Tag Archives: Customer service

November 16, 2015 · 11:33 am

Getting Personal

At the tail end of last week, I received a mailing from the folks at Total Wine.  It’s one that comes along each week and contains what Total calls my “weekend recommendations.”  It shows me some highly-rated wines that are supposed to fit my tastes.  The problem is that they don’t.  There are several bottles of white wine listed and I don’t drink white wine.  There is some expensive champagne and I prefer prosecco.  I don’t believe I’ve ever bought pinot noir in the store and yet there is a pinot recommendation as well.  

I’m not surprised. Although I shop fairly regularly at Total and love the store, there is no system in place to associate customer purchases with customers.  There is no loyalty card, as I have with a supermarket or two, to record what I’m buying, how often etc.  Without that information, recommendations can’t be personalized.  It’s the difference between me walking in the store and having them greet me by name as opposed to a generic hello.

I think we’ve all become spoiled by personalization, so much so that I think the ability to personalize the customer experience is table stakes for any retailer.  Notice I’m not limiting that to online retailers either.  My supermarket personalizes every trip as soon as I use their scanner to shop by delivering instant coupons and savings on products I buy or might like based on past buying.  We’ve all used Amazon and seen their recommendations.  In fact, their algorithm is so good that it’s worth examining what they’re using to determine your personalized selections and deleting things that you don’t want to include (maybe you bought something as a gift that should not be included, for example).  Netflix famously paid a lot of money to scientists that improved their recommendations by 8.5%.

Any business needs to think about how to incorporate personalization, even those of us that are not in B2C businesses.  Still showing generic decks to potential customers?  Still have a standard rate card that you send out when people ask for price quotes?  Still think you’re in tune with customer expectations?

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November 12, 2015 · 10:47 am

Ignored For The Holidays

As we turn the corner on Veteran’s Day, the next big holiday on the horizon is Thanksgiving.  For those of us in the US, Thanksgiving used to be the kickoff to the holiday season – Christmas, Hanukah, and other major holidays for most of us.   That, of course, is no long true, since as of September 2015, a staggering 59% of US and UK retailers had kicked off their annual holiday ad blitz.  More ads lead, hopefully, to more customers, and more customers means more inbound customer service messaging,  

The folks at Sprout Social looked into how well retailers are dealing with these messages, and the answer, unfortunately, is not very well:

Given that people are taking to Facebook and Twitter in droves to get answers about products and services, one might assume that retailers would allocate more resources to social customer care. In reality, retailers are choosing to ignore customers’ questions—answering only 1 in 6 messages promptly—while making the lucky few people who do get their attention wait an average of 12 hours for a response (up from 11 hours in 2014). This delay provides little relief during what is already a stressful time for many.

In other words, 83% of the time, the customer is ignored.  So if, as the study found, the typical retailer can expect 1,500 inbound messages from consumers, fewer than 300 of them receive a reply. What’s worse is that it’s not as if the retailers are ignoring the social channel.  Not at all.  Instead of replying to the customer complaints, what are they doing?  Why, sending out more messages about themselves, of course. Rather than focusing on people’s concerns, retail brands send out 3 times as many promotional messages, (deals, coupons and product merchandising,) as they do helpful responses.

There are so many things wrong here, and if you’ve been here on the screed before it will all sound too familiar.  Ignoring customer outreach  83% of the time is only the tip of the error iceberg.  Using a social channel – they’re made for conversation, folks – to send broadcast messages is bad.  Sending those messages more than 3 times as often as you actually deal with what is on a consumer’s mind is much worse.

If this is how retailers wish their customers a happy holiday, I’m thinking Scrooge is running their business.  Who is running yours?

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October 13, 2015 · 12:27 pm

I’ll Take Bad Ads

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of going into a store where the staff is charming and can’t do enough for you, but you left without buying anything.  You’ve also probably seen a wonderful product description in some online store, only to get to the customer reviews and find out that the product wasn’t nearly as good as the advertising.  That is a truism in marketing:  good ads can’t sell a bad product.  Conversely, even the worst marketing can’t keep a great product out of consumers’ hands.   Give me the bad ads every time and a great product.

I put customer experience right in there as part of product.  That experience isn’t just customer service.  It’s any engagement your product and brand has with a customer – social media, email, etc.   Since the product is more important than advertising, improving those engagements can yield a significant competitive advantage.  Having an ongoing, transparent, truthful series of interactions with your customers as well as consumers at large will probably have a larger effect on your business than doubling the ad budget.  You want to improve your product without retooling, repackaging, or developing a better formula?  Improve the customer experience and you’ve done so.

So why aren’t brands spending more to improve those engagements and the products they support?  Beats me.  Maybe it’s because they didn’t have it in last year’s plan.  Maybe it’s because you can’t run that on TV.  Maybe because we tend to emphasize creativity over basic blocking and tackling. Whatever the root, it’s something to think about.

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