Category Archives: Helpful Hints

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 10, 2015 · 11:44 am

Are You Marketing To Goldfish?

If you are like many people I know, you spend a fair amount of time curating your feeds. What I mean by that is separating out all the stuff that really isn’t important to you so that what you’re reading is meaningful. On Twitter, for example, you might do as I do and use lists. I rarely look at the firehose of my main feed, relying on those carefully constructed lists and the odd specific search to help me stay informed via the service. I do the same thing on Facebook – build specific lists of people – to use the service efficiently.

Why do I bring this up? Because that is the same thinking that should be going into your brand’s marketing these days. Consumers’ attention is a scarce resource. If you think I’m kidding, check out the results of a study from the folks at Microsoft:

Humans have become so obsessed with portable devices and overwhelmed by content that we now have attention spans shorter than that of the previously jokingly juxtaposed goldfish.

Microsoft surveyed 2,000 people and used electroencephalograms (EEGs) to monitor the brain activity of another 112 in the study, which sought to determine the impact that pocket-sized devices and the increased availability of digital media and information have had on our daily lives.

Among the good news in the 54-page report is that our ability to multi-task has drastically improved in the information age, but unfortunately attention spans have fallen.

In 2000 the average attention span was 12 seconds, but this has now fallen to just eight. The goldfish is believed to be able to maintain a solid nine.

You have very little chance of having your 8 seconds of attention continue unless you’re curating the feed (read that as your marketing messaging) with a customer focus in mind.  How are you helping solve their problem today?  What added value are you bringing into their lives?  If you can’t answer those questions, you might as well be marketing to goldfish.  At least you get a little more of their attention.

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November 5, 2015 · 9:47 am

It’s Not Just Data

There is an interesting case that was argued before the Supreme Court the other day and it just might have an impact on your business.  There was also a lawsuit filed in an unrelated matter that could have the same effect.  A third item is a study that’s kind of scary. Let’s have a quick look at them and think about what they might mean to anyone who gathers information about their customers. 

First, the case before The Supremes.  It involves Spokeo, one of the large data aggregators.  Spokeo’s information about a consumer was almost 100% wrong.  As Justice Kagan said, “They basically got everything wrong about him. They got his marital status wrong. They got his income wrong. They got his education wrong. They basically portrayed a different person.”  The plaintiff was seeking a job when he filed suit, and worried that the errors in the report would affect his job search.  The other suit involves Ashley Madison.  They were sued for allegedly misleading users by inflating the number of women who belonged to the service.  As we have found out from the data hack, only a small percentage of the profiles belonged to actual women who used the site.  The company hired employees whose jobs were to create thousands of fake female profiles.

I suspect that a third form of data abuse will be in the courts shortly, as a recent study found that the average Android app sends potentially sensitive data to 3.1 third-party domains, and the average iOS app connects to 2.6 third-party domains.  None of the apps notify users that their information is being shared with third parties.  Data that’s wrong, data that’s fake, and data that’s shared without permission.  I suppose if we could get the fake guys to populate the wrong guys, sharing it without permission wouldn’t be a big deal.  Since it’s your personal information, it is.

If you gather data (and who doesn’t), you have a responsibility to keep it secure and not to use it for purposes beyond what the owner of the data (that would be you and me) reasonably expects you’ll be doing with it.  If you’re disseminating data, especially data that could impact someone’s life and not just your own business, you need to be sure it’s accurate.  And if you’re making stuff up, please just go away.

They’re not just data points, folks.  They’re people.  Maybe they’re lawsuits in waiting, or maybe they’re your spouse, kids, or parents.  Let’s be careful out there, ok?

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