Linda's Marketing Leverage Blog

When the Customer is Never Right Part 2: We Know What You Want, Deal With It!

More musings from Miami...

Still smarting from our adventure with the Sushi Nazi, a smaller group went to an outdoor café for dinner the following night.

The salmon dinner I ordered came with 2 side orders. I asked the waiter if the green beans were cooked in butter, since I can't eat butter. He told me, no they weren’t, so I ordered them. However, when my dinner came out, instead of green beans I had an order of French fries.

I called the waiter over and told him there’d been a mistake. He said, “There’s no mistake. You told me you wanted French fries and you even asked me if the French fries were cooked in butter.”

French fries in butter? Now maybe I’m suffering from culinary impairment, but I have yet to hear of anyone anywhere cooking French fries in butter—let alone that was not what I’d asked for.

To prove his point, the waiter pulled out his pad and showed me that he’d written down French fries. “There! See! I have it right here!”--as if the fact that he wrote down the wrong thing confirmed that that’s what I asked for.

After an argument, he took my entire plate away and 20 minutes later finally brought out a new order of salmon with green beans.

To add insult to injury, the restaurant had a policy that “for our convenience,” automatically added 19% gratuity to all checks—so I couldn’t even express my displeasure with the service with the tip. And, to top it off, the check came with a mini survey that asked me to rate the restaurant on several factors—except that the only choices were from 5 to 10. Since nothing about this restaurant rated anywhere near a 5, and the restaurant already knew what I wanted to eat and how I wanted to tip, it seemed futile to waste time on the survey.

Amazing how this restaurant knew what I wanted more than I did…too bad they got the whole thing wrong from top to bottom.

 

p.s. I had an absolutely wonderful Miami dining experience at a restaurant called Rare Steak the following night. Both the food and service were exceptional.

When the Customer Is Never Right...Part 1: The Case of the Sushi Nazi

Maybe it’s something in the water, but I had two memorable instances in Miami Beach restaurants last week. Here's the first.

You’ve heard of the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld. I met his cousin, the Sushi Nazi, at a small sushi restaurant in South Beach.

Ten of us showed up for sushi dinner on Tuesday evening, which happened to be the restaurant’s All You Can Eat Sushi night. For $37, you could get all the sushi you could eat…provided you wanted to choose from the limited items on the all you can eat menu.

Several members of our party were not big sushi eaters and opted to order off the menu. However, our waiter, the Sushi Nazi, informed us that wasn’t possible. Either the entire table of ten had to order all you can eat, or all of us had to order off the menu.

We offered to put the all you can eaters on one end of the table together. Nope, that was not acceptable. When we opted to all order off the menu, the waiter came back with a compromise. The restaurant would charge half price for those who really didn’t want much sushi, if we all chose the all you can eat option.

We took the compromise, only to find out that all you can eat meant all you could eat from a limited selection of items…which were brought out in a prescribed order. So even though we wanted more of some pieces, we had to cycle through the sushi in the order they chose to bring it out before we could get more of what we really wanted.

Items that were not on the limited all you can eat menu were verboten. Nope, couldn’t help us with that. What we wanted was not relevant, they served us what, when and how they chose.

Somehow by the time they finished, we wound up each paying more than $40 for this “great” deal. How we got there from 1/2 price for the limited eaters was never quite clear.

The food wasn’t bad, but the whole experience was a bit fishy.

Just a Moment for Marketing: Those Pesky Airline Customers

Linda asks: Get rid of your customers?? What message are you giving your customers; you need them.

Not Quite the Right Mix: Kitchen Aid doesn’t serve up the recipe we’re looking for

When my old blender died a few weeks ago, I went out and picked up a new model from Kitchen Aid.

My thought process was simple: I make protein shakes on a daily basis and I needed a good quality blender that could handle frozen fruit and ice, but nothing too extravagant. Kitchen Aid is a brand I know and trust—I’ve had one of their stand mixers for years that is just great—and it was moderately priced: neither the cheapest model on the shelf nor the most expensive.

About two weeks later, I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of liquid spilling around my new blender. The first few times this happened I thought it must be me not being careful when I made shakes. But I noticed this occurred every single time I used the blende. Even when I put it in the sink to wash it, the water drained from the blender pitcher.

So I called the no-hassle warranty number in my user manual (yes, I actually kept the user manual). The woman who answered the phone was quite pleasant, asked me the model and serial number of my unit, and told me she’d get out a replacement pitcher within a few days. So far, so good.

But here’s where the process broke down. When I asked her if she wanted me to return the old leaking pitcher, she said, no—we’ve made a modification to fix a design flaw in that model.

Wait a minute. “Design flaw?” We’re not talking about a minor feature that users may or may not notice. The design flaw she was referring to results in the darn thing leaking like a sieve. Although it’s great that Kitchen Aid fixed this, here’s the flaw in their thinking: The old model remains on the shelf at retailers, meaning that poor suckers like me will continue buying it and finding a good part of their strawberry banana protein shake all over their kitchen counter, wondering what they did wrong and either taking it back, shelving it, or finally calling the 800 number for help.

