Tag: Amazon

Hmm… possible problem with social media peer reviews

Go look at the reviews for a popular item on Amazon.com. Compare the volume of people voting on the “most helpful favorable review” and the “most helpful critical review”. In most cases, the number of “helpful” votes on the “favorable” reviews will swamp the “critical” numbers. My hypothesis:  people reading these reviews mostly want to support their own positive impression because they’ve already decided to buy the item.

Some time ago, I accepted an invitation to be a “Vine” reviewer on Amazon. This honor came to me because I had written a couple of reviews on the site that got a high number of “helpful” ratings. Now I get a monthly email offering me some products for free as long as I agree to review them. This is not a boondoggle: if you regard your time as worth anywhere close to minimum wage, the hours you spend in reviewing the items are going to be far more than the value of the goods received.

But here’s the thing. Most of my Vine reviews have been negative and POSSIBLY as a result I’m getting less attractive Vine offers now. I have no ideas how this algorithm works. Maybe Amazon merchants are subsidizing this effort in some way? I’m certainly not suggesting that there has been any pressure to give a positive review but maybe Amazon is able to say “we’ll offer your product to a certain number of our top reviewers, they’ll likely review it favorably because they’re getting it for free etc.” In any case the net result is that fewer people are giving me a “helpful” nod now and I’m less well-rated as a reviewer since I started to write more negative reviews.

I love peer reviews and am a frequent contributor to Yelp, as well as Amazon. I read and use these reviews in my own buying decisions. If I want to know how to do some trick with a kitchen gadget that came with a poor instruction manual, I can bet that an Amazon reviewer will have filled in the gaps. But Amazon and other social media outlets need to make sure they provide a venue for intelligent negative opinions to express themselves, even if those reviews are not beloved by the readership. Maybe a helpful negative review gets extra weight, if it’s of a certain length and not a rant?

Psst… Kindle for sale…

Is this your Kindle 2?
Is this your Kindle 2?

Amazon is releasing its second generation of Kindle, its perpetually sold-out ebook reader. The new Kindle is faster and has more memory, and also substitutes a joystick for the page turning buttons along the side that always made me feel like I was using my mother’s old desktop phone directory (with the slider that would cause the page for the right letter to drop open… remember?).

But maybe most important, the new Kindle is available now… or almost now, because Amazon promises they have 320,000 of them for shipment starting 2/24. You can get it here.

AT&T: anti-marketing ninjas at work

So I am finally got my iPhone. Per the earlier post, my web order disappeared into automated customer service limbo yet was impossible to cancel until I called a live sales rep. Meanwhile the price dropped $50 so I place the order again and it goes through with me $50 richer and ATT $50 poorer. And with me, a long time AT&T customer who is now a “new” wireless customer, holding a vastly reduced favorable view of the company. How is this good for the shareholders?

For people who have to call customer service on their lunch hour, stories like this are just more yadda-yadda. But for the marketer came up with the promotion that drew me to AT&T at this particular moment, and is getting reviewed for it possibly with their job on the line, it’s not at all trivial. You did your best work, you got the click, and then the order was deep-sixed by a combination of bad IT architecture and moronic overview by whatever human is supposed to spot-check to ensure all is going well.

I will not bore you with the details of yet another poor customer service experience beyond citing a couple of particularly telling details:

* “Unfortunately, either we have not heard from you in several days, or you have chosen to cancel your order. In either case, this e-mail confirms your order cancellation”. That was in an email I got from AT&T during the first attempt to order. But notice we’re talking about two totally different customer relationship scenarios, and they’ve chosen to respond to both of them in the same email.

Why would this happen? Because some human life form has decided it is “too complicated” to have two different stock emails to respond to two different scenarios that create the same result. The computers don’t care! It is people thinking for the computers that is causing the problem here.

* Now I’ve finally got an order placed, and a confirmation email arrives: “Congratulations! You’re now part of the largest wireless community in America—71 million and growing! You will receive your new wireless phone in a few days.” Well that’s interesting news, since the original order confirmation promised two-day guaranteed delivery! There is also a tracking number in the email but when I click on it, it takes me to AT&T’s home page!

So recognizing it as a UPS number I go to their tracking page and do indeed find the package quickly and discover it actually will be delivered on time in spite of AT&T’s hedging.
Why didn’t they actually confirm that they were delivering on schedule in the confirming email? Why didn’t they reference my specific smart decision to buy an iPhone? You guessed it… they send the same confirming email to EVERYONE, regardless of what offer they responded to.

Just imagine the phone calls to customer service this generates. But there is apparently no consequence and no human cost to AT&T because they have no intention of answering those calls. They’ll be led through a phone tree and ultimately disconnected as I was in my first encounter.

