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Did you get my email?

One can learn a lot from suppliers.

The things they do well will give you a positive customer experience. So do the same to your customers.

But you might hate some suppliers for how they treat you. Avoid making the same mistakes.

Here’s what I can’t stand, and too often encounter with one of my suppliers:

I put effort in my request for proposal, trying to detail as much as possible what I want.

I send it by mail. And that’s it. I don’t get any sign of life for a few days.

So I call.

– Me: “Did you get my email?”.

– Supplier: “Yes, of course. We’ll have a look at it and will answer you by Monday.”

– Me: “OK, thanks.”

On Monday: no answer.

On Tuesday: no answer.

On Wednesday, I call back: “Oh, sorry, we’re so loaded, you know, we’ll send our proposal today.”

Look, I don’t f@#%ing care that you’re loaded. I just want to know where I’m at!

So, upon receiving my request, a simple mail saying: “Thanks for your request. You may expect an answer by next Friday”, would satisfy.

And then you send me your answer not by Friday, but the Wednesday before. And I would be extremely happy.

The difference for me? In both cases I get my answer on Wednesday, but scenario 1 I’m pissed of, scenario 2 I’m happy.

The difference for my supplier? No difference in workload, but Scenario 1 he has an unhappy customer who will never recommend him.

Scenario 2 a happy customer who will recommend him.

Lesson learned: be responsive, underpromise and overdeliver.

The internet remembers

Is something I will remember from now on.

We have all heard of stories from students posting silly things during their ‘wild’ years. Silly things that keep following them into adulthood when they start looking for a job.

But how can this ‘memory’ affect customer interaction and customer experience?

Well, I have actually learnt from making the following mistake myself. Here’s how it goes.

You have an excellent idea for a promo.

You promote it via e-mail marketing, on facebook, via twitter…

And you’ve made a special landing page and promo code. So far so good.

The promotion is temporary, and so is the promocode.

When the promotional period is over, the promocode and landing page are disactivated.

Nothing wrong, right? Wrong! Suddenly, three months after the promo was finished someone came across my tweet, obviously liked the tweet, and retweeted.

But then when he/she, and others followed the short url… there was no landing page and no promo.

Conclusion: it was a good tweet, a good promo, but these last visitors clearly did not have a positive experience.

So take this into account, and make sure that when the internet remembers, you have something to tell.

Lack of empathy? Blindness?

I got quite annoyed yesterday at the supermarket.

Having to pay, looking for my wallet in my pockets, the cashier was just looking at the price on her cash register, waiting to hit some button.

My groceries were laying there. Waiting for me to finally be able to bag them (if I managed to grab a bag).

In the meantime, I was getting looks from the queue.

The cashier could have turned a smile on my face, by bagging my groceries for me, in stead of numbly looking at the cash register.

That would have been a nice customer experience, for me and for the queue…

Unprofessional Call Handling

Practically on a daily basis I get the following type of calls from some call center:

Agent: “Bonjour Monsieur, … de la société X à l’appareil. J’aurais voulu parler au responsable pour la … s.v.p.”

Me: “Sorry, but I don’t speak French.”

Agent hangs up without another word….

Needless to say this does not deliver a positive experience with company X.

And X is quite often a leader in its field. If you are X, confoo will be happy to train or monitor the people working for you.

We can also make mystery calls if you work with inbound call centers.

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