We don’t know how many of the pitchers leak, but obviously it’s enough for the company to redesign the unit. That means it’s more than a once-in-awhile occurrence. Think of the missed opportunity here to offer an outstanding customer experience. One alternative would be to recall the blenders and replace them with the newly designed units. Another possibility would be to simply add a sticker to the box that says “Improved Blender Pitcher Available—contact us for more information.” This would allow those consumers who wanted the new part (or had a problem with the old one) to call and get it immediately. Instead, Kitchen Aid let purchasers find out the hard way that the product didn't work right--allowing brand equity and customer loyalty to drain away.

How do you handle situations like this? Do you wait for a customer to call and tell you about a problem you already know exists? Or do you proactively contact them to let them know you’ll be taking care of a potential situation before it has the opportunity to cause a problem?

The answer may be the difference between whipping up success or slogging through yet another customer service mess.

What a Difference an Attitude Makes

I'm literally writing this post from the cloud--onboard Delta flight 2462 from Atlanta to Newark. The free wifi is courtesy of Google, but the pleasant atmosphere on the plane is courtesy of one of the most friendliest and customer-friendly fight crews I've encountered in a long time. 

Southwest Airlines employees are invariably friendly and fun, but outside of that island of civility, it's been pretty bleak and discouraging to be a flier the last couple of years. Whether it's the thought of fighting your way through airport security or being treated like an inconvenience and bother by flight attendants, for the most part the friendly skies are few and far between.

That's why today's experience stands out. As we were boarding, the pilot came on and told us we had George Clooney and Brad Pitt at the controls. He proceeded to tell a few other jokes, but he had us all at line one. Then to top it off, he came out of the cockpit and walked up and down the length of the plane, saying hello to everyone and asking how we were doing.

This is my 4th flight on Delta in less than a week. The first three weren't terrible--one was delayed for several hours due to weather, which was not Delta's fault--but this flight stands out because of the extra attention of the crew.

Let's face it. The American public is frustrated with air travel in general, TSA security processes in particular, and the screw you attitude of most airline personnel. It cost nothing, took little effort and just 5 minutes of one pilot's time to make a world of difference--so much so that I'm sharing this with the world before we even land. In fact, what he did probably made the entire crew's job easier for the duration of the flight by defusing any tension and frustration amongst the passengers.

We've known for years that employee attitudes make or break a brand. How many times do organizations need to learn this lesson the hard way? Here's an example of what happens when you do things right.

Message to Delta: Find this pilot, reward him then clone him. If you can't find Clooney and Pitt on your employee rolls, try looking for someone named Craig. Rumor has it that's his off-stage alias.

 

Time for a New Approach to Helping Customers

Last week I had the opportunity to hear Adrian Ott discuss key points from her new book, The 24 Hour Customer: New Rules for Winning in a Time-Starved, Always-Connected Economy, at the NorCal Business Marketing Association Marketing Strategy Roundtable.

I've known Adrian for many years as an outstanding strategy consultant (in fact, she's been called one of Silicon Valley's most respected--if not the most respected--strategists by Consulting Magazine). When she first told me she was writing about the importance of time in today's economy, I was intrigued but a little puzzled: did the world really need yet another book on time management?

I still don't know the answer to that question, because that is certainly not the direction of Adrian's book. Instead of focusing on the personal aspects of time, she's taken a strategic look at how companies today need to rethink their approach to customers to focus on how time, attention and value can be competitive differentiators for businesses. She's also created a Time-ographics framework that explains the various ways customers consider time in relation to products and services--for convenience, motivation, value and out of habit.

Adrian's book is well-researched--she's talked to scores of companies across the spectrum-- and includes many fun, real-life examples.

As I listened to her presentation, I was reminded of sitting in a conference room at Sun Microsystems in Mountain View back in the late 1980s listening to a consultant from Regis McKenna named Geoffrey Moore tell us about a new way of looking at how technology companies should approach new markets. That, of course evolved into Crossing the Chasm, which forever changed the way we look at technology marketing.

Adrian's book has the potential to do for time what Geoffrey Moore did for the technology adoption life cycle--provide powerful new customer insights that transform the way companies do business.

The book will be released by Harper Collins next month. Learn more here.

Chief Customer Officers: Bringing Customer Focus to the C-Suite

Curtis Bingham

Join us for the next episode of our podcast series, MarketingThoughtLeadership.com, where Curtis Bingham, founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) Council, discusses how the CCO role is evolving and why this function is becoming more and more critical for many leading organizations.

Listen now.

Lessons from the Road: If it Weren't For Those Pesky Customers!

A few observations from my travel the past week on the east coast:

We Give You What We Want. Period.

A restaurant we stopped at in Queens, NY has a note on the bottom of the menu that menu items must be ordered as outlined on the menu. They do not make substitutions or changes. What's there is there--deal with it. No wonder the place was practically empty when we stopped.

It's All The Customers' Fault.

The Crowne Plaza Hotel in Providence called me yesterday to tell me there was a problem with my room: "It turns out we're 'under departed." Under departed? Does this have to do with deaths and funerals or is it related to the movie The Departed, shot up the road in Boston?

