Posts Tagged ‘customer service’

Two Start-ups That Highlight Customer Service

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

Most of our encounters with start-up companies in the digital world have been less than desirable. Because they are new and often overwhelmed by their growth, service often takes a backseat. But that happens less and less today, as the growth of social media means that not only do service gaffes hurt new companies’ prospects, but also that incredible service can itself drive word-of-mouth. Some companies, such as Zappos, have made customer service their main marketing tool. Lately I’ve encountered two newer companies’ customer service efforts–one good, and one poor–that offer tips on the right way to run your own company and another way to deliver Marketing with Meaning.

The Good: Poll Everywhere

This is a relatively new service that we’ve been using to create live SMS-based polls during powerpoint presentations.  Think of Poll Everywhere as a version of those devices that are sometimes handed out in big events and used to get immediately feedback and answers from the audience.  Except that this is much cheaper to create (even free versions are available) and can be done with nothing more than a basic mobile phone.  Within seconds you can create a poll and add a live, updating PowerPoint slide to your presentation. There are a variety of monthly service plans for the tool.

In terms of customer service, what I really loved about Poll Everywhere is that it sends you an email reminder two days before you are charged again for the service.  This worked well for me, as I recently traded up to the more expensive plan in order to use the service for a very large presentation I was giving. But in the month ahead I do not have a similar need. So this warning email allowed me to trade back down at a significant cost savings.

This simple step comes at some cost for Poll Everywhere, of course. I likely would have forgotten about my monthly fee for a month or more, giving the company additional revenue.  Further, I would have blamed myself for being dumb, not the company for continuing to charge me a rate that I chose to accept. By helping me spend my money wisely, Poll Everywhere earned my trust and my positive word-of-mouth.

I wish more companies would earn my trust and loyalty this way. Why doesn’t Netflix proactively offer me the opportunity to trade down to one movie per month when I go a long time between rentals? What if your gym or country club offered to reduce your monthly fee when it notices that you’re not going as often as your plan allows?  “Crazy,” I know, but in reality such moves engender enormous trust, and in most cases help retain customers who would be much more likely to opt out entirely after a few months of overspending.

The Bad: iStockphoto

iStockphoto has actually been around for more than four years, but it is still seems to be a small online start-up to me. It is one of a handful of low-cost stock photography sellers. I first learned about the service from Guy Kawasaki and used it when I began blogging a few years ago.  The price of $1 per image was right for my modest needs, and the company offered discounts when you bought credits in bulk.  It has been a good service that I recommend to others and we use the service from time to time at our agency.

But I was unpleasantly surprised a few months ago to receive an email from iStockphoto, explaining that my 100 credits would be expiring this week.  I was mystified by this message and policy. Maybe somewhere in the fine print the company explained that there was an expiration date for these credits, but this was certainly not obvious, and is completely inconsistent with just about any other service I have come across. As a regular user of iStockphoto, it’s not like I was some lapsed customer with a liability they needed to phase out.  I had about $100 that I was in danger of leaving on the table because the company arbitrarily decided to take these electronic bits away.

Although it was at least smart to warn me months in advance that my credits would expire, the act of stealing my money this way is outrageous. Remember, the company already got my money, and keeping record of my credits costs nothing. I believe this is incredibly shortsighted and bad for business. After all, there are many other places to secure stock photography, and the Internet makes it easier to set this up every day. By screwing over its customers for no real gain, iStockphoto ends up generating continuous waves of negative word-of-mouth. I did a quick Google search for “istockphoto credit expiration” and found several negative reviews. Count me as one person who will never use iStockphoto again, and who will look for ways to use my influence to weaken the company wherever possible.

Customer service is not an afterthought or something to “be managed.”  Rather, in the connected world of social media it is at the front lines of building trust and earning word-of-mouth–it’s Marketing with Meaning.

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Starbucks Stores Sharing Improvement Plans

Monday, December 14th, 2009

starbucks service photo

Here at Bridge Worldwide, all 260 (and growing) employees are preparing to go through our annual evaluation process and work-plan development for the year ahead. Our belief is that it is important to regularly review how each employee is doing and assess individuals’ strengths and opportunity areas. On the latter, we’re big believers in having open and honest conversations about what people need to improve on, and managers help direct reports create action plans to tackle them. While it can sometimes be a tough conversation to have, we strongly believe this is a reason we have such great employees and have been named one of the Best Small Businesses to Work For in America four years in a row. So I found it interesting to see that Starbucks stores seem to be taking the same approach.

Our President, Jay, sent me this photograph he took during a recent trip to a local Starbucks here in Cincinnati. As you can see, the store is proudly sharing what opportunity areas it is working on this month. It seems to be based on feedback that they have gotten from store visitors, and alternates every month.

There are several things I love about this big idea. First, it shows visitors that the store is listening and actually thankful for the feedback. Second, because it is handwritten and changes every month, visitors can tell that this is not just some big corporate B.S., but rather that the specific store cares and is listening. Third, by writing its opportunity area publicly, Starbucks effectively opens up the dialogue with its customers. I believe people will start giving more open and honest feedback to store employees, which in turn will make them even better.

Finally, this is a tremendous tool for educating and reminding store employees what is important for them to focus on. When they walk in to start working at 5:30 a.m., they are greeted with this same sign—a very vivid reminder of what each individual should focus on.

When he shared this photo, Jay suggested that this goes even further by allowing customers to feel like they are shaping the brand and experience—and that this helps reinforce Starbucks strategy as “the third place” people spend significant time in. After all, if it’s really your space, then you need to have a say in how it appears and functions, just like home and the office.

