’t want that?

And what makes these two examples even nicer for me is that there’s no particular intent to sell you anything or to “be” poetic. Like a shaker chair or a Korean pojagi (cloth used to wrap gifts), they’re everyday things that rise to the level of art.

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.

Measure twice. Cut once.

I’ve been doing a lot of carpentry this summer, and I find myself pleased by the unforgiving nature of working with a saw. Once you make a cut you can’t take it back. Master carpenters who do the same thing over and over again develop an instinctive eye and a steady hand for sure, accurate cuts. But a tinkering hobbyist doesn’t get enough practice, so mistakes are going to happen. And it’s a milestone in the tyro’s journey when you decide you will toss away the maimed piece (perhaps an expensive piece of stock you’ve worked on for several hours) and start over rather than live with your mistake.

Copywriting used to be something like this, early in my career. I was too early for computers but too late to have access to a steno pool where my manuscript would be retyped. A copy deck was expected to look good as well as read well when submitted—no typos, strikeovers or white-out permitted. And there were moments, many of them, when you’d take the page out of your typewriter, read it over, and realized you should have used a different word or sentence order. And you’d have the choice of living with something that possibly could have been better—or typing the whole page over again.

There’s no doubt computers make for better copy. Not only can you delete your mistakes, you can try all kinds of what-ifs without penalty before hitting the “print” button. But I miss the finality…the recognition that once you type a word, there’s no going back without paying a price. In fact, that may have been what separated a good junior copywriter from a hack—the willingness to not only learn from your mistakes, but pay for them in extra time at the keyboard.