The bottom line is they didn't have enough rooms for the number of guests. But rather than saying that they were oversold, which implies some responsibility on the part of the hotel, they chose to say "under departed," which puts the onus back on those darn guests for staying too long. Personally, I was underwhelmed.

Wish We Could Help, But It's Always Been Broken.

As a result of the departure situation at the Crowne Plaza, I was "diverted" to a nearby Sheraton, where it seems the business center is not quite open for business. Following all of the directions, I tried multiple times to print a document with no luck. The staff came out to help me and were just as frustrated. One of the other guests told me a workaround he'd come up with since "this system hasn't worked for the months I've been coming here." Eventually we figured it out (although their printer was running low on ink so the print quality was poor), but my question is why have this pretty little technology center set up, if you don't maintain it or aren't sure how to make it work?

In all of these cases, imagine how much easier life would be if it weren't for those pesky customers bothering them. Wait..aren't those the people who pay the bills?  Might there not be a connection somewhere?

What signals is your business sending to its customers? Are you signaling them not to bother you in the future? Stop and look from your customers' perspective. Then do something to make them feel wanted--while you still can.

Badgering Your Customers is Not Good for Business

In the last month, I've received no less than 15 phone calls from the telemarketing arm of a publication I subscribe to. It's gotten to the point where I recognize the phone number and ignore all of the calls from these people.

I understand the need to remind people to renew their subscriptions, but in that case one or two phone calls and a voice mail is more than sufficient. The interesting thing is I was wavering on whether or not to renew this particular publication, and the ongoing badgering from their sales people is not helping their cause at all. There is absolutely nothing they can say to me on the phone that is going to influence me positively and their ongoing consistent calling makes me want to give the whole thing up just to get rid of them permanently.

If that's not bad enough, several years ago I decided not to renew my membership in a professional organization for many reasons. Again, I got emails and phone calls asking me to renew and I told them I wasn't interested. Then I got on the "Lost member contact" list, and I started to get calls from their board members to interview me about why I had chosen not to renew.

I really had no interest in this--all I wanted to do was have them go away quietly, but this was not meant to be. When I got a personal message from the president of the national association insisting that he had to talk to me to convince me why I was making a mistake in not renewing, I'd had enough. I told the local membership person that if all contact from the organization didn't cease and desist immediately (this had gone on for several months), I'd consider it harassment and take legal steps. That did the trick.

We all want to keep our customers, and we want to find out why customers defect. That makes sense. But badgering people who obviously are not interested in responding, doesn't. For one thing, it makes me wonder if the organization in question is so desperate they can't afford to lose a single subscriber or member. For another, my behavior tells you what you want to know. Asking the same question again except slower and louder doesn't make me any more responsive. The problem is not that I didn't hear you--it's that I've chosen not to respond.

Even worse, the bad experience I've had with these two organizations will stick with me for a long time--much longer than they'd want, if they thought about it. And I'll warn others about them as well.

Is that the way you want your customers to think about you? Think about this from the customer's perspective. No badgering allowed.

A Case of Mistaken (Information about My) Identity

We've all heard a lot about identity theft. But have you considered the problem of corrupted information being attached to your online identity?

I recently had an interesting interaction with a financial institution. Before they would discuss my account with me, they wanted to confirm my identify by asking a series of personal questions. In theory, this sounds reasonable. In reality, it was a nightmare.

I was told the answers were taken from multiple sources of publicly available information about me. Hmm--in that case, it seemed like other people besides me would have been able to determine the answers, right?

As it turned out, NO ONE would have been able to answer these correctly--because the answers they were looking for weren't factually correct.

We started with my age and driver's license number. That was simple. Then they asked about one of my prior addresses. Also simple (and something someone else could have answered). From there, it went downhill. I was asked about a prior employer and given 4 possible choices. None of them were accurate, which I told the customer service rep. She didn't know how to deal with that and said I had to pick one of the 4 answers. But there was no correct answer, which meant we were stuck. She had no idea how to move forward from there.

She finally agreed to send me login information by mail. I went to the website, entered the login, and lo and behold, was subjected to a similar authentication process. The first 2 questions were fine and I answered appropriately, but the third one was again a multiple choice question with 4 incorrect answers, so I was stuck again. Another phone call.  Since they had an established paper address, we got around this by having them physically mail forms to the address they had on file, but it appears there is no way for me to establish an online account with this firm.

Here's the problem: Somewhere along the line some incorrect information was attached to my profile. This was picked up by the authentication program and passed along as gospel. I don't know where they got the information from (and neither do they), so I can't go back and fix the mistakes. The bank's process is to require correct answers to all the questions, so therefore they couldn't authenticate me. 

We got around the problem that time, but the incorrect information is still out there, somewhere, and sooner or later this will likely happen again. As a business, consider that your need for security needs to be balanced with how best to serve your customer. Online systems like this are far from perfect. What's your backup plan?  How will you handle these situations?

I was not eager to go through the hassle with this institution again. End of story: Case (and account) closed.

Insanity: Knowing Customers Are Unhappy and Waiting for Them to Defect

I recently terminated the relationship with the man who's serviced our pool for a number of years.

For quite awhile now, I haven't been happy with the service we've gotten, including the fact that the hot tub never seems to really be clean. But it was always good enough and in the overall scheme of things, it was not bad enough warrant the time and effort to go out and find someone else.

