Do you value your customers or your shareholders more?

I have a comparison to talk about today between how Telecom NZ (no link provided on purpose) and Genesis Energy bill for their services. It shows very clearly the very different thinking each company has about who is important to them. One values its shareholders above all else. The other values their customers above all else.

I get a bill from both companies each month, not a huge bill comparatively to other companies but I am a customer all the same. Telecom sends a bill each month with a payment due date. If you miss this date you get a “5% penalty payment” added to your bill. Genesis on the other hand provides a bill and a “prompt payment discount” if you pay before the due date.

It is obvious to me that Telecom’s “We will punish you and get more out of you” attitude is all about increasing the shareholders return. Genesis Energy on the other hand stands out as a company that sees its customers as extremely valuable.

Ultimately if it is a prompt payment discount or a penalty it is the same thing. A company just factors in the cost differences. In fact a prompt payment discount is just a nice way of saying penalty. But most importantly it creates a different feeling amongst your customers. They feel special and want to pay on time.

If I had to choose between paying a $100 bill to Telecom NZ or a $100 bill to Genesis Energy. I know which one I would pay.

Who was the stupid idiot that thought up traffic lights for on ramps

My motorway on ramp now has traffic lights. It was an idea thought up by some stupid bright spark thinking that it would make a huge difference to traffic flow. Well they were right it has made a huge NEGATIVE impact on traffic flow.

I remember when it was being talked about saying to friends (well anyone that would listen to me) that all it would do was take the traffic off the motor way and send it back into the streets of the city. And sure enough within days of the traffic lights being active there is a huge traffic jam back into the streets.

Mission accomplished, it is definitely a smoother ride on the motorway now. Problem is it now takes 20 minutes to get on the motorway and adds 15 minutes to your total trip home. How can a traffic expert be so dumb?

If marketing isn’t of value is it SPAM?

I am using the word SPAM in a very wide way today. SPAM is pretty obvious when associated with email. If you don’t want the email and you don’t know where it came from then it is probably SPAM.

I have been thinking of late about all the marketing that flies around the world either, physical, ad based or internet. How much of it actually provides value to prospects or customers?

More to the point if I get a marketing piece and it isn’t of value to me, what does it make it? Does this mean it is SPAM and an offensive interruption to my day? Take for example the almost daily offer from our suppliers for training on this product or that product. Most of the training is free, and for the supplier this kind of marketing is of value to them. They are hoping I will sell more of their stuff. But how valuable is it to me? Do they even bother to find out, and can it be considered SPAM or not?

I get tons of Junk mail in my mailbox. Most of it is of no value what so ever to me. Does this make it SPAM? What about advertising on TV? Again almost 99% of all advertising I see is of no value to me whatsoever so does that make it SPAM? And almost all of the radio advertising on the station I listen to is of no value to me at all.

My question is this. If we have such a great and intense dislike for SPAM that comes through to our email box, why do we tolerate the huge volumes of SPAM that comes from every other medium. What makes other advertising that is of no value to us ok?

I believe the answer is that we tolerate the rest of the SPAM around us because we are used to it. Each of the other mediums except email SPAM has grown up with us. It started small and has grown from there. Email SPAM was new and came like a tidal wave. This is why we tolerate all the other mediums.

retail salespeople, the good the bad and the OK

We went shopping in the weekend for a new bed. We were definitely due for one and found a great bed. It took a lot longer than I had hoped but of course when you buy something as important as a bed you want to get it right.

Anyway it highlighted an interesting thing in retail sales worth talking about. Firstly let me state that in my opinion retail is a hard game as a sales-person to be in. We went to 5 stores in total, and each store we were served with a range of salespeople from ok to really good. They were all helpful and polite, and pointed us in the direction we needed to go.

Once we had chosen a bed we actually felt bad for the salespeople that didn’t get our sale. They were all helpful. However we weren’t sorry enough to forego buying the bed we wanted. So it posed a question, why have a good salesperson? Why not just have some cheap don’t know much person working the floor?

Here is my reason. We had two OK sales people. The first took us to a bed way out of our budget. Although we told him our budget he didn’t probe the number enough to see whether he could sell us a better bed. Put it down to inexperience or whatever, the fact remained that once we had tried the bed out of our budget … none of his other beds within budget felt that good. So he missed out on the sale.

