Archive for the ‘Customer Experiences’ Category
Everyone I know that flies a lot has their own horror stories to tell. Everyone that has a mobile phone or mobile broadband service has complained about their carrier. While my experiences with American Airlines and Verizon yesterday would not necessarily fall under the ‘horror story’ category, they did illustrate how not to handle a customer.
Our flight back to LaGuardia from Raleigh, NC started out innocently enough (I was with our Executive VP and Creative Director Nader Ashway). We were seated and ready to go when an announcement from the cockpit informed us that there were mechanical difficulties with the aircraft and they were going to try to fix it but we would be better off getting off the plane and waiting in the gate area.
We immediately got on the long line to find out what were our options for other flights to LaGuardia. Note – when you sit near the back of even a small aircraft it becomes a bad thing since you end up with fewer options. We had not considered this when booking. We will next time. By the time we got to the counter our flight had been fully cancelled and our options were –standby list on two later flights and a ‘guaranteed’ seat on the flight to LaGuardia that was scheduled to leave four hours after our original flight. There were few if any announcements in the gate area informing displaced passengers of what was going on.
American blew an opportunity to make a little hay out of adversity. All of us know that sometimes planes have equipment problems and safety first must be the #1 policy. But the communication was so non-existent that I could simply not believe it. I booked electronically and American Airlines has my mobile number, my email and they have to know what happens to any passenger at any given moment. Not one communication have I received from American Airlines – nearly 24 hours later!
How about the idea of offering all displaced passengers complimentary access to the Admiral’s Club until they could be rebooked? For people that have never been in that club it might even convince them to join. Talk about a missed opportunity. For those that have been in there at least they would feel acknowledged that a problem (not weather related) occurred and American Airlines at least tried to do what they could. Offering me a seat on a flight four hours later did nothing to serve this customer.
Only because I am a glutton for punishment I then decided to use the time to repair my Verizon wireless modem card that had been acting up. I called the number and a helpful woman in Georgia named Angela tried to help me get the card back up and working since I had money on the card and wanted to get online.
After rebooting my machine two times and trying everything else under the sun for 45 minutes (draining my mobile phone battery in the process), Angela told me that she needed to fill out a ‘trouble ticket’ with a case number. And it would ‘only’ take 5-10 minutes. What? How does this serve me – the customer? I already had been dragged through a series of protocols that simply established that Verizon’s modem was defective. Now I have to wait for them to fill out a trouble ticket? But having invested 50 minutes into the call I was compelled to wait and see it through. At the close of the call (I was pushing hard to get off the phone to save what little battery I had left), I was told I would get a SMS text message with the ‘trouble ticket’ information. You guessed it. I am still waiting for that text and my mobile card still does not work.
Verizon has that age-old message at the start of a service call – ‘This call may be monitored for customer service”. I don’t think that they are really listening at all do you?
As a sometime frustrated original Kindle owner (mainly due to the fact that they have never reached out to me since I paid the $ 399 for the now dinosaur-like 1st edition) ,the news this week http://on.wsj.com/i9NHe2 that Amazon has come up with an even less expensive option by offering an advertising-supported Kindle made me even more annoyed. The same exact Kindle currently on sale for $ 139 will now be available for $ 114 with ads popping up on the home page but not during the ‘reading’ experience.
The idea itself is both interesting and perhaps even overdue. What surprised me is the small difference between the price for a Kindle with and without ads. Keep in mind that the Kindle owner can turn off the Wi-Fi so that ads will not be served and you can read on your Kindle without ads except when you go the Kindle store to buy something.
I take it as some type of return salvo against Apple’s iPad 2 which still has A T & T Wireless customers still lining up in the streets in order to try to get one. From the article in the Wall Street Journal from April 12th by Stu Wood – ‘Some in publishing suggested that the new lower price is a savvy move.’ “People won’t hesitate to buy the cheaper device because advertising is everywhere we look,” said Richard Curtis, a New York literary agent and digital book publisher. “People will think it’s a good trade-off.” And if they actually look at the ads, so much the better for the advertisers and Amazon”.
But only a $ 25 discount? Amazon is said to have sold more than 5 million Kindles in 2010 alone. If half that universe purchased an ad supported Kindle in 2011 that would mean a universe of 2,500,000 for which ads could be served. It seems to me that even with modest projections the lifetime value of the purchasing consumer would be worth far more than a measly $ 25 discount.
