Self-fulfilling queasiness

A business exists to serve great customers, not to punish the bad. So that’s where your energy needs to go.

I was reminded of this roughly — if humorously — in an Atlanta taxi the other morning.  Though I’d felt hale and hearty when I stepped into the cab, the power of suggestion began to play tricks on my stomach after I noticed the window decal:

If you get sick, pay $250 cleanup fee

Atlanta taxi window decal

In more subtle ways (and could there be less?), orienting any business toward the rare or hypothetical miscreant is a risky step toward self-fulfilling prophecy.  Just because some knucklehead burned you with a bad credit card in 1978 doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take credit cards — or require invasive amounts of ID when you do.    Any more than the possibility someone might blow chunks on your taxi (or  lobby) carpet should drive you to post a warning against public regurgitation.

The Elite Media’s truly elite sales rep

So: your company runs a spiffy little promotion intended to grab you some brand-new customers.  Super — but how you treat existing customers who also happen to respond is a thorny and important question. (And, studies show: existing customers are, in fact, the ones who pay the most attention to everything new you do as a brand, including your promotions and advertisements.)

The way Rachel, who was womanning a booth for The New York Times yesterday, treated me as an existing customer is, in my experience, essentially unheard of.  Yet it should be considered the epitome of what we all want from the people who represent our businesses.

I was walking through a crafts fair in the Pennsylvania countryside as she trolled for fresh New York Times subscribers at her booth. She had brought along some nice New York Times gift items as incentives, and gave her pitch as people passed:

Existing customers are worth the swag!

If your offer's good, prepare for existing customers wanting it too.

“Subscribe to New York Times home delivery, only $X a week, get great gifts!”

I said quietly, “Sorry–already subscribe.”

Rachel: “Are you getting all seven days delivered currently?  I can upgrade you if you aren’t.”

Me (chuckling at her persistence): “Unless you’re going to start a new evening edition, I don’t think there’s a way we can get more papers delivered.”

Rachel: “But these are nice gifts, aren’t they? I’m going to give you something anyway, for being a great customer. What would you like?”

Let’s look at this encounter. First, some overall observations. Note that I was just walking by at a crowded crafts fair. I hadn’t asked her for anything and hadn’t offered her anything in terms of making her numbers. I also hadn’t said anything about wanting the gifts. She could, however, sense the imbalance in the encounter, having nothing to offer one of the paper’s “full fare” passengers.

So she decided to extend exceptional, anticipatory service to someone who wasn’t even the target customer of the promotion.

—–

The encounter is both heartening and a little unsettling.  Unsettling because of the questions that were left in my mind.  As follows:

1.   Will Rachel get some bragging rights if her manager sees this post?  In other words, was she doing what The New York Times wisely wants her to do (support existing subscribers, who they recognize are even more valuable than a johnny-come-lately signing up temporarily on impulse)?

Or, did she get in trouble when she got back to the office?  In other words, was all she got for her good judgment a slap on the wrist for coming back one gift short?

More to the point, do you give your employees the discretion Rachel –I hope– had, to make sure your existing customers feel good while you’re out searching for new ones?

Four Seasons Hotels’ new green eco-keycards

(Like you needed another excuse to treat yourself to the Four Seasons…)

Check out these paper eco-keycards.  Basic, but kinda brilliant.

And about damn time.

New four seasons paper keycard

New four seasons paper keycard

Joseph Heller’s ghost visits Starbucks

Has Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, ever read Catch-22? Seems likely…what seems less than likely is that he has ever tried the sign-up process for his own new Internet service. Read on…

=====

This afternoon I had some work to do and I figured it was time to head to Starbucks and try the new, free AT&T-powered Internet that CEO Howard Schultz seems so proud of.

I knew I’d need a Starbucks card in order to sign up (stretching the definition of “free,” but that didn’t bug me). What I didn’t expect was what happened next: nothing. Once I bought the card and signed up with my powerbook, I couldn’t do anything. Instead, Starbucks/ATT gave me a message to the following effect (this is a close paraphrase):  “now that you’ve signed up, please check your email account for your access verification code, so that you can complete the log-in process and start using your new Starbucks Internet account.”

But remember, Starbucks:  at this point your customer (me) doesn’t have email access.  This is why I’ve bought your now-accursed card and gone through the signup process in the first place.  So now you are asking me to drive home and check my email on my existing account, and click on a link get an access code before I can log in!

I’m something of a fan of Howard Schultz.  He seems like a good guy: he made it his personal mission, for example (and it’s quite an extraordinary example!) to provide health-care benefits even to part-time workers.  His autobiography, Pour Your Heart Into It, wasn’t bad at all. So it’s in a let’s-get-back-on-track spirit that I offer this simple tip, a one all us proprietors should take to heart:  before you spend your time on minutiae like changing the color of your Starbucks cups again,  refocus on the actual feeling of being a customer in your own stores.  And what it takes to keep a customer in the store.

Because by the time I got home and checked my email for the access code, I remembered I do have Internet access at home.  (It is 2008.)  And once I was home, I started to feel my longstanding venti chai habit might be breakable after all.

You gotta admit: you don’t carry life vests in your jockey box, either…

air canada jazz logo

air canada jazz logo

According to Rob Gilles of AP, Air Canada’s inland regional carrier Jazz is removing life vests from all its planes to save weight and fuel.

Before I join the increasingly indignant kerfuffle in response to this story, I took a moment to ponder: how many bodies of water do I drive over in the course of a week?

And when am I going to get around to stashing handy pocket-sized life jackets in the jockey box, for myself and any potential passengers of mine–you know, just in case? Remembering that, unlike those of an Air Canada/Jazz jet, the seats in my Volvo are not approved flotation devices.

