Keep Your Promises

Consumers will actually tolerate all kinds of things, if you set expectations properly. It's popular to talk about providing amazing customer service as a prerequisite for success, but it's not.

You do need to provide a certain baseline level of service. Above that, it's a trade-off: do you spend the money to invest in systems and people that make your service better, or do you save that money and let it flow to your bottom line?

The truth is, it all depends on what that investment buys you. If you've staked out the niche of being the service leader in your market, you need to make those investments. That can make a lot of sense in a commodity market. I wonder how much business Amazon.com gets because their ordering process is just perfect - you get all the information you need, you only get the email notifications you ask for, and so on. They probably avoid having people run off to Barnes and Noble to save 50 cents on an item just making buying from them so easy and so pleasant.

On the other hand, if you have an amazing product, you can get away with being okay. That may sound like heresy - but if a customer knows what to expect when they do business with you, and those expectations are met, then that is probably good enough, and spending a fortune on enhancements probably won't pay off.

Let me give you an example. I recently needed to open a new small business checking account. I shopped online (of course) and discovered some interesting things. The bigger banks make it very easy to get the process going online, but then charge you $10-15 per month for the privilege of using your money. Smaller local banks don't charge those fees, but the web sites are not as slick and you often can't open an account online.

I found a local bank here in Houston that seemed like the best of both worlds - no fees, and online account applications. So I completed the application, which ended with a screen telling me what documents I would need to provide them, and promising that someone would be in touch to finish the procees within three business days. That was repeated twice. Within three business days.

About six business days went by. I didn't want to start over, so I called the 800 number on the web confirmation page (which I'd printed). The person I spoke to there (after some voice menu bingo) told me that Evan was handling my account, and that she'd get him.

Instead I got Evan's voicemail. I left a message explaining who I was, that I would really like to be one of their customers, and could he please call me.

Two days went by with no further reply. Then I got an email from Evan explaining that he was "trying to get in touch with me" and that I should call him to complete my account application.

Unfortuantely for Evan, in the meantime I'd gone back to comparison shopping online, and opened an account at another bank.

Here's the thing: having to wait three days for someone to call you is not an amazing experience, but it's not that bad either. I would have happily gone with that bank had someone called me and completed the process. But I ran out of patience, and I found myself wondering this: if they can't meet the deadlines they set themselves when I'm trying to give them business, how resonsive will they be once my money's there and it's a real pain to leave?

The other bank had no online application for business checking. I just drove over to a nearby branch and did it. That's no my preferred way of doing business, but guess what - they set my expectations (you must come to our office to do this), and when I went to their office, it was done in under 30 mintues.

Fabulous online service? No. Setting expectations and meeting them? Yes. So they've got my business.

As for the other bank - their investment in their web site and their online application appears to be money flushed down the toilet, because they begin a relationship with a potential customer by making promises and then breaking them.

Don't overcomplicate things. Figure out what you can do, tell your customers what that is, and do it. If you can't do it, don't promise. Don't say you'll do something that your competitors do unless you really can; you're better off finding something attainable that sets you apart and then delivering.

The Basics. Not Delivered.

I've watched the new AT&T (formerly SBC) branding campaign unfold the same way I'd watch a car crash on the freeway. You don't want to look; it's just horrible. But you can't tear your eyes away.

The billboards are bad enough - this, that, and the other "delivered," reaching a point of sheer silliness when the ads talk about areas in which AT&T has no services of any kind. The "best" of these is the "Blogging delivered" ad from a company that not only has no blog related services, but publishes no blogs of its own.

That one popped up again on the main page of the New York Times web site today. I clicked on it, hoping I'd find that I was wrong - that there was some blogging-related content on the AT&T site, that my well-paid peers over at AT&T were really not that stupid.

No such luck. They are running expensive ads that take you to a generic SBC/AT&T web page. No landing page. No content that relates to the ad you just clicked. Nothing, in other words, to make the ads useful in any way other than to tell you that yes, AT&T exists. Unless you were wondering.

It's scary to see a company with the resources of AT&T running an expensive campaign without even doing the most basic things to get some benefit from it. Shocking. And you know their agency is making a bundle off of it.

