3 Priceless Customer Service Facts You Can’t Buy (they might tell for free)

September 12, 2010 by

Sending out customer service emails is largely a waste of time. No matter how polite you are, no matter how ludicrously awful your experience was, 90% of the time “customer service” finds a way to make you feel really small or stupid. If they even reply at all.

Which is why I don’t send such emails out very often. I find a different product or service. Or I just suck it up.

(Sometimes, I write a blog post about it. But not very often, nobody likes a whiner.)

If you work in customer service, here’s the deal: when anyone takes the time to contact you, you have only one thing you need to determine real fast: is this person mentally ill?

If the person isn’t mentally ill, isn’t just batsh*t crazy, consider… listening.

When someone contacts you, they are taking their time to

  1. Tell you what they believe they actually did. Not what you think they did. Not what they said they were going to do, but what they actually ended up doing.
  2. How your product or service made them feel. Not how you thought it would make them feel, not how they thought it would make them feel, but how your product or service (or lack thereof) actually moved their emotions.
  3. The action induced by what they did and how that made them feel. Not “the action they said they would take,” but the actual, rubber-meets-the-road result of being your (possibly former) customer.

Your customer is giving twice, first by purchasing, then by taking their time to pursue resolution. You cannot buy this kind of customer research.

And no, they don’t automatically know all your in-house jargon. So yes, they’re probably going to have a really hard time explaining exactly what the problem is.

By the way, the comment rate on my blogs is about 1% (about average). Is your customer feedback rate any better than 1%? How do you know?

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Dealing With Self-Appointed Internet and Social Media “Police”

January 22, 2010 by

Here’s how you deal with emotional issues of getting tooled by self-appointed arbiters of the internet and the new social media applications. That is, when you get “policed” by the chattering classes.

First, let’s examine how the real world works. Consider:

  • Fact: If Brad Pitt does it, he’s cool.
  • Fact: If you do the same thing, you’re a chump (putting it nicely).

A large number of people tout social media tools as breaking down barriers to communication between people.

A real, and very chilling side effect: you’re never more than a few clicks away from being ostracized.

When your every move, every piece of communication is subject to world-wide, public social scrutiny… you’re back in high school. Or worse.

As in high school, if you can’t score points, keep your mouth shut (fingers away from the keyboard) and focus on what you do best.

This is as old as the internet. Go back and read through some of the usenet flame wars for historical examples.

Here’s another example, a bit of hurt feelings in blogistan back at the dawn of sponsored tweets. In my opinion, both parties are being silly here. Matt Cutts needs no reason to follow or unfollow people. Shoemaker shouldn’t care one way or another.

Here’s concrete action you can take when you’re too emotionally wrapped around social media:

  • Close your feed.
  • Unfollow everyone not in your audience.
  • If anyone bitches, they can just unfollow you. Or block them.
  • Go do something else for a while. Like walk the dog. Or tell your mother you love her. Or both. I guarantee it will make you feel better.

I post publicly on twitter as @websiteweekend, my current business brand. You can also find me on twitter as @doolin, which is a very private, blocked feed. If I don’t know you personally, I won’t accept your request to follow me. [Update: @doolin is now an open feed, but I rarely follow anyone I don't know personally, or who isn't a programmer. If this is a problem for you, do NOT follow @doolin.]

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Viewpath Finally Nails It: Prospecting done right!

September 10, 2009 by

Long time readers (bofem) may recall “More Ineffective Marketing – Emails that missed the mark” from a few months ago.

The “ABC” company I ripped apart in that email is Viewpath.

My decision to replace Viewpath’s name with an obviously generic name was to allow the reader to focus on the content rather the producer. I didn’t have any beef with Viewpath at the time, but they sure weren’t going to sell me anything with that email!

Here’s the next email, which I just received:

Subject: Your Viewpath account is still active – do you have any projects we can help you manage?

Dear Dave,

We´re contacting you because you are registered as a member of Viewpath – and to remind you that we´re ready to help you manage any project or activity more effectively!

