Monthly Archives: November 2015

November 20, 2015 · 11:57 am

Firing The Customer

This Foodie Friday, we have the tale of a restaurant that fired a customer. A regular customer ordered some takeout and asked that it be delivered. The delivery guy, who is autistic, had handed the customer the wrong order from his car (he went back and corrected it immediately). The customer called the restaurant, furious. and informed the owner that the driver was an idiot and strung out on drugs (neither of which was true). I’ll let the owner (via his Facebook post) tell you the rest:  

This driver has worked for us for two years. He is a seriously accomplished University student, has an amazingly inquisitive personality, a wicked sense of humor and one helluva work ethic! You would think, in the year 2015 the majority of the population would have learned or at least heard about autism. I understand that there is a large portion of our population that is content to remain uninformed and uneducated, but that doesn’t give them the right to take that ignorance and turn it into a foul-mouthed rant on two of my employees!

Therefore, we have fired this customer. That address, that name and phone number will be tagged with a DO NOT DELIVER DO NOT ACCEPT ORDER message.

Now, we talk a lot in this space about being 100% customer-focused and seeing the world through the consumer’s eyes.  There are times, however, when we need to fire a client or a customer, and clearly this is one of them.  When you have a client or a customer that does certain things, it’s really time to move on.  Such as?

When there is no longer trust between you.  Maybe you sense there is unethical stuff going on or maybe the communication has become irreparably damaged.  Time to move on.  When clients stop paying their bills on time and don’t have a good faith discussion about the reasons why and the plan to do so, it’s time to stop working.  Financial abuse is abuse nonetheless. Maybe they begin to demand more work (or additional products) for no additional money.  No, thank you.  Finally, as is the case above, maybe they’ve become abusive verbally on a regular basis.  Everyone gets mad once in a while and you can’t make a souffle without cracking an egg or two.  That doesn’t mean a customer gets to cross the line on a regular basis.

Being customer centric doesn’t mean being a punching bag.  No client or customer is worth demeaning yourself to retain.  You might lose a customer, but you’ll lose a headache in the process.

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November 19, 2015 · 11:51 am

1,800

Yesterday’s edition of the screed was the 1,800th post. At roughly 350 words per, that’s 630,000 words I’ve written in an effort to make sense of business. I’ve written approximately 250 posts each year for the last 7. While not every one of those posts has been original (I do republish some stuff), each one has been carefully considered for its topic and usefulness to you folks. I’ll leave it to you to judge how well I’ve succeeded, although I hear from some readers that while some posts are enlightening, others are just too confusing. Well, yes. That’s kind of reflective of business, isn’t it?  

Since 1,800 feels like a milepost on the way to 2,000, I’m going to do something that I like to do with clients after a long meeting: sum up. If you hang around this space long enough you’ll pick up on a bunch of recurring themes, and while I’d hope that you’ll continue to come around here each day, let me make things a little easier for you in case you miss something. All of what follows should feel very familiar and, hopefully, not new. In no particular order:

  • The reason any of us are in business is to solve problems for our customers. If our product or service doesn’t add value and/or solve a problem, it’s useless, even if it’s free.
  • Hire smart people who possess the intangible skills you can’t teach: work ethic, honesty, humility, and hunger to succeed. Treat them well, train them even better, and demand their best.
  • Technology changes; basic, sound business principles don’t. Don’t confuse the technology with the business, even if the business IS technology.
  • Finally, while it’s impossible to ignore “the bottom line” as we run our businesses, for the most part our focus needs to be squarely on our customers.  We need to see our world from their perspective and recognize that their perspective might be very different from that of the business.  Customer focus is imperative, although (as we’ll see tomorrow), that doesn’t mean the customer is right 100% of the time (but they are way more than most businesses appreciate).

The above is a little cheat sheet to understanding what’s going on here most days.  In theory, anything you read will fall into one of those theme buckets.  I hope you’ll continue to do so.  Please?

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November 18, 2015 · 1:44 pm

Not Sexy (But Effective)

There is a big debate going on about whether advertising is dead. It may be, to a certain extent (that’s a much longer post) but I’m also certain that marketing lives on, albeit in a very different form than it was a decade ago. No matter where you come out on the aforementioned question, you’re probably in the business of reaching out to your customers or potential customers to increase sales. Today’s topic is an unsexy but highly effective way to do just that.  

I hope you or your marketing folks spend a lot of time on email, but I’m doubtful that’s true. It’s “old” technology, and I think we all sort of gravitate to more recent stuff. It’s not as much fun as video or social media nor as interesting as paid search. It just works.  This from the folks at Retention Science:

Although flashier channels like social media and mobile marketing routinely steal headlines, email is still the core of every effective digital marketing strategy…Email marketing generated the highest ROI for eCommerce in 2014, and consistently outperforms other channels in engagement and conversion. Even tech-savvy Millennials prefer to communicate with brands through email; 47 percent of respondents chose email as the preferred channel, while only 6 percent selected social media.

Integral to that statement is the notion of control.  People like that they can see what they want to see and unsubscribe if you’re not helpful (how’s THAT for good feedback!).  Email is much easier to personalize, and the offers can be fine-tuned.  Are you really going to make 100 different videos to reflect the nuances of your customers?  Probably not.

Email is one of those things in business that reminds us that the new, shiny object might not be the best use of our time or resources.  Building a mailing list is hard, and just using content (fill this out for a free whitepaper or report) won’t do it alone.  Great content combined with innovative thinking and smart socialization can help.  So can working with another brand that complements yours.  The reward, however, is well worth the effort.

A personalized ad, delivered which is requested by the customer, delivered when the customer wants it, and which is highly actionable and measurable sounds like email in a nutshell.  It also sounds like a pretty good thing to me.  You?

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