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Here’s a good one from the paper this week: Big Retail Chains Dun
Mere Suspects in Theft. Apparently, large retailers paid off enough lawmakers to pass various sham laws which allow the retailers to shakedown alleged shoplifters. Emphasis on alleged here. No crime must have been proved. The retailers are basically able to attempt to cajole and intimidate these people and attempt to extract ‘pre-legal’ litigation fees.

 Hey, great way to build customer goodwill.

As a guitar player, I’ve spent years associating the Gibson brand with quality, stardom, and generally rocking out. This sad story from Consumerist is somewhat opinion-changing:
Gibson Screws Musician Out Of $10,000 Worth Of Equipment

To summarize - Gibson sponsors a contest with free price of $10k in gear. Then reneges and refuses to give the prize to the winner. Reputation-damaging antics ensue.

 Of couse, I’ve always preferred the Fender sound. And the brand is now looking better as well.

I suppose everyone has heard the chestnut about how the Chinese character for danger is the same as that for opportunity (a chestnut which, by the way, is apparently wrong). Well, I think there is some truth to the idea that crises reveal opportunities. More to the point, it’s in a crisis where you really reveal your true colors.

Back in the proverbial day, when Johnson & Johnson’s lucrative Tylenol brand was threatened by a nutcase bent on poisoning people, the company did the unthinkable (but right) thing– they yanked all of the product from the shelves, even though 99.9% of the product was certainly untainted. The entire episode remains to this day a case study in how to handle a crisis. The brand emerged better, stronger, faster for the company’s crisis handling.

Very recently, mighty Google has had a crisis, albeit of smaller proportions. I’ve blogged about the new Web Optimizer tool which is part of Adwords. Well, a week ago, an alert started popping up in Adwords management area alerting users to a flaw in the optimizer code. Apparently a pretty serious flaw which could allow someone to take over your page for god-knows-what nefarious purposes. I soon got emails from Google on this problem as well, with instructions for a fix.

I assumed that was the end of it, until today, when I actually got a phone call from someone at Google. Actually, I have 2 separate Adwords accounts, so I got 2 separate phone calls from 2 different people. They wanted to be sure that I had installed the patch. Now, I’m sure most people are aware that Google is probably the most telephone-averse company on the planet. You can’t seem to call them about anything. So I’m really surprised that they were calling little-old-me to be sure I got the fix (necessitated by their buggy code, but still). More than a few people use Adwords, and I’m sure there are quite a few who use Optimizer. Assuming they are calling all of the optimizer users… well, that’s an awful lot of people to call. It couldn’t have been an easy to decision to make, nor to implement.

Google’s been getting increasing amounts of heat lately, ever since they have started to become the monopolistic monolith which Microsoft once was. And people start to refer to their famous ‘don’t be evil’ motto with scorn. But really, can you recall a single time in the past 20 years when Microsoft called you to make sure you had installed a security patch? A single instance? During one of the perhaps 2,000,000 episodes where they exposed you to serious security risks through buggy software?

Neither can I. True colors in a crisis… words to remember, and live by.

What’s the most reviled industry these days? Let’s take a look at a few top contenders:

• Oil industry– raking in the kabillions and costing me $40 to fill up my tank.
• Airlines– friendly skies? Yeah, right.
• Music labels– keep prosecuting teenagers for downloading a few songs, way to build up that customer support.
• Wireless carriers– ooh, here we have a great one. Limit your choices, lock you in by contract rather than making you want to stick with them because they’re awesome, keep the US on ancient cellphone technology, inhibit features of handsets… the list goes on and on. Wired has a post on 10 Reasons To Hate Cellphone Carriers which is a great walk down misery lane.

The great blog Consumerist has probably the world’s most thorough and detailed post on what to do when customer service goes bad. Check out The Ultimate Consumerist Guide To Fighting Back (Revised Edition). Unfortunately, one thing that is for certain is that this post will come in handy for tons of people!

Way back in January, I posted on my terrible experience with the NFL Fieldpass program (Cancel my !$%&!# account!!!). I find it sad but amusing that when I look at my site traffic logs, I see that people pretty regularly find their way to that post through Google. So clearly I’m not alone…

One of the things you can be most certain of if  your job involves any measure of customer contact (and therefore customer service) is that you’ll eventually have to face a ticked off customer. Some people handle this well, others don’t. Obviously, there is a talent to dealing with the angry. Along comes a post 7 Tips for Resolving Conflicts Quickly and Peacefully which lists some great ideas. I think the most important one is this– if you’re facing someone who is on a rant, the best step is usually to let them go. They’ve got something to burn off, and they’re not going to stop until they do. Eventually, they sputter out, and then you can deal with them normally.