My buddy Pete Blackshaw recently pointed out that Starbucks claims it has implemented 50 customer suggestions that have come from its MyStarbucksIdea site. Pete literally wrote the book on how to turn great customer service into marketing, and Starbucks hits it out of the park here.

This is a great reminder that Marketing with Meaning works best when you make it personal, in-store, and face to face with the customers who hand you their money every day.

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Nice Follow-up By Netflix

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

I hope everyone is having a great start to 2009. I spent much of the past two weeks finishing the first draft of our Marketing with Meaning book. It took a ton of time and we still have some work to do in editing, of course, but it’s a huge step and I’m extremely excited about how it reads so far!

Aside from working on the book over the holidays, I got a chance to play around with a few grown-up toys.  I spent a little time with the new Xbox 360 interface and specifically with the new Netflix viewing service that it added. I have been interested in testing the Netflix service since I heard it was coming several months ago. I have been an active Netflix user, and it seemed smart to allow members to download movies direct rather than waiting a few days for a DVD to arrive in the mail.

I tried out the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie, At World’s End, which I have been waiting to see for some time. Unfortunately, the experience was way below par. The movie started easily enough, and it was nice to play it immediately like a pay-per-view movie. But as the movie began to play, the quality was horrible. On my 50″ HDTV it looked like a low-quality YouTube video. I turned it off after a few minutes, highly disappointed.

The next day, however, I got an email from Netflix that specifically asked my opinion of the quality of the picture (see screen grab above). I was very pleasantly surprised to see the company notice that I had tried the service for the first time, and that it followed up proactively on an issue that obviously was experienced by other customers. As a Netflix member, I’m disappointed with the service and likely won’t try it again for some time, but I actually feel more positive about the brand itself.

On another level, it is remarkable to me that this kind of service quality is so remarkable. It is routine for restaurant servers to come back and ask how your meal tastes, so why doesn’t every other service brand do the same? It is even easier in digital businesses, where a quick email like this can be programmed to go to millions automatically.

It reminds me of my friend Pete Blackshaw’s quote that “customer service is the new marketing department.”  If that is the case, proactively asking for feedback is another great example of Marketing with Meaning.

(P.S. Check out this investor presentation by Netflix a few months ago. It is one of the best company strategy decks I have seen in years-and also adds to my confidence in the company.)

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Posted in Solution, customer service | 4 Comments »

Serving Up Meaning in Bite Sizes

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

In Monday’s post I mentioned that Marketing with Meaning can apply to any business, not just the large brands with multimillion-dollar marketing budgets. I shared an example of a book publisher that is uniquely connecting with its target readers. Today I wanted to share how even local restaurants can win by directing a targeted campaign using a single insight about its target market – at a very low cost.

To simplify a core part of our Marketing with Meaning model: Companies must begin by establishing a business objective they hope to reach. Once this specific business objective is set, the company then can put more focused thinking around how they can do something meaningful for customers that helps achieve the business objective. With these focused customer insights, they are then able to start crafting strategies and creative ideas around meaningful marketing.

In the restaurant business, a common business objective is to drive loyalty and visits from existing customers. Most of us know that in nearly every business, 80% of profits come from the 20% of loyal customers. My friends in the restaurant business tell me this holds for their industry as well. Their challenge is that there are many, many dining options for people to choose from, and any number of them can provide a similarly pleasing experience. So they must work hard to achieve a high “share of mind” with their customers. People also have a natural desire to “try something new,” so retaining loyal customers is a critical need.

Historically, most local advertising spending tends to consist of a stagnant group of traditional tactics. There are the Yellow Pages, Val-Pak direct mail coupons, and ads in the local city restaurant guides. Everybody in the business does these same things – which is another negative of such marketing. Part of the reason restaurants (and many, many other small local businesses) use these tools is that they don’t know what to do instead, and they worry that traffic will dry up when dollars are shifted. These businesses can’t afford to wait for a year for a new marketing approach to pay out. But, I’ve spotted two great examples in the past few months.

First up is Palomino , a “drop-in downtown restaurant” chain with about 10 locations across the country. At the end of each meal, Palomino provides a feedback card with an offer to join an email list for special events and offers. This is not too unusual. What is special is that Palomino asks a single question on the registration form: “What’s you birthday?”

With this information, Palomino sends an email to its customers once per year, about two weeks before this big day. Palomino knows that this is when people start to make plans to get a babysitter and hit the town. It includes a $20 voucher with the email to sweeten the offer, again, knowing that a birthday will result in extra revenue splurges such as dessert and bottle(s) of wine. For the customer, this email comes at the right time with a compelling discount. We customers feel inclined to repay the business that remembered our special day. The cost of putting together this offer is negligible, and the results can be tracked through email clicks and voucher redemptions.

The second example is from a local pizza chain called Donatos. It’s one of several large citywide chains and competes with the big guys such as Papa John’s and Domino’s. As I detailed on my Challenge Dividend blog a few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised one weekend to get a call from the manager of my neighborhood Donatos store. She saw that I placed an order during the past week, and called to ask for any feedback.

I was pretty blown away that a store manager would bother to make such a phone call. This small, focused, and personal effort makes a big difference in my mind when my wife asks me where we should order from on pizza night. I now know that someone appreciates my business and sees that I am important. Further, results of this effort can be tracked by simply looking at whether I order more often in the months ahead.

I love that both of these examples use specific insights to add value to consumers’ lives, they take very little time or money investment, and they are completely measurable back to the original business objective of driving loyalty. So if these guys can do it, what’s holding you back?

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