Finally I decided enough was enough. I found another company that offers a pool service that's more complete than what I'm paying for now (and not always getting) and less costly, too. The next step was to call the current guy and go through the inevitable dance of telling him we're canceling service, then have him try to convince us why we should stay.

Except that's not what happened. When I told him we'd decided to use someone else, he said, "Well you must be unhappy because the hot tub isn't getting cleaned, but it's too much effort for me to do this regularly."

Huh? You know your service isn't up to snuff, but you're telling the customer it's too much work to do what you've agreed on a regular basis?  Even worse, you wait until the customer leaves to have this discussion. Instead of telling me that you can't deliver the level of service requested and perhaps lowering the rate, you just keep on keeping on at a lower level of quality and hope no one notices or says anything.

In this day and age, one would think businesses with customers would do everything they can to try and hang on to them. To do otherwise, is just insane.

If you've got a customer that isn't getting the top quality service they expect, what are you doing to change that? Will you wait till they go to a competitor?  Or will you do something to fix the problem and the relationship while you still can?

My pool guy's last words, on the bottom of the final bill, "We've enjoyed providing service all these years and are sorry to lose your pool." Hmm. Too bad he didn't understand it's better to be safe than sorry.

Avis: No Longer Trying Harder

You just can't make this stuff up:

I walked into the Avis Rental Car Office at Boston's Logan Airport yesterday. The customer service rep very efficiently handled my reservation and asked me if I'd like to get a GPS for the car. I told her no, but I would like a map.

"We no longer do maps," she said.

"What? You don't offer maps? Is that because you want people to rent GPS systems instead?" I asked.

"Oh no," she said, quite seriously. "We're trying to save money, so we stopped printing maps. The economy is so bad, we're laying off a lot of people. We're all going to lose our jobs soon!"

Saving money by not printing maps? How sad that an industry leader like Avis has stooped this low. As I got in the car, I wondered if they'd also checked the air in the tires lately, or changed the oil and, when I had to stop suddenly, how recently they'd tested the brakes.

Looking around the rental car office, at first glance I noticed at least 4-5 different printed pieces that could have been eliminated to save money, but instead Avis chose to eliminate maps.This is not a way to make customers feel warm and fuzzy and secure when renting a car in New England in winter. When I hit a traffic jam on the Mass Pike  a half hour later, I thought how nice it would have been to have a local map to find an alternative route.

It's a shame that Avis doesn't do maps anymore. It looks like Trying Harder is out of vogue these days.

Yes You Can...Use Lessons From the Obama Campaign Marketing in Business

In the December 1st issue of Business Week, Jon Fine says Your Brand is Not a Candidate:(Marketing Lessons from Obama's Campaign) "The Obama campaign's marketing was remarkable. But you can't use it to sell yogurt."

His point is that the selling of a political candidate, particularly a presidential one, is very different than buying an everyday product or service. He says the lessons are limited to "something that makes people cry when they see it giving an acceptance speech."

Granted, the Obama campaign was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, for many reasons. But the strategies and tactics the campaign team used so effectively were not.

As I mentioned in my last post, the Obama team understood the importance of building a brand that people crossed party lines, demographics, race, and ethnicity. They knew better than to focus on features, but instead targeted clear benefits. They integrated traditional and new media, effectively used personalization and built an outstanding grass roots, bottoms-up groundswell of support. They kept one clear, focused message throughout the campaign and focused on the benefits to the consumer--the voter. (How many times did we hear Obama say, "It's not about me--it's about you."?)

So which of these strategies are not relevant to businesses and individuals as they market products and services?

They're all relevant.

The bottom line, to quote Million Dollar Consultant Alan Weiss, is that logic makes people think, emotion makes them act. When you get behind the wheel of a brand new high-end sports car or buy an attractive new outfit or treat yourself to a wonderful dinner at a great restaurant, or buy an iPhone, what's driving that purchase is emotion, not logic. It's not about the need for transportation or clothing or sustenance or communication--it's about the emotional experience and fulfillment you get from purchasing that particular product or service.

Look at the hundreds of thousands of teenage girls (including mine) who lined up to see the new movie Twilight this past weekend. If that's not an emotional reaction, what is? There's certainly no logical reason to flock to a fairly mediocre movie about vegetarian vampires.

In a time of recession and economic turbulence, it is even more important for companies and organizations to understand the emotional factors that motivate customers to buy their products or services. Before you decide to bite the bullet and compete on price, understand the implications of what that means. The number one retailer in the world, Wal-Mart, owns that position fair and square. They tightly control their supply chain to eliminate excess cost and because of their size, they have the clout to negotiate more effectively than any of their competitors. Is that what you want to compete with?

Even more importantly, no matter what market position you choose to differentiate yourself, look at what happens when you don't take the time to build an effective brand with clear differentiation and a solid brand promise you can deliver. For a timely example, let's look at the Detroit 3 auto manufacturers, who were in Washington this past week looking for a bailout. Their problems are complex: high overhead, bloated pension and health care costs for retirees, etc.

