Linda's Marketing Leverage Blog

Doing Good Shouldn't Be So Hard

File this under the heading "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished".....

We had quite a bit of catered, untouched food left from a graduation/birthday/anniversary party yesterday (Lesson: Don't believe the estimates you see about how many servings each platter holds. Multiply that number by two at least!). Rather than throw all this food away, we wanted to donate this to people who could use it.

One wouldn't think this would be so difficult--I mean there is a recession going on, right? There are a lot of people out of work, homeless, down on their luck. How hard can it be to help them out? Harder than you would think, as it turns out.

First I called the one name brand I know in this area, Second Harvest Food Bank. Turns out they only deal with nonperishable food, not prepared-and-ready-to-eat-with-a-shelf-life items. (They also take nonperishable cash, but not prepared food.)

They recommended going to a soup kitchen and after a little prodding gave me a couple of recommendations. The first place I called only serves food on Sundays, so our timing was bad. The second was a wrong number. I found a similarly named church online and called them, but the phone rang off the hook. My next phone call reached a soup kitchen but the person who answered wasn't sure how to help me, who to send me to, or what exactly I was looking for anyway.

I did a Google search and found a place that said they'd be thrilled to have this. They gave me directions and off I went. Unfortunately, I missed a turn somewhere and didn't have their phone number handy. So I called Sprint 411. Three times. And all three times I got people who could not figure out the word "Ecumenical"  (as in Ecumenical Hunger Program) to save their life. They asked me to spell it, told me the program didn't exist, asked me to respell the name of the street, and told me they couldn't understand what I was saying because the connection was bad (Hmmm...you're with Sprint--whose fault do you think that might be?).

Finally with no help whatsoever from Sprint's Directory Assistance, I found the address, delivered the food, was thanked heartily and went away with a feeling of accomplishment.

But, ladies and gentlemen, this should not be that hard. It's graduation/wedding/prom season. There must be plenty of people who have leftover food that could feed hungry people. How much of that food goes to waste because it's just too difficult to get it to the people who need it?

For that matter, regardless of the business you're in, how many of your customers give up on you because it's too much work to locate you,  find your contact information, navigate your website, or something similar.

Life is already hard enough. Here's to making things easy.

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.

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.

Not everywhere you want to be...

From our most recent Marketing Leverage Times newsletter:

Wes Trochil of Effective Database Management in Hamilton, VA  tells us why he won’t be leaving home without American Express:

"I lost my wallet and had to replace all my credit cards. I called American Express and they said, without my asking, 'We'll UPS the card to you for arrival tomorrow.' This was good, since I was going on a business trip a day or so later. Both my Visa cards came 7 days later. Visa never even asked if I wanted the cards sooner, much less offering this as standard practice. Guess whose card I'll use?'

My wife had to return some things to Target. She had bought them on the credit cards I lost, so she didn't have the card, and she didn't have the receipt. The store said 'Sorry, we can't refund you or credit you.' So she insisted they call the manager, who still said no. Then she insisted they call the corporate headquarters, who asked 'Do you have the old credit card number?' She said, 'I can get it.' She did, gave it to headquarters who told her to give that number to the cashier, who then gave my wife a gift card as store credit. My wife's response (after arguing with them for 10 minutes prior), 'Now that wasn't so difficult, was it?'"

 We agree with Wes. These things shouldn't be so difficult. Why not start with employees doing the right thing?

Read our entire newsletter.