Customer Relationship Marketing – Here’s Someone Who Really Gets It. |
When we think of the stories we exchange with friends and colleagues about our experiences with customer service departments, likely most of them are pretty terrible stories. In fact, I’ll bet you that for every disaster story you tell a friend of how you were ignored or disrespected, your friend has a story to top yours and the conversation escalates into a game of who got screwed the worse. The finale happens when, someone asks the rhetorical question; “whatever happened to the concept of SERVICE in customer service departments?” I have a wonderful answer for you, it’s alive and well and living at Amazon.com Rather that rewrite my experience here, I’ll just copy the actual email I sent to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com telling him about my experience. Dear Jeff, I have to write and tell you, and I’ve been telling others, of a great experience I had yesterday with Amazon. My Kindle inexplicably froze a few days back and all actions I took thereafter failed to restart it. It took an effort to connect to the Kindle Support department, but after talking to a few people, who BTW were quite helpful, I was finally able to talk to Mr. Dennis Michaels, a tech in your Kindle Support center. I explained the problem, and he gave me careful instructions over the phone on how to reset the device, and as I was calling from my office and did not have the Kindle with me, he also sent me a follow up email repeating the instructions he’d just given me so that could take them home that evening. Now here’s the part that blew me away. He told me he was going to call me the next day to make sure that his instructions had worked and to be sure that I was back in business with my Kindle. I was a bit shocked by this so I offered to call or email him myself but no, he insisted that I wouldn’t be able to get to him directly so he took it upon himself to follow up with me. We agreed to talk today at 9:00 am and he said that in the event he missed me at 9:00 he would keep calling me (in Toronto, Canada) until we connected to make sure I was happy. The best part is… he did. It’s a great story, and I don’t know if this is how all of your techs behave; if so then well done. If it isn’t, you might consider my note for tech training. This guy made me love the Amazon experience even though I was having difficulty with your product and he turned a potential negative situation into a customer-building opportunity. The experience reinforced the reasons I chose Amazon for many past purchases and now I have become a loyal and almost evangelical customer for the company. Oh and by the way, the Kindle did reset and is working just fine. So thank you for putting the “service” back into customer service, and congratulations on a job well done. Please make sure you congratulate Dennis – he deserves it. By the way, as the executive of an advertising agency here in Toronto, it takes a lot to impress me and to get me to write stuff like this, so I hope you won’t mind if I use my personal experience here as a teachable moment for some of my clients’ CRM programs in the future. Best Wishes, Jim Kabrajee For those of us who make our living dealing with clients and customers, and those of us who think we know Customer Relationship Marketing, this was a superb lesson demonstrating best practices in the CRM field. Keep it in mind. - Jim Kabrajee, Partner, jimk@marshall-fenn.com |
Archive
Measuring Online Papers |
Why was there surprise when the New York Times announced it was going to begin charging for its online edition? Readership of the paper version is down 3.2%. Ad revenues for the paper version are down. The cost of newsprint and transportation is up. Their online version gets more than 18-million unique visitors — every day! The New York Times is not unique, all newspapers are having trouble. The National Post only publishes online on Mondays. The top ten newspapers in North America all experienced online growth last year, and a decline in their pulp versions. Soon, all papers will be charging for access. It’s inevitable. They simply have no other choice. But overall readership of online versions will decline as a result. Many people browse several online news sources each day. When the publishers begin charging, the public will be more selective and quality publications will remain vital. But what does this change in online readership mean from a measurement standpoint, particularly for clients and agencies? From a PR perspective, there was a simple formula for assessing the impact of a printed article on a client’s business or products. We simply took the circulation numbers for the papers as the number of impressions, and some multiplied it by 2.5 under the misguided belief that each printed copy of a newspaper was read by 2.5 people. This number has more to do with the wishful thinking of PR people than anything based on empirical measurement. Our Media Director actually laughed when I asked her if there was any validity in the 2.5 multiple. So, now that online impressions can be measured and if a publication cooperates, views of a specific article can be accurately assessed, what does this do to the valuation of media coverage for a company or its products? The value of a news item has also been based on its position in the publication. We can console clients that a negative piece is buried at the bottom of page 26, or gloat when a new product launch is featured “above the fold” on B1. Unlike hard copy versions, online papers change their front pages frequently during the day and they often do not mirror the line-up of the print edition. Some people connect directly to a specific article and never see the homepage. Media monitoring and valuation by PR professionals has turned a corner, and we need to be offering our clients a much more insightful and accurate way to judge the effect of earned media. Monitoring the media is certainly easier in an Internet world, but the job of correctly assessing the real value to our clients requires more work and better in-depth analysis. We have to balance online impressions versus print and we have to delineate for clients the value of each individually, not merely lump the numbers together. We’re finding new ways to evaluate coverage for our clients and the result is a much more accurate analysis. - Paul Chater, Partner, paulc@marshall-fenn.com |
Marketing in a Post- Recession |
Budget cuts. Everyone is weary of belt-tightening, smaller budgets and lower revenues. But the apprehension and uncertainty bred by a recession will remain with us for quite a while. Does marketing change in a post recession period? Should it? One thing many pundits foresee is a long, slow climb back and the summit may not be as high as it was pre-recession. This economic downturn is indeed different, and marketers need to adjust to the fact that our world has changed and the strategies and tools you used prior to the recession may no longer be relevant. Consumer confidence and trust are always shaken during a recession. Confidence in the financial systems south of the border were shaken to the core. While Canadian financial institutions weathered the downturn well, the lack of confidence in the US system has spilled across the border. Because so much of Canada’s economy depends on the US, we have to acknowledge that what happens there doesn’t stay there. That means confidence will be tempered and trust will probably take longer to recover than the economy itself. So what does this mean for marketing communicators? You can’t go back. The mindset of the average consumer has changed. There is a whole generation of young consumers for whom this recession was the pin that burst their seemingly endless affluence and prospects for the future. For the young consumer, this recession was not only a first, it was a reality check. We are all tired of bad news, grim forecasts, layoffs, cuts and pessimism. The media loves talking about the recession and it is a common watercooler topic in the office. Look up optimism in a thesaurus and you will likely find only one or two synonyms. You’ll find it has dozens of antonyms. We are almost inured to the gloom which is why successful marketers in the post-recession period will benefit by raising consumer confidence and instilling a new sense of optimism. The marketplace is not going to return soon to the way it was, so your marketing strategies and tactics have to change. Winning back consumers means appealing to their need to feel some optimism. The frequency and intensity of depressing news about the recession from governments, corporations and the media have had a major impact on the basic mindset of the average consumer. You have to counter it with positive, uplifting and hopeful messages in everything you do. Your customers are not just going to come back, they have to be won back. Competition for their trust, loyalty and dollars will never be more intense. Here are Marshall Fenn’s Five Key Points for post-recession marketing:
As the recovery strengthens we’ll look at some successful examples from the marketplace. - Paul Chater, Partner, paulc@marshall-fenn.com |