But even if all of those issues could be fixed, through bankruptcy or a bailout, they'd still be faced with a critical problem. With few exceptions, they haven't built strong, solid brands that consumers feel passionately about.We can't force people to buy Chevys or Fords, any more than we can force people to not want to buy BMWs or Toyotas.

Apple and Nike and Coke, among others, have figured it out.The problem is that many other American companies haven't. That doesn't mean we can't put lessons from the Obama campaign to work in business today. It means that it's a crying shame if we don't.

Stranger than Fiction: AT&T Misses the Connection

This falls under the category of "you just can't make this stuff up."

I've been working with my ISP for two days to figure out why my T1 line has been intermittently flaky. They went to the provisioner (Covad), who has determined the problem is with the line provider, AT&T. In a desire to get this fixed as quickly as possible, I told the ISP to tell AT&T they could come any time of the day or night as long as they called first.

Guess what. AT&T told us they aren't able to call in advance. Wait a minute, aren't they the phone company?  Am I missing something here?  Maybe we should take them over to Sprint or Verizon and help them get one of those great deals on a cell phone.

The Most Expensive Five-Cent MasterCard Bill in History

Case Study in how not to do customer service...

My mother recently received a Citibank MasterCard bill for five cents. No, that's not a typo. The bill, which arrived via US Mail was for five cents, as in one single solitary nickel.

Her first thought was this must be a mistake. Then she realized what happened: She had gone to the automated postage machine at the post office to buy stamps when the postage rate increased last month. The machine took only credit cards. She swiped a credit card and attempted to buy several types of stamps, starting with five one-cent stamps to cover the new rate. The problem was the post office machine only allowed one purchase per credit card swipe, so she took her five one cent stamps and left, rather than spend all day at the machine generating multiple small transactions to get her stamps.

Fast forward to this week. A MasterCard bill arrives with this single five cent transaction on it. She calls Citibank where one of those paid-to-read-the-screen, not-to-have-an-original-thought call center representatives tells her she must pay the five cent bill by the due date, there are no options. The account rep does tell her that yes, there is another transaction that will appear on the following month's bill, however it is not acceptable to wait until the following month's billing to pay this month's five cent charge together with next month's charge. If she does this, the account will be considered overdue and both interest and late fees will apply. (Most credit card late fees start at $29/month; some are even higher.) Furthermore, in this age of subprime mortgage crisis, if her payment is late, her account will be reported as delinquent.

A long conversation ensued in a futile attempt to convince the rep how ridiculous this is (not to mention how costly to the credit card company as well as to the consumer). Still no luck. Finally, my mother says, fine, if that's the way you insist on treating me, cancel the credit card.I have plenty of others I can use.  Immediately, the rep's attitude changes and she transfers her to someone in card retention.

The next conversation goes something like this:

Card Retention Rep: I see you have been a card holder with us for over 22 years.
My Mother: That's correct. And you can also see I always pay my account on time, which is why I think you should just wait till next month for the five-cent charge.
CRR: I'm sorry ma'am. We can't do that. [Sort of reminds you of the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, doesn't it?]
Mom: I don't understand why. It obviously cost you more than 5 cents to generate the bill, it will cost me more than that to mail the check, and it will cost you more than that to process and deposit the check. Why can't you add this to the following month's bill?
CRR: It's not in our policy.
Mom: Well, like I told the last rep,  your policy is pretty stupid. It is costing both you and me money so why don't you just cancel my card.
CRR: We really don't want you to cancel your card. Maybe I can look into this. Can you call back next week?
Mom: Why? What will be different then?

As of now, the situation is unresolved. In the meantime, Citibank has spent a ton of money on bill processing, payment and call center resources, a long-time cardholder is mad as hell and not willing to take it anymore, and, as mistreated and frustrated customers usually do, she is telling everyone she knows about this ridiculous situation. And, I, in turn, am telling you. All for a lousy five cents, which is less than 1/8th the cost of a first class stamp to begin with.

Here's how I see it:

Cost of five one-cent stamps                                                                                                                                           $.05
Cost to process statement for five cent balance                                                                                                   Several dollars at least
Cost for Citibank Master Card to mail statement for five cent balance                                                     $ .42 (slightly less if bulk mail)
Cost of toll free number and at least two call center resources tied up for over an hour on this call                          $100? Maybe more

Cost to Citibank MasterCard of alienating a long-term customer and propagating this stupidity through the blogosphere...          PRICELESS.

The Case of the Bay Area's Missing Matzoh

Why was celebrating Passover in northern CA different this year from all other years?

Well, for one thing, because there was an acute shortage of several kosher for Passover staples, including a critical one--matzoh.

Passover matzoh is made from flour and water but must be produced under specific types of conditions to ensure it does not  become leavened, or unacceptable for use during the holiday. Most Jews, even those who are not normally religiously observant, buy and eat matzoh for Passover, so the demand should be fairly constant from year to year.

This year it was the supply that was way off. It appears there was some sort of technical glitch w/a Manishewitz factory on the east coast that severely limited the amount of some types of specialty matzah produced. But that didn't explain why even plain old ordinary matzah,  not just the fancy kinds Manishewitz normally churns out, were MIA.