If that's how decision making at AT&T works, it does at least explain why my phone service is so crappy, though.

Getting the Basics Right

A friend passed along this email invitation to a lunch event sponsored by a local marketing group. They decided to do some basic mail merge to personalize the invitation. The result:

Greetings NOT FOUND

If you're not already familiar with the [Local Marketing Group], here's your chance to learn more about a great organization. [John Doe] and [Jim Poe] of [Fancy Creative Ad Guys], leaders in integrated business-to-business branding and communications, have graciously agreed to speak at the [LMG] luncheon this Thursday. I'm on the Board of the [LMG], and they've agreed to extend the member's only $25 luncheon price to anybody who mentions this email. What a deal! Please join us this Thursday and learn more about ROI that resonates in the board room.

Ouch. I thanked Mr. Found for passing this along (well, I just call him Not, since we're close). How embarrassing. Especially coming from a marketing group.

No to mention the bad apostrophe in "member's."

The basics matter, folks.

Wasted Search Dollars

Everyone loves sponsored search marketing, using things like Google Adwords, right? Well, maybe not the users, who get to watch marketers throw their pay per click fees away while getting really frustrated.

I just spent quite a bit of time looking for a cargo van rental. I need to get a van here in Houston for the day. We'll drive about 150 miles in it shuttling stuff around.

When you do a Google search on "rent cargo van houston," you get a lot of results. Most of them lead to web sites of companies that don't rent cargo vans.

Why is this? Marketers are forgetting to use negative keywords. If you rent passenger vans, but not cargo vans, you should do a negative search so that your ads don't appear for cargo van searches (and you don't pay for all the clicks I just used up for these folks).

Even more egregious, though, are the companies that do rent cargo vans but won't let you reserve them online. (Hello, Budget!) After making my through several maze-like web sites, picking locations and dates and whatnot, I was told several times that I had to call the local location.

That's frustrating. It's also not helpful if you're searching outside of business hours (when most of us have time for this kind of thing).

I was ready to make a reservation. The web sites of a number of national rental companies foiled me completely. In the end, I used something that worked much better: the yellow pages.

I hope those folks enjoy paying the bills for their web sites and search sponsorships, though.

Ratcheting Up Commitment

One of the most important things to remember when you're trying to get people to respond to your marketing efforts is that commitment should start small and grow. (Not unlike relationships!)

In practical terms, this means that when you ask for a commitment from a customer - giving you their email address, registering on your site, handing over a credit card number - you need to make sure you've built an appropriate relationship with them. How do you do that? By talking to them, giving them what they need to be comfortable with you, showing them how they'll benefit from doing business with you, and by never coming on too strong.

A good example of the wrong way to do it is a site called eMusic. I've heard it mentioned on several blogs as a great place to buy interesting music in MP3 form. I'm a potential customer.

But eMusic comes across like the guy who shows up on the first date with a wedding ring. My first question about them was, "Okay, what music do you have?" And the only way to get an answer is to sign up.

Yes, there's a free trial. But so what? I don't want to sign up, pick a plan, offer a payment method, and download software until I know they have music I want. So the whole process ends at step one - no eMusic for me, I'm just not ready to commit to them (even for a trial) until I know what the product is.

It would have been easy for eMusic to let you browse their catalog of songs and see what you'd get when signing up. The site itself would become a great sales tool. (It would also keep people who really aren't interested from signing up and then cancelling their accounts.)

I'm not a commitment-phobe - I just want to know what I'm getting into. By failing to tell me, eMusic has short-circuited their sales process and possibly lost a customer.

Blog Influence?

I've had this one tagged for comment for quite a while now: a piece from the Houston Chronicle's TechBlog about the fallout from a blogger writing about the crappy service he got from Dell.

That's widely credited with creating a firestorm of criticism of Dell that measurably changed the perception of Dell's service (for the worse). Interestingly, the blogger himself doesn't see what he did as causing much of anything, but just as an indicator of existing frustration with Dell.

Are blogs influential enough to have a real affect on a company's reputation? If so, why does it sometimes happen? There are no definitive answers to these questions yet, but as events like the Dell imbroglio unfold, we'll be learning more about how it works.