If Amazon truly wants to make makers of other E-readers and tablets take notice, the price of an advertising-supported Kindle should come down even more – how about $ 49? How about free with the purchase of 10 or more books from the Kindle Store?
Or how about a free Kindle if the customer buys an advertising-supported Kindle and also agrees to purchase 10 books from the Kindle store over a defined time period? That’s how Columbia House Record Clubs, BMG Records and Book of the Month did it for years. Only this time the books are delivered electronically so there is no cost for shipping and handling.
How about it – would you like a free Amazon Kindle with ads and a promise to buy a certain number of books over a certain period of time?
Friday afternoon was opening day at CitiField for my beloved New York Mets or as Steve Somers of WFAN coined it – the Wilponzi’s. Ouch. It was a cold and dreary day like many days in early April at baseball parks in the northern climes. My ticket partners and I made a reservation at the Acela Club where we’ve eaten a number of times since it opened with the new stadium in 2009.
Arriving intentionally a bit early at 2PM for our 2:15 PM reservation, we knew that there was a 3:45 PM reservation behind us so we would have to clear out by then – first pitch was scheduled for 4:10PM. The line outside the restaurant was surprisingly long. None of us could figure out why. This began an odyssey that defied explanation for much of the afternoon. It ended well but only due to a savvy restaurateur in Drew Nieporent of Myriad Restaurant Group (Tribeca Grill, Nobu, Corton among others if you don’t know), who in addition to being on the scene realized that things were not going smoothly at all.
At $ 48 prix fix a meal at the Acela Club is not cheap. But you do get a lot for the money mainly due to the impressive salad and sandwich bar that has more high quality food than you could eat even if you didn’t eat an entrée. (The truffle macaroni and cheese is addictive).
Once we were seated, the drinks we ordered took 20 minutes to arrive. And our server was nowhere in sight for those 20 minutes of waiting. One of our partners cryptically mentioned to another server that we actually were at the stadium to watch a ball game “today”. Our meals did not arrive until well after 3:15. A couple of times we were visited by a host who offered us a free drink (we declined) and apologies for the slow service which did show that the staff was aware that things were not going well.
Once the meals did arrive the food as always was good. However at that point there was sincere doubt that we might return again – first pitch was 10 minutes away and it was long past 3:45. We finished up our meals and one of the hosts came over and told us that they were sorry for the long wait and the restaurant was going to pick up our meals.
Wow. And who said there was no such thing as a free lunch? None of us expected that but we were extremely pleased with the result. And yes we will be going back to the Acela club again soon but we might not have had they not come in and made amends.
On the way out I passed Drew (whom I have met a couple of times but do not know well at all) who was both on the phone and surveying the proceedings. I mentioned to him that it was a tough day and he more than agreed saying they totally messed it up – surprising candor from one of New York’s premiere restaurateurs. But I also told him that in the end they got it right by doing the unexpected.
Everyone should think about doing the unexpected when you know your customer has a bad experience in order try to make it right. Anyone can have a bad day. It’s what you do to respond that sets your company apart.
Do you have any good stories on successful resolution to a potential bad customer experience?
First it was an article in the March 30th New York Times http://nyti.ms/e2p6Ry indicating that the F.D.A. Panel is going to consider warnings for artificial food colorings. There is some evidence that food coloring is linked to Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). This was followed on April 2nd with an article in the same newspaper entitled ‘Colorless Food? We Blanch” http://nyti.ms/hJSjJ4.
It made me realize that food coloring is nothing more than marketing. After all who would want to eat a grey pickle? From Gardiner Harris’ article – “Without the artificial coloring FD&C Yellow No. 6, Cheetos Crunchy Cheese Flavored Snacks would look like the shriveled larvae of a large insect. Not surprisingly, in taste tests, people derived little pleasure from eating them. Their fingers did not turn orange. And their brains did not register much cheese flavor, even though the Cheetos tasted just as they did with food coloring.”
“People ranked the taste as bland and said that they weren’t much fun to eat,” said Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University and director of the university’s Food and Brand Lab.