An article in this week's J, the Jewish News Weekly of No CA, claims this was really a case of confused signals in the distribution channel. For the last several years, chains like Costco and Trader Joes have sold large quantities of matzoh at a significantly discounted price. (The price of matzoh had gone through the roof over the last decade or so. Costco took advantage of this to sell matzoh at a price so so cheap that  one had to wonder if everyone else was gouging consumers or Costco was losing money on every box sold.)

Even though some people eat matzoh all year round, probably greater than 80% of purchases are made for the one-week Passover holiday. So if you don't sell your matzoh supply for Passover, you are pretty much stuck with it afterwards. And there are fewer things harder to get rid of than old, stale matzoh.

This year two things happened here that caused a big disconnect: 

• Most of the retail stores in the area cut way back on their matzoh purchases rather than be forced to "eat"  excess inventory after the holiday
• Costco and Trader Joes decided not to carry matzoh this year at all--eliminating a big source of the product

As a result, it was virtually impossible to find a box of matzoh anywhere in the Bay Area as Passover approached.

Even if you've never been lucky enough to indulge in the ritual consumption of matzoh each spring, what happened here is fascinating. Retail supermarket chains made a rational decision to carry only limited supplies of a product that is both under severe price pressure and has a very short promotional life. The chains causing the pricing pressure, for whatever reason (maybe selling at or below cost finally caught up with them?), decided not to carry the product at all. This resulted in the acute and unexpected shortage.

Who dropped the ball? The manufacturers and distributors take a good share of the blame. One would expect they could make a reasonably accurate forecast of expected annual demand (this is the season when they make most of their profits).  Why didn't someone put 2 +2 together and ask why wholesale purchases of matzoh were so much lower in the Bay Area than usual.

This is also a great example of how markets run based on expectations. We as consumers have been trained to expect a choice of product at both retailers and warehouse clubs/discount chains. The supermarkets had expected to be undercut by the big chains. The manufacturers expected that the market ran efficiently enough that advance orders reflected expected demand. When expectations didn't reflect reality, everyone along the chain, from the producer to the consumer, was caught by surprise, hence the unexpected.

How to prevent this in the future? For one thing, it has been reported that Costco has signaled they will carry matzoh again next Passover in at least some of their larger warehouses. Manishewitz should be expected to have resolved their terribly timed production glitches. And should there be even a hint of a supply/demand inbalance in the future,  some enterpreneur will likely develop a way to exploit and profit from this (maybe a Web2.0 application that lets users track the availability of matzoh on their mobile devices?).

In the meantime, the issue of market expectations has moved to a new front: rice. It appears that Costco and others are limiting the amount of rice sacks that can be purchased by each buyer--because of the expectation that there may be hoarding which would in turn cause a shortage. Except that now consumers are expecting a rice shortage and buying more...

Gee, in any other year, I would have been able to give them my excess matzoh...

When the Package Says About the Product Inside

This week I finally decided to dump my HP OfficeJet All-in-One printer. I know HP has a reputation for building good quality printers and I have an ancient LaserJet 4050 that I think will survive the next nuclear disaster, but the quality of this OfficeJet has been absolutely terrible.

Even worse, the quality of the service and support I've received from HP has been abysmal. I've spent hours talking to offshore support reps who spoke heavily accented English, couldn't move beyond preset standard support scripts, and managed to lose all my account support information multiple times. Finally, in desperation I was escalated to an executive support group in the US right before Xmas, where a pleasant but curt native English-speaker told me I was out of line to expect quick delivery of my package because it was right before the holidays. (Never mind that my replacement order had been misplaced by HP for the previous three weeks.)

But I digress. For all these reasons plus the fact that the fourth OfficeJet I was sent from HP still isn't working correctly, I decided it was time to dump the OfficeJet and move to something else--anything but HP.

I purchase a Brother color laser multifunction center. Since the machine itself is  maybe 1.5 feet wide by 1.5 feet deep by almost 2 feet high, I was surprised when the clerk told me he doubted whether this would fit in my BMW. Aw cmon, I said. I'm sure it will fit. Then he wheeled out a huge box that was nearly 3' cubed. And, yes, it did require an SUV to trek home.

Here's what was so important about this big package:

• From the first impression onward, the package was impressive. Inside the box was another box. Inside that box was a third box, and inside that third box was my printer.
• When I got to the actual machine, there were foam, cardboard, and plastic inserts and other packaging material to keep the machine in good shape, even within the triple boxing.
• There were detailed instructions on how to unpack the printer, step by step, including where every piece of packaging material was and what order to remove it in.
• Even more importantly, the instructions were written in real English that I could understand.
• There were also detailed instructions on what to save and how to repack the printer if it ever needs to be sent back for repair.
• The only assembly I needed to do was to insert the toner cartridges (as opposed to the HP which had loose pieces that had to be put on the machine by the user).

This is in direct contrast to the HP unit, which was sent directly from HP in a flimsy cardboard box that more often than not would arrive torn or pushed in. Within the box, the printer was packed in a thin plastic bag and stuffed in between a styrofoam insert on either side. I say stuffed because it was impossible to get the machine out of the packing without the styrofoam disintegrating. HP sent me three replacement units and they all were sent the same way, so it looks like we have a pattern here.