This is kind of hilarious — according to various internet sources (and you know how dependable those are, so take it with a grain of salt until you see this confirmed somewhere reliable, like FOX News) Apple is going to start charging $5 to enter the Apple Stores. Why? To reduce the hordes of looky-loo’s and gawker’s coming to fawn over iPhones and iPods without buying anything, and just getting in the way of dedicated Mac geeks who need to belly up to the Genius Bar.

As Apple goes Disney, don’t fret- your $5 will surely get you entertainment. Perhaps a ride on the Apple stock price roller coaster? The squirt gun game where you blow up a balloon shaped like Steve Ballmer’s head until it blows up? A discount on a t-shirt which says “My cell phone provider is spying for the government“?

Don’t stop me, I’m on a roll. Actually, I’m just jealous. Imagine the mojo your brand has when you can make people PAY you for the privilege of shopping at your store!

Through Digg I came across a blog post called  4 Signs Your Customers Hate You. Good post referring to a Harvard Business Review article on companies which profit by policies which tick off their customers (for example, miss your credit card payment due date by a day, get hit with a $25 late fee– of COURSE the credit card company is hoping every single one of its customers will be a day or two late every time!).

The post cites 4 signs you may be guilty of these sort of practices:

1. Your most profitable customers would tend to be the ones most unhappy with you, rather than the ones who like you the most.
2. You create rules which you would prefer customers to break (ie. the credit card payment due date), since it is profitable for you if they do so.
3. You create rules which are hard for your customers to understand.
4. Your preferred method of ensuring customer retention: contracts locking them in.

It’s all well and good until a new competitor comes along and lets the sunshine in. Then you’re dead in the water. I’m talking to you, cell phone service providers.

I had dinner with clients at a well-known, rather upscale steak chain restaurant. Let’s call it ‘Chuth’s Rris’. My first time at this particular establishment. Our waiter made several recommendations. Oddly enough, each of his recommendations just happened to be the most expensive item in the category. Glass of wine? (not that he was asked, and not that he asked my preferences)… “I recommend such-and-such” (at $20 a glass). He actually capped that one off with “It’s our best, and believe me, I  know a lot about wine.” Me too- there’s red, there’s white, and don’t drink it out of plastic cups or add ice.

Steak cut (not that he was asked)… “I recommend this one”… Appetizers, salads, on and on it went, with not-so-subtle nudges towards the priciest item, with no justification other than the nudge itself.

You wouldn’t expect to feel nickel-and-dimed at a place where steak entrees run $35/per, not including the potato. But there you go.

I relate this story today because I think it says something about how (not) to upsell, and it goes back to the primary rule of marketing - “What’s in it for me?”, with ‘me’ being the customer, not the salesman. It’s not enough to tell someone what they should buy. You need them to believe that they want it. In fact, if you’re really good, you can make them believe they chose it. And if you’re great, you would know them so well, you’d be bringing them what they wanted before they knew they wanted it.

Another potential lesson from the story is that you can put together a great marketing plan, and build a great reputation, but you’ve got to deliver on it day after day. And every day, you run the risk that your plan will be undermined where the rubber meets the road by the people who have contact with your customers. Your reputation precedes you, and so they enter your doors expecting to be blown away, and leave feeling a little bit used. Ouch.

I drove 5 hours tonight, so I don’t have any recommendations for avoiding this, just observations.

PS The steak was great, albeit overcooked.

I posted a few days ago about Customer (dis)satisfaction sensitivity, surmising that some types of companies may be more (or less) susceptible to word of mouth than others, largely depending on the competitiveness of the market and how well established they are. I also posted The new math of customer satisfaction regarding how the internet has changed the rules of how much impact a happy or mad consumer can potentially have.

Todd Hollander alerted me to a post on his Customer Satisfaction blog which outlines thoughts on these same issues. In Should your company be obsessed with customer satisfaction? he makes the case that companies need to recognize the effects these new technologies can have and really focus on making customers happy. It’s a recommended read if you’re interested in customer satisfaction. (And if you’re not, you probably won’t be in business very long).