I feel like such a whiner in describing all this but I actually do have a point worth making. In this terrible economy, when every company should be scrambling for every last potential order to keep its bottom line healthy and to keep employees employed, AT&T is running its business like there is money, and orders, to burn.

Much of this definitely goes to the laziness of midlevel IT and customer service folks who are scheming ways to go home on time, not to execute their job which should be to make things easier for the customer. But it also goes back to a hubris that has existed from the tim companies like AT&T established their websites… because face it, the web experience with any phone company is terrible.

What they did: get on the web early, because they’re an Important Company that needs a “web presence”, then cobble on an e-commerce function as an afterthought. Now the tail is wagging the dog because their ecommerce engine doesn’t work and the ridiculous official explanations sound like one of those clone commanders in Star Wars. What they should have done: emulate sites like amazon.com. (or, just emulate amazon.com) which realize that no order can be allowed to get away.

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?

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.

Land mines in the “last mile”

Telephone companies, cable operators and such refer to the “last mile” as the final step of actually getting their service into a home or office. For marketing companies, the “last mile” is the process of actually delivering the product or service to the customer—and that’s where more and more companies fall short, perhaps intentionally.

Infoweek columnist Chad Dickerson describes a situation in which a hotel reservation was not honored because the “last mile” procedure of the online booking company was to send a fax to the participating hotel, where it was ignored. My wife had the experience of ordering expensive curtains from a company called Smith and Noble, whose “last mile” procedure when a customer complains about a missing order is to send an email to the factory and hope they respond. (This outfit couldn’t even CANCEL an order efficiently; when they still hadn’t delivered the drapes for our little vacation cabin on the next-to-last day of our stay, she was assured the order would be shipped that night overnight or not at all. Neither promise turned out to be true; our friendly neighbor signed for the package a few days later and the curtains now sit uselessly in a closet. Sure hope they fit when we show up next year…)

As to intentional disappointments, this is what happens when a company looks for ways to cut costs and finds that it can save big by lowering expectations or simply failing to meet them for the small percentage of orders that are more expensive to fulfill. This is happening now at my beloved Amazon.com, whose “Prime Shipping”—two-day shipping at no extra cost beyond a yearly fee, and overnight shipping for $3.99—is I predict destined to be a one-season wonder.

When Amazon consistently failed to get a Prime order to me in 2 days, AND email customer service failed to reach a solution or adequately explain the problem, I wrote a detailed letter to Jeff Bezos. (As a practice this is what I recommend as a final step to get a resolution from a company; if the CEO (or someone else with responsibility) fails to respond or sends you a form letter, that tells you as much as if they fixed the problem.)

In my case I got a personal response from a personal representative of Jeff’s, but she got both the shipping date and the item description wrong—data that was readily available in Amazon’s own files, of course. Trouble in the last mile which presages more disappointments down the road…

The Robert Collier Letter Book

Early in my copywriting career, I stumbled across the Robert Collier Letter Book at the L.A. Central Library. Discovering it was out of print, I flirted with telling them I’d lost it… and soon wished I had, because the only copy was lost when the library burned down.

Now, the Robert Collier Letter Book is available once again via the web (use this Amazon link). It’s just as relevant and meaty as I remembered. Robert Collier was an early “Giant of the Mails” who shared his knowledge in 1937, but people are people and selling is selling so most of it still applies today. For example:

“All of us are consciously, or unconsciously, using ‘TESTED SELLING SENTENCES’ from morning, noon till night. Some of us use them to sell ideas, others service and others actual merchandise.

“Little Willy wants an extra slice of bread and jam; sister wants 15 cents for the movies; Dad is scheming how to get out of the house for lodge that night, and Mother is planning to have Dad sweep out the cellar–while around the corner the Preacher is planning a visit on the household to make it more church conscious and one and all, have their own pet ‘TESTED SELLING SENTENCES’ they plan to use on one another!”

If you work in marketing or selling, or even if you don’t, I say: get this book.

Philip Claypool

I drove to the Marina district the other day to check out the rumor and, sad to say, it’s true: Claypool’s B-B-Q is gone. A lady who looked to be closing out the books said he was “out of town… working on a franchise to open in Southern California” but further investigation reveals he’s simply gone… off to the Napa Valley with no immediate plans for a new spot.

Which is a true shame. Because this Arkansaw boy (whose family ran the huge Claypool duck farm, incidentally) who specialized in Tennessee pulled pork established, in the last year, a true talent for Texas brisket to go with his wonderful Jack Daniels beans. And is a good and generous guy as well as (full disclosure) the original owner of my backyard barrel smoker.

Come back soon, Philip. In the meantime, all of us should head off to Amazon.com and buy one of his country albums or, at the very least, listen to a clip or two.