The key lesson  is that the first impression I have as a customer is what I see and encounter when I open the product. The impression I got from Brother is one of quality, concern for the customer and ease of use. The impression I got from HP, OTOH, is quick, dirty and inexpensive: we make our money on ink and that's where we put our focus, not on printers. BTW, the cost for the Brother was not that much more than an HP machine w/comparable features.

Remember that old saw: You can't judge a book by its cover? Well, sometime you can tell a lot about a product and its manufacturer by its packaging. Caveat emptor.

Hearing Good Things About Bose

We hear a lot of negative customer interactions, so it's always a pleasant change to hear someone talking about a great customer service interaction.

This comes from Chad Barr, President of CB Software in Shaker Heights, OH:

I love my Bose QuietComfort2 Headphones product and won’t use anything else in first class due to peer pressure.

When I first broke it about a year ago, the local store immediately exchanged it for a new headset - no questions asked. When breaking this new headset again several weeks ago, I had to send it to Bose Corporation since the local store did not have them in stock. I just received my brand new headphones from Bose, no questions asked.

Voting Process Made Easy...for real!

I have been a permanent absentee voter in California for years and years. That way I don't have to worry about where I am on election day, getting to the polls by a certain time, etc. The ballot comes in the mail, I fill it out and return it and everything is set.

Until this year. Somehow I managed to lose my absentee ballot. Actually, I think I may have thrown it out. Here I was less than a week from the election, past the deadline to mail my ballot and ensure it would be received, and dreading the thought of having to go vote in person.

Luckily I live in San Mateo County, where the county government has made these things straightforward and simple. I called the voter registration number (which I found via Google), and told the person on the other end I'd lost my ballot. She said I had 2 choices: go to my normal voting place (which I've never been to and don't know where it is) on election day, or come down to the voter registration headquarters in Redwood City anytime between now and Tuesday and vote there.

I was amazed at how simple and automated the process was at County Center in Redwood City. My first thought walking in to the assessor's office/voter registration office was how clean and neat and organized it was. Real estate related files are all neatly catalogued on cassettes, the mounds of paper that were likely present in this kind of operation previously have all disappeared, and all the service centers in the office are neatly marked. The woman @ the absentee voting station was pleasant, knowledgeable and helpful. She looked up my information on her computer, had me sign an affidavit that I had lost my ballot, then offered me the choice of using a paper ballot or one of the computerized systems they had available.
When I said I'd never used their system before, she said, well it's quite simple and I can walk you through the whole process without a problem. She then proceeded to demonstrate how the system worked (which really IS quite simple and intuitive). It took me about 5 minutes to go through the ballot, highlighting each candidate or initiative to vote for, then I was asked three times to confirm my choices (and given the opportunity to change them), before the ballot was officially cast. I got a receipt with a confirmation number corresponding to my ballot and I was done.  Total time from when I walked in the door until I walked out: less than 7 minutes.

It was actually really simple, effective and efficient. When is the last time you said those words in conjunction with local government? In fact, the most difficult part of the whole process was finding parking in downtown Redwood City.  Well, some things never change...

Hold for an Important Message

If there's one thing I find totally annoying, it's picking up the phone to get first silence, then a recording that says "Hold for an important message from...", then I am put on hold again while the system dials someone on the other end who asks me my name, account number and other information and makes it clear that my call is bothering them. Wait a minute--didn't your automated system just call me?

I've been getting calls from one of these systems for about a week now, regarding a supposed unpaid balance on an account I closed over a month ago. First I'd just hang up when I got the recording, but they started coming more and more frequently, like contractions, and they were getting more and more annoying too.

Today I actually called the customer service dept. of this company and got a rep who very rudely told me that I had a balance to pay, and wasn't I aware that I had to give 30 days notice to cancel my contract so that I was responsible for another month's bill. Her mission was obviously to be curt, cold and get me off the phone as quickly as possible. I asked to speak to her supervisor, who started to give me the same spiel until I told her that not only was I not told about any additional fees to terminate my service, but that I had never signed a contract with this company, therefore I could not be held responsible for the terms of such non-existent contract.

She put me on hold and when she came back it was with a whole different attitude. She had taken time to read the notes on the account, saw that the CSR a month ago had noted that the account should be credited and no further payments were due, and she would take care of it. Did I have anything else she could help me with?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact. I'd like to know who made the decision to implement that horrid autodialing system they're using. Did they really think harassing people with ongoing automated phone calls was going to lead to customer satisfaction and retention? Actually, some people may pay their bills just to make the phone calls stop--it's a possibility.) Oh, and by the way, wasn't it possible that they would make more progress with their customers by starting from the premise that the customer on the other end of the phone isn't always wrong and maybe is someone who should be valued and treated that way?

That's what I would have liked to say, but I don't believe it would have done any good. So I thanked her for her help and hung up.

But I'm thinking of setting up an automated dialing system to call the executives of companies like this and leave a message:

Please hold for an important message from one of your valuable customers. If you don't treat us more appropriately, we are going to not only cancel our service and go somewhere else, but we will tell everyone else we know. In fact, some of us may even blog about it on the internet. Oh, and have a nice day.

Stuck in Lodi Again...