Considering this I’ve decided to sit this fight out, with my seat belt securely fastened, until it comes to a complete stop.

The ultimate reason to be nice to a customer

Not that it comes down to this often, in most lines of work. But an ultimate reason to be kind to a customer, or even a vendor, is the off-chance it’ll be the last time you interact.

Opening the Times this morning I saw what no business owner ever wants to see: my customer’s face looking back at me from the obits. A customer we were all proud to work with here, a well-loved veteran of our industry.

Somberly, I took a moment to look over my notes of our last interaction – hopeful, at least, that we had done right by him.

Here’s what I found looking over my notes: a project that had actually started with a small bump, and a customer who was gracious in giving us a chance to make things right. On what nobody could have known was to be his last project.

To speak with precision, he made our error seem small and merely bumplike, because that was his way: starting out a letter of very valid grievance with “First the good stuff– your staff has been excellent” before getting to the meat of what needed to be addressed.

So the transaction felt roundly satisfactory in the end, through his gracious way of bringing our attention to the issue, and, I’m hopeful to think, our way of resolving it.

That’s a nice way of leaving things, because you’re a long time gone.

Marketing Cinnabon in the Men’s Room

It’s easy to think up a long list of products you wouldn’t market in a rest room. (Turn it into a parlor game and you could have fun playing it with your snarky friends, even.)

But you’d be scratching your, uh, head a long time before coming up with a product that’s less stall-likely than Cinnabon, a brand so successfully built around the scent of its product. In other words,

cinnabon billboard in men's room I 95 rest stop delaware 063008

Cinnabon’s “gift of aroma and taste,” as the placard I found in the men’s rest room Friday at this Delaware I-95 rest stop put it.

You can see how this could happen–I guess.The ad, after all, was likely a free item for the manager at Cinnabon, a concessionaire to the state.

But contextual missteps like this are significant. Even when you get the air rights in the men’s room at no charge, your brand is not getting off Scott® free.

Green marketing dos and don’ts.

There is an urgency and importance to getting your green marketing right before customers everywhere become completely cynical.

The solution is straightforward (no, that doesn’t mean easy), according to this post published initially by Seth Godin on Seth’s Blog and turning up almost immediately following as a new lifestyle riff (without attribution, but what the heck) by The New York Times.

Here’s the crux: as marketers, every green message we send out needs to include a number, even if it’s an imperfect number. So here, as published on Seth Godin’s “Seth’s Blog”, is:

The Coming Backlash Over Green Marketing

Go_green

Micah points us to this campaign from Tumi Luggage. Buy some nylon luggage, they’ll plant some trees (one tree? A bush? It’s not clear how many trees per suitcase). It’s entirely possible that Tumi’s campaign is nothing short of generous, but as a consumer, it’s awfully difficult to tell.

………………………UPDATE……………………………………………..

Business Week called Tumi to follow up on this point, and the answers from the Tumi spokesperson are less than stunning: Buying nylon luggage doesn’t in fact help the planet (though I must confess it helps the planetary inhabitants lucky enough to be carrying it–Tumi makes indisputably great stuff). Business Week’s phone call shows exactly why the numeric concept (see below) makes such sense–Micah

………………………UPDATE………………………………………………

{SNIP}

Consumers aren’t stupid (we’re dumb sometimes, but not stupid.) So, when the backlash hits, when every single brand has used up some green angle, then what?

Here’s what’s missing: a number. When you buy a fridge, there’s a big yellow sticker with a number about relative energy consumption. Now, we could argue all day long about how to figure out the right number (should the number on the fridge include data about the amount of energy needed to make the fridge in the first place?) but an imperfect number sure seems better than no number at all.

Drive to Philadelphia: 150.
Take Amtrak: 22.

Stick with the lightbulbs you have throughout your whole house until they burn out: 175.
Replace them all now with something better: 142.

Organic strawberries from California: 88
Frozen strawberries from California: 80
Apple from Dutchess County: 4

Read Seth’s entire post here: sethgodin.com/sg

Who should do the customer service at your company?

Who should do the customer service at your company?

(You know that’s a trick question. The answer, of course, is everyone.)

I’m not nuts, though. I don’t mean you have to fire the extreme introvert who has always saved your butt when your computer hard drive fries at 8:43 p.m. I mean that everyone who interacts with customers must do customer service …to the full extent of her aptitude for it.

All the people who work in your organization — at least all the people who should work in your organization — should be skilled at recognizing – and motivated to recognize – customers’ wishes, moods, and motivations.
This only happens when you hire the right people, train them properly, and follow up daily.

Sorry. You’ve got to. It’s worth it.

Get the entire ebook here, for free

Attention — It’s what your customers crave.

Attention — It’s what your customers crave.

The thing that’s most expensive to give customers—a defect-free product—just gets you in the door. Only human attention, love shown to, your customers is going to buy their loyalty in return. (If you’re making airplane engines, please, please ignore this paragraph. I like a defect-free flight. A lot. Concentrate on that, nix on giving me personal attention. Thanks.)

In many, many industries a large part — significant enough to make a crucial competitive difference — of what you’re selling is attention. This is where the small business has a chance to clobber the big one, where the upstart can get ahead because, well, you’re paying attention.

A great hotel could have the exact same floor plan as the fleabag next door and it wouldn’t matter: it isn’t renting rectangular rooms by the evening. Its business is attention. Many cars in the Lexus line are significantly similar to the Toyota line, but Lexus dealers don’t just sell transportation. They very successfully sell attention.

Get good enough at the attention business, and you’re going to get a lot more attention from your banker.