Naked Cheetos would not seem to have much commercial future. Nor might some brands of pickles. The pickling process turns them an unappetizing gray. Dye is responsible for their robust green. Gummi worms without artificial coloring would look, like, well, muddily translucent worms. Jell-O would emerge out of the refrigerator a watery tan.”
Yum right? I was able to handle the fact that Cheetos were artificially colored and flavored and whatever else makes a Cheeto (that word looks very odd in singular form to me), the epitome of ersatz food), but pickles? Cucumbers are green so somehow I extrapolated that pickles should be green. I bet I am not alone there.
Inherently we all know that food coloring is a part of many of the processed foods we Americans have come to love. But what if all the processed foods Americans love to eat were not artificially colored? Would Americans (and people all around the world) become less fat?.
It’s no secret that color (and odor of course) is critical in making food appear appetizing. That goes for natural and unnatural foods alike. But marketing folks have to acknowledge that putting food coloring in processed foods is nothing other than advertising and salesmanship. I never really thought about it that way before.
The article did note that while there were natural colorings, they were “not as bright, cheap, or stable, as artificial colorings, which can remain vibrant years.” Now there’s a comforting thought.
Some food companies have expanded their processed-product offerings to include foods without artificial colorings. You can now buy Kool-Aid Invisible, http://bit.ly/hSNq8A for instance, and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Organic White Cheddar http://bit.ly/et0CPX. Some grocery chains, including Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe’s, refuse to sell foods with artificial coloring.
Talk about your processed foods, this week Procter & Gamble sold the last of its food products – Pringles Potato Chips to Diamond foods for $ 2.3 billion. Pringles are made from potatoes that are cooked, mashed, dehydrated, and made into a dough. They are then cut out, shaped, and dried. This enables them to stay crispy and not greasy and to keep their saddle shape in the can! (At least according to the website cha-cha). Oh and BTW they are amazingly tasty if I say so myself.
In the meantime while I am not a regular consumer of Cheetos or Kool-Aid, I do like a pickle now and again with my sandwich, but every time I eat one from now on I will think about the color and how it got to be that way.
I’m not saying that food coloring should be banned. But we should all be a little more aware that processed food is truly unnatural.
Or maybe people simply don’t care?
This thought has been popping up in my mind consistently over the past few years. With voice recognition technology continually improving (I admit it still has a way to go), the need to actually keystroke in words is possibly becoming less and less relevant every day.
I don’t know about you but my handwriting is terrible. Never all that good in the first place, it has devolved into a text style instantly recognizable by nobody and sometimes not even by me. I am a far better typist since I type ALL the time and dislike having to write by hand. Since I grew up even before the advent of the personal computer (I was a proud owner of an IBM Selectric back in college) typing was a vast improvement over my even then lousy handwriting.
Teenagers today impress everyone with their mind-blowing speed when SMS texting. I also notice that kids are very fast and good at typing on a keyboard as well (their spelling – well that’s another story). But what if there was really good voice recognition software and technology that worked all the time? Perhaps I will receive notes from companies like Dragon and Nuance, as well as products from Windows, Google and Apple espousing how well their products work. I’ve used a few of them from time to time and my impression is they are improving but the learning curve takes too long – that is they take too long to recognize my voice to make the proper word interpretation.
Eventually voice recognition technology will be truly high performing. And the need to actually type one’s thoughts and ideas will be reduced dramatically. There will be a much higher value put on editing since the inability to think orally (unfortunately evidenced by too many people too frequently) will allow things like term papers and white papers to be much more easily started. But the finishing will then truly be the challenge – something that writers already are well aware of. Taking all those thoughts you have that then are translated into text that you can read on the page will be exciting at first as it will seem so easy. Yet crafting something that is both interesting and concise (brevity is beautiful after all), is not as easy as it looks – even when you don’t have to physically type the words.
Part of my process for “creating content” as it is now called, is writing and editing at the same time. Even after I finish the thought process I go back and edit. And then I edit again and again. So while I welcome advancements in voice recognition technology I am so wired into typing my thoughts it will not be easy for me to adopt its usage – at least for some of the time.
Of course then there’s eye tracking which was in the news this week as articles both in Business Week http://buswk.co/hbW9QS and the New York Times http://nyti.ms/giq0eA highlighted this emerging technology
I don’t long for my old IBM Selectric, but I wonder if I could really give up typing all together. Could you?