...at the Microtel Motel.

Remember the old John Fogerty song where he was "stuck in Lodi again?" Well, we spent the weekend in Lodi for a club soccer tournament.

Turns out that Lodi is not such a bad little town. It has a quaint little downtown, a number of wineries (which we did not stop at) and the requisite shopping center with Target, Starbucks, Quiznos, Pantera, Chilis, etc. In fact there were 4 different Starbucks we found while we were there.

The problem is we were stuck at the Microtel Inn right off of I-5. We came in with reasonably low expectations--this was obviously not going to be the Ritz Carlton. I booked the reservation on the internet, which gave me a choice of rooms, rates (discount for AAA), etc. Very simple.I did pay a little extra for a "suite", which I figured was the type of divided room w/a door you get at Embassy Suites and other similar places. However, it turns out that for the Microtel Lodi, a room becomes a suite by removing one of the double beds, replacing it with a sofabed, adding a small cube fridge and a microwave, and renaming it a suite.

The desk clerk, who was unfailingly polite, first asked me to sign the checkin form before filling in the daily rate. Good think I didn't do this, because he had an incorrect rate. After finding out that their version of the word suite was different than ours, I had another discussion with said clerk. He informed me that that really WAS a suite. And, besides, if we wanted a regular double room, he was out of those and was therefore upgrading all of the other double requests to "suites" for the lower price.

Thisdid not compute, so I asked if he could then give us the lower rate, since what we had was more like a double than a suite anyway. He smiled and said of course, then proceeded to cross out the old price on my credit card receipt and write in the new one. When I told him that wasn't going to work, he obliged to credit the old charge and recharge it. However, he had forgotten that I was booked on the lower AAA rate, so he had to go back and do that again.

In the middle of the night we discovered that the toilet in our "suite" was blocked and didn't flush right. The last thing we wanted to do was have the desk clerk come up in the middle of the night and try to fix this himself, so we waited till morning to tell the clerk about the problem.

A different clerk was on duty. She listened to me describe the problem, then said with a smile, "Well, those things happen. Maybe it needs to be plunged." Then she walked away.

Let me reiterate what did NOT happen in this interchange:

• She didn't apologize for the incident
• She didn't offer to make any amends for not having a working toilet in the room
• She didn't even write down the room number to get the problem solved

In discussing this with another guest, I found that her room had a bathroom that was both dirty and full of bugs. Yuch.

I should say this was my first interaction with the Microtel Inn chain, and it may very likely be my last. My impression is that Microtel hires clerks that are invariably polite, but untrained in basic check-in systems (crossing out a credit card receipt to do a refund?), ignorant of even Customer Service 101 (how about apologizing for a problem to start?), and totally oblivious to health and sanitary concerns.

Maybe I was out of line in expecting a suite in a motel in Lodi to have a door separating one part from the other. But flushing toilets and clean bathrooms are pretty much nonnegotiable.

Next time if we can't find another place in town, we'll drive to another town to stay. Better than being stuck in the Microtel in Lodi again.

Water, water everywhere--but only once a month

Many of you know that I am passionate about how important customer-facing interactions are to an organization's success.

It's important to remember that customer-facing interactions are not just with front-line employees--sometimes they are with "things" such as websites, email systems or IVR phone systems. And sometimes some of the most negative customer experiences are with company-issued policies and procedures.

Here's an example of a non-customer friendly customer-facing process. Last week I got a letter from Arrowhead, my home delivery bottled water company, informing me that they "take great pride in providing you with superior products and services and strive to continually improve our customers (sic) experience."

The letter notes they are about to change my water delivery from every 3 weeks to once a month, which means that the number of bottles they deliver may increase (what a coincidence) "to ensure that you have enough water to accomodate your new delivery schedule." Furthermore, if my account is set up for automatic recurring charges to a bank account or credit card, the monthly recurring payment date may need to be moved as well (why, I'm not sure--if they're already billing once a month, what's the difference?).

Wait a minute--I thought they were looking to improve my experience? I didn't ask for my schedule to be changed. I don't particularly like the fact that I now have to keep more of those big unwieldy 5 gallon water bottles around the house so that I don't run out of water. Why is this change good for me, the customer?

Ah...when I read closer, I find  the real reason for this rigamarole: "The change is being made specifically to improve our operational efficiency." So this isn't really to improve my customer experience. In fact, if they asked me, I'd probably tell them that the best way to improve my experience is not to make me pay in advance and store their inventory long before it's needed, but to have deliveries occur more often so that this is one less thing I have to worry or think about. In fact, I used to get deliveries every 2 weeks, then every 3, now once a month. You can see where this is going--in a couple of years I expect I will get one annual delivery of bottled water (whether I need it or not). 

Why is it that companies push all kinds of changes, policies and procedures through to us, the customer, under the premise that they are doing us a favor? What were they thinking? Did anybody out here ever ask what the customer really wants?

And, if it's really, really necessary to make a change for the company's sake, not mine, please, please, please DON'T pretend that this is a customer-centered change. Tell me what's going on and be upfront about it. Customers will work with you if they know where you're coming from, but work with us,

Glass of water anyone? I've got a few extra bottles floating around....