Posts Tagged ‘customer service’

I have a story to tell. One that has been burning a hole in my stomach for six months now. That’s right, six months. Count them with me February, March, April. May, June, and July. Oh but wait, this story hasn’t been burning a hole in my stomach, it’s been burning my eyes. I’ve been waiting six months for glasses I can see out of. (The glasses that I could see clearly out of have been at the bottom of Donnor Lake for almost a year now, but that is another story, and it has nothing marketing related ….)

Here are a few lessons for all the businesses that provide product or service to the customer. It is a rather long story so I am going to split it into two parts …

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Viewers can smell a rat. They know the stock photos on your site aren’t your employees, and they can tell if you have ulterior motives behind your P.R. messages.

I just watched a user-created video that’s gone viral on Youtube. It’s a video filmed by a passenger on a flight that’s been grounded for hours by a report of lightning. He storms up to the cockpit and berates the pilots for a while- demanding to be let off the plane and claiming that he’s even called his congressman to issue a complaint. From what I can gather so far, most of the media outlets have covered this as your rank and file “David and Goliath” angry-consumer video, but the public seems to differ. Usually these kind of videos incite public outcries- but this one is going in reverse.

Why?

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Update: I wanted to provide a quick update to my last post regarding the Blockbuster Total Access email blunder. I just received another email from them for yet another coupon. But this time they got it right. Look what was sitting in the middle of the email:

Blockbuster is getting closer to creating near-perfect customer service. But they are not there yet….

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I am going to have to second Stoney’s post about Blockbuster Total Access taking another misstep because something similar just happened to me. I joined an online forum and received a crazy no help welcome email. But first a little background to explain why I wanted to join this yet unnamed forum.

Living in Reno NV, the Angora Fire that is burning up the South Lake Tahoe area is dominating the news coverage. I happened to be up there at South Lake rock climbing this past Sunday when the fire broke out. We had no idea there was a fire burning until we drove down (West) Luther Pass on Highway 89 towards Highway 50. We didn’t pull over with all the “looky-loo” rubber neckers who were gawking at the Angora Fire. We just drove on, continuing our way toward home. The chaos had not yet ensued and traffic moved smoothly along North bound Highway 50 … South bound was not so smooth but that isn’t part of my story. We stopped on the Nevada side of South Lake Tahoe (it is a village) for a cold brewski before making our way down the final push to the valley floor. During this time I received a call from home on my cell phone.

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Yeah, I know. I’ve been talking about Blockbuster a lot lately. I’ve already covered Blockbuster’s UVP (which I’m very impressed with) and then followed that up with their disasterous customer service survey. So why another post about Blockbuster? Because they provide a perfect real-world example of a company struggling to get it right. Sometimes they get the DVD in the tray and sometimes they don’t. (That analogy sounded better in my head!)

One of the neat features of Blockbuster Total Access is that along with being able to exchange mail envelopes for a free DVD in the store is that they also send you a monthly coupon that can be used for either a DVD or a game. Real quick, let’s do the math on all of this. I pay just about $10 per month for the one DVD at a time plan. Let’s say that I only watch movies on the weekend so every week I get my DVD in the mail, watch it, exchange it for a freebie in the store and then wash, rinse and repeat the next weekend and so on. That’s two movies I watch per per week, eight per month plus a ninth movie (or game) using the free coupon. I’m paying just over $1.10 per movie.

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