Viewpath is the online project management solution designed by productivity experts to reflect the way people actually work. This free service provides a full set of easy-to-use tools to set up and manage project timelines, action plans, and task lists – to help you accomplish your goals with a team or on your own.

Just log back in to Viewpath, and in minutes you can build a project team, create the road map for a major initiative, or just organize your daily tasks.

· Log in at http://www.viewpath.com by clicking on the Member Login link in the upper left-hand corner of the Home page.

· Your unique Login ID is your email address: {user address}

· Enter your password. If you don´t have your password handy or forgot your password, click the link by “Forgot Password?” and we will send you a new one.

· Once you log in, you´ll find links to video tutorials and our online user guide on the Welcome Page for tips on getting started quickly.

We´re here to help – please contact us with any questions at support@viewpath.net, or call us toll free at (877) 843-9728, Mon. – Fri., 8am-6pm Pacific Standard Time.

Sincerely,

-Steve Davis

Viewpath Support

As you can see, this is much, much better than the previous email. However, it still has too much focus on features, and lacks focus on clear benefits to the consumer. I want to know exactly how I benefit from these features.

Since this is clearly (to me) a sales letter, if you’re interested in project management applications, feel free to check out Viewpath and report back. If you’ve used the service and products in the past, let’s hear about it!

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Comcast tricks for paperless billing, customer service saves the day

August 12, 2009 by

I’ve tried very hard to ensure my Comcast account retains paper statements.

I ended up on a page where Comcast blocked my account access unless I accepted paperless billing, except I didn’t know that they were going to do that.

And there doesn’t appear to be any way to undo that. As it stands, I’m not sure either way, and not sure how to find out. Maybe when they turn off the internet…

The “Ask Comcast” pages just shut down when persisting on a query for “remove paperless billing.”

If they managed to trick me into paperless billing, it means I have to set up my comcast.net email account and monitor that in some way. My hunch is that their email is either something I will have to log into, or POP3 only forwarding. Those are the two most convenient “Screw the customer” mechanisms. Not looking forward to it.

But, ok, fine.

That’s just how it is.

However, a fast call with Alex, Customer Service Rep. #19410 put everything to rights concerning a related question I had. Alex was polite, fast and accurate, and answered my question to my full satisfaction.

Thanks Alex!

Filed Under: small business Tagged With: ,

Truncating Customer Service Emails Doesn’t Serve Customers

June 3, 2009 by

I’m dealing with a content theft issue between two hosting companies with two different blogs involved in ripping off some of my content from Website In A Weekend.

Neither of the blogs involved have direct contact information anywhere on their websites. So I’ve contacted the hosting companies.

I’m back at square one now, because the technical support person at one of the hosting companies (NameCheap) has no context for the issue: his email system successively truncates replies. There’s no need for truncation when any dumdum can buy a terabyte drive at Wal-Mart. In any case, a blog I believe [possibly wrongly, see below] his company hosts is infringing, and my complaint is being routed to (essentially) /dev/null.

So I would have to go back through all the old emails and rebuild the entire story.

[UPDATE:] Since I wrote this last paragraph, Jerry, a very helpful engineer at NameCheap, took the time to track down the hosting company evidently behind the original offender. I had not heard of NameCheap before now, but I’m going to check out their offerings, and you should too. Good customer service saves money, way beyond affiliate commission I get from recommending Bluehost (I am also very happy with Bluehost’s services, including customer service).

The other company, Dreamhost, brushed me off: unless I file a formal DMCA complaint, they aren’t interested.

Next time I’ll log all the emails externally as I go, and won’t waste any time: I’ll send the DMCA letter out on the first email.

Filed Under: small business Tagged With: ,

Kodak Makes Customer Service Progress

April 17, 2009 by

I just got an email from Mr Victor Cho, General Manager, KODAK Gallery.

Kodak changed their Terms and Conditions on their Photo Gallery service to recoup some of the cost of storing petabytes of image bits. This is perfectly reasonable. I don’t recall how they announced the changes, but Mr Cho explained, in a very straightfoward manner, exactly why the changes were necessary, and acknowledged that some previously free services now had nominal costs (ranging from $0.15 to $19.95 annually).

[Read more...]

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