Monthly Archives: March 2013

March 13, 2013 · 9:01 am

Wet Newspapers

Here are a couple of quick examples of how two companies address the same customer happiness issue with two differing degrees of success. You’ll notice I say customer happiness rather than customer service. That’s because more often than not the service defines the happiness or lack thereof.

It rains here from time to time. As I’ve mentioned previously, we have a couple of newspapers delivered here at Rancho Deluxe each day. Rain and newspapers are fundamentally incompatible – just try to read one that’s been left out in the rain unprotected.  Every once in a while, the delivery person doesn’t get the newspaper wrapped up too well and it’s wet.  Not a big deal.

We’ve had a wet week and so each of the two newspapers – The NY Times and USA Today – has shown up wet.  What happened next is the subject today.  In the case of the Times, I went on their website where the link into account service is very clear and let them know we received a wet paper.  I was given the option to get a credit or to have another paper delivered – potentially that same day.  Three clicks and all done.  The paper did show up followed by a telephone call from a human – not a robot – making sure I’d received it and the matter was resolved.  Wow.

Compare that with yesterday’s experience with USA Today.  First, they redesigned USA Today ‘s website and it is very pretty.  Unfortunately, they’ve let “pretty” get ahead of “useful” and it took several minutes to get past the pretty pictures and actually locate the link into my account.  At one point I hit the “subscribe” button (which is all the way down the page – I wonder how that link converts?) but I could do nothing on that page except subscribe.  Oh wait – there’s a “chat with us” link available.  Maybe they can help?

Nope.  I gave them my name and email and told them I was a current subscriber.  This was at 8:25 am.  The autorespond said their reps were unavailable until 8 am in the same time zone I was in.  Right – 25 minutes prior.  Fail.

I won’t bore you with the details of how I finally got to the right page but when I did I clicked on “wet paper”.  I was not given an option on how the issue would be resolved (I still don’t know).  I was told it would be resolved within “1-2 business days” which is what the follow-up email said.

Two big companies, two very different responses to the same problem.  With which company would you rather do business?  More importantly  which one is most like the way your business handles issues?

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March 12, 2013 · 9:04 am

What Do You Wrap Something Fishy In? Newspaper!

You might have heard something about the study that was released yesterday by the folks at the Newspaper National Network.  It proclaimed in large type that “Sports Fans Rank Local Newspaper Sports Pages #1” and that “The Study Validates the Unique Benefits of Newspaper Sports Content to Advertisers.” You can read the study here.

Logo of the Newspaper National Network.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now being the open-minded sort of guy that I am, I read through the study with great interest but also with a very large wad of skepticism. You see, it strikes me that everything we read about newspapers has to do with the decline of daily readership. Given the “right now” nature of sports information in particular, I was surprised that the study found that newspapers are still the top source for sports news for sports fans. Let’s see what you think.

Sports news and information is one of the most hotly-contested content areas.  Having lived in it for decades, I know that the competition is fierce.  Other than the big guys – USAToday and Sports Illustrated, I can’t think of a single daily or even weekly print source that can compete for the sports audience.  Still, according to the study:

Wow!  Now I read a couple of newspapers every day but I must admit that I don’t do so for the sports scores.  I’m also out of the demo that was surveyed – Men 18-54.  I was also quite surprised by the second point.  The study shows that 76% of the respondents identified newspaper websites when asked to identify all the places you typically go to for sports news, information, and/or analysis, not including live games or competitions.  Only 65% mentioned ESPN.com and 46% identified either Yahoo Sports or a league website. Given everything I know about traffic numbers in sports, that 76% seems weird, even aggregating all of the newspaper sites (except USAToday) into a number.

That’s when I took the advice I’ve given you here on the screed a number of times:  when the results seem weird, check who was asked the question and how the question was asked.  In this case, half the men surveyed identified themselves as regular sports pages readers (2x or more/week).  Given that the ongoing Pew Study found late last year that only 29% now say they read a newspaper yesterday – with just 23% reading a print newspaper that seems like a skewed sample to me.  In fact, it’s hard to accept that 69% of male sports fans identify the print sports section as the “go to” source when over half of those who read the newspaper do so electronically according to Pew.

The best research is enlightening and can’t be picked apart very easily.  Unfortunately, this does neither.  Do you agree?

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March 11, 2013 · 10:00 am

The CW

You might have read this morning that the online betting site InTrade is shutting down.

Intrade $ predictions - Nov 3

(Photo credit: New England Secession)

Unlike many of the gambling sites with which you might be familiar, InTrade lets users place wagers on non-sports-related upcoming events.  It was a lot of fun to read the site during the election season because you could see the odds of various candidates’ success changing with each news cycle.  You can read about why the business is shutting down here or here.  We can debate if it’s for legitimate concerns or just because it seemed to be operating outside of the long arm of the law but that’s not really my topic this morning.

What interests me about this site is that it was sometimes criticized for “getting it wrong”, as if the odds it offered were some kind of prediction.  That’s as off-base as thinking that a Las Vegas betting line is a prediction of the outcome.  Neither of those things are true.  InTrade’s odds simply reflected the conventional wisdom – how people saw the outcome and were betting.  It was not any sort of analysis of polling and other data to make predictions.  The Vegas line is similar.  It’s not a prediction – it’s an inducement.  It reflects how the conventional wisdom perceives the event’s outcome and is there to induce an equal number of people to bet on either side.  That’s why the odds change and the line changes.

We do the same thing in business a lot of the time and it’s often to our detriment.  We don’t “bet” on the outcome because we often confuse it with the conventional wisdom.  It’s the old expression about no one ever getting fired for buying IBM or ATT back when those services were the “go to” providers.  We see it today in media plans – start with TV and see whats left.  Even in digital we see it with the “buy Facebook” thinking I run into all the time.  “Winning” in my mind means trying new things all the time, measuring them with data, and not worrying a whole lot if the outcomes defy the conventional wisdom.  After all, it’s easy to get lost in a herd (or to get trampled).

What do you think?

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