one part truth, two parts mixer

Being thoughtful

This email from Wired arrived this morning. All the more powerful because it was unexpected. We shouldn't be waiting for our customers to tell us what's wrong all the time, but instead pre-empting and addressing their problems. Nice one Wired.

Finally!

I was quite happy to see this when I checked into Amazon today:

I remember once recieving a ricer in a box that could have fit a microwave. Grrr. Seeing as I broke said ricer yesterday with my superhuman strength, I may order another one to see if they really have changed.

Recharge and weep

For only the second time in my life I managed to get the train ticket booking system to work in my favour and get a first class return to Liverpool for the princely sum of £43. While the Virgin first class lounge at Euston isn't really happening, you can buy cheap drinks and stock up on mini-cans of Virgin cola should you so desire.  Anyway they did have this nifty charging station which I quite liked:

Very useful. Except no HTC charger as of yet :(

Instant response

I've been wondering for a while whether companies will start automatically responding to customer complaints and it seems that yes, it is a growing thing. With the technology to see when your brand is spoken about online readily available, it seems like the right thing to do.

It was interesting to see this tweet by Tom.

I hadn't really considered that it may not feel special if everyone does it.In the future, will consumers soon expect that they don't have to contact customer services directly and how will companies respond?

Oi Sainsbury's, NO!

Pain au chocolat for petit pains? Chinese-style pork (sounds disgusting) for lamb cutlets? These are two of the replacements made by Sainsbury's in my online shop today. Non-sensical, annoying. Can I please have a button on the online shop that says 'if you don't have what I want, then don't bother' or some sort of option to suggest a replacement myself?

Why the hell not?

 A little Twitter story.
 
Today the darling, darling Stephen Fry tweeted the above. Seeing as everyone on Twitter follows him, he got a call which led him to tweet this:

Which I'm sure led a lot of people to make comments like the one young George made:

Obviously Stephen Fry acknoweledged this:

I understand why the people at Epson offered Mr. Fry help so quickly, hell, they probably offered him a new printer. Which was the right thing to do. But equally they should be reaching out to all their vocal and disgruntled customers and trying to make it right, whether that's by offering a quicker route to customer services, money off or tea and a cupcake. To have your complaint recognised by the company without even having to contact them will usually make you soften your stance immediately (unless it's ParcelForce. Or British Gas).

Scouring twitter, forums and Facebook should be a function of every customer services department. Don't wait for your customers to come to you (because let's face it, you don't always make it wasy for them to do that), go to them instead.

In reply

A little while ago I had a little rant about the salad place Tossed. Seeing as they didn't respond immediately after getting a Google alert about my rant, I thought I'd take my complaints to them personally. I made three points:

1. It was unfair to charge for swapping ingredients
2. It was unfair to charge for heating up
3. There's nothing close to uniform measurement (and if you get a stingy server and ask for more, you have to pay extra)

Fairplay, the owner and founder Vincent emailed me at 10pm that evening, which I have to say I was quite impressed by. He'd actually emailed earlier to let me know he was busy and would email me later - and actually stuck to his word.

The answers he gave in a nutshell were:

1. Basically that the prices they charge for the ingredient groups are a mean of that group's ingredients. Tossed's worry is that if you allow people to swap ingredients from their house salads everyone will swap cheap lettuce for expensive vine tomatoes, putting Tossed out of pocket.
2. It's the taxman's fault!
3. Admitted fault and said he was investigating how to make it more uniform. 

I'm still not convinced by his answer for number 1, but fairplay for his other answers. And we did notice they were 'tossing' our salads differently the day after our email exchange.

I got a free wrap and smoothie for my troubles and they also organised a company-wide staff discount of 10% last week, which I think was a nice touch - although I understand it's good for them, it has generated a lot of goodwill to the brand in my corner. How to win over annoyed customers, part 1. Now, for British Gas to make a similar gesture...

More complaints please, we're British

I'm sorry that I've been very ranty (is that even a word?) over the last week or so, but hopefully this will be the last one. Everyone has been going mad over Tossed, the salad place, since it opened a couple of doors down from our office. There are a couple of things they do which I find offensive:

1. Charge 50p to heat up your wrap.
2. Charge you for swapping ingredients out of their house salads and wraps - they are made up on the spot not pre-prepared so it wouldn't be too difficult to swap a like-for-like.

For a brand that trades in the Innocent/Pret lovely food brand category, those are pretty unfriendly things to do. So even though the banana custard is really good, I may have to stop my patronage and stick with Pure California (less options, happy about swapping).

Ugh, sort it out

I found this mildly annoying. I was rating my friends short film (btw watch it) and I would actually like to hear more about the competition, but my only options are hear nothing or hear everything. Why can I not hear more about Virgin Media Shorts without being bombarded with crap from Virgin Media (which I can't even get) and Virgin Mobile (which I don't even want)? Surely the whole point of doing stuff like this is (or should be) to make people warm towards your brand? A soft-sell if you like. Not just a way to build a database for mailings about mobile offers.

And anyway, it's not like you couldn't advertise to the 'Shorts info only' people. I'm sure you're allowed to put  adverts within emails that are about the thing they've signed up to.

I know I need to stop ranting, but brands need to stop being annoying first.

Slow-burning hatred for Sky continues

Oh, they keep doing things to annoy me.  I noticed the other day that Sky have changed their structure so that the basic TV package is now made up of mix and match packs (I realise they probably did this ages ago, but like most consumers I rarely look at my product once I've purchased it). I figured seeing as I never watch the childrens or nature channels, it would probably be worth getting rid of them. You'd expect to be able to do something like this online, but no - you can only upgrade your product online - to downgrade you have to call. However, there's no option for downgrading your package, so you end up talking to someone that can't help you who then has to transfer you to the 'relevant department'. How frustrating.

I understand that Sky want to keep value-loss at a minimum, but is it not better (and more cost-efficient) to allow people some degree of control over their product? Or is it better to stick to the 'let's make it so frustrating that people will give up' model.

Incidentally, if you downgrade your package, you can't downgrade it again for another month. What's that about? I hate these non-sensical rules that companies put in place. It's so archaic.

I just wish I could live without multi-channel TV, or more specifically SkySports. Come on someone, start a Freeview package where you can get SkySports ontop. You will have at least one customer.