The second OK salesperson didn’t bother to really ask what we wanted. He pointed us to their special and that was about it. Ultimately he didn’t care enough to find out more about our needs and we walked out. Still polite but these two stores with OK sales people were not going to get our sale … mainly because the sales approach was substandard to the other three.

The other three salespeople were very good. Each had a good offering at comparable pricing. We could only choose one out of the three options. And here’s the point, they were all as good as each other. We chose from one of the three good sales people. The OK salesperson didn’t get a look in.

So although only one could get our sale, all the very good sales people were in the running. And that is why you need a good salesperson. Ultimately the sale of the bed was based on which option felt the best for us. The salesperson put their store (and offering) in the running, or excluded it from consideration.

Here’s the round up

A bad salesperson drives your customers away. They feel like purchasing somewhere else, almost in spite of the sales person.

An OK salesperson will drive the customer to the best deal, without finding out whether it will fit. They will only hit the mark if the sale happens to be what the customer really wants.

A good salesperson will keep your store in the running through providing the customer with options that best suit the customers identified needs. These guys keep you in the running.

The very good salespeople put you in the running but also provide the customer with a sense of obligation to them. If the sale goes elsewhere, the customer almost feels guilty that it wasn’t purchased from them.

Xtra’s 45 minute wait message

Yesterday Telecom New Zealand’s Xtra service was facing more problems for its customers connecting (see article). This is bad in itself but what surprised me was the people saying that they were getting a message on the call centre helpdesk that calls would be answered in about 45 minutes.

The 45 minutes is what this post is really about. In New Zealand we have to handle sub-standard Broadband anyway so the fact it broke is nothing new. However there must be some way that Telecom with its huge resources could at least reduce if not eliminate the 45 minute wait.

In 2007 it is unacceptable to have your customers wait 45 minutes to answer the phone. One person I spoke to found a way around. They hung up and called the business desk through their company and got the business desk on to it for her. A simple side swipe to get the result. Why couldn’t Telecom think up something like that.

“Hey guys Telecom management here, we have an emergency on the broadband helpdesk. Divert all resources to that please.” Sure it would have probably not helped in getting broadband up and running any faster, however at least customers could get through, vent their frustrations to someone, and feel looked after.

More often than not, if a customer can get through quickly and is told about the emergency or big problem they can handle it.

More often than not if a customer has to wait 45 minutes on hold before they get service, no matter what you say it isn’t going to please them.

Another solution. Contract an emergency response call centre. Once call loads get over a certain amount the extra resource kicks in. Yes this call centre probably wouldn’t be able to solve the problem as well as the main helpdesk (if at all). However again the customer at least feels like you care, can hear from someone in the company that all in their power is being done to fix the problem.

I repeat in 2007 no one should ever wait 45 minutes to have a support phone call answered.

Website music and noise etc

I personally in most circumstances can’t stand websites that have sound. It annoys me because it is really distracting and very much an interruption to my personal zone. I often click links while waiting for people to answer their phones, or I open 3-4 links at once then have no idea which one the sound is coming from.

This is probably a pet dislike, I am sure many people out there find it interesting. The reason I bring it up is that today I found an exception to this rule. Generally I am chasing down the mute button to get rid of the sound. This time as I went to mute I didn’t. So what made this site different? Well take a look at the link below.

www.marinescape.co.nz

To me this site actually provided a glimpse of relaxation in a busy day. It provided enough interest to make me stop and take notice. To me this has been a truly enlightening experience. Not just the music, but how someone has used this music carefully to entice me to look further.

Congratulations to the designer.

These days it’s not only about being good, but also being convenient.

My wife said this to me today as we walked back to the car after getting her a hair appointment. We have just moved into the area a few months ago and she was due to get a haircut. As we walked by a shop we went in and before you knew it she had an appointment. Simple as that.

After talking to the lady in the shop for a while she mentioned that because she was right across from a school that alot of her customers found it very convenient to drop off the kids and then get a haircut. This prompted the lovely title above from my wife. It was obvious that she was good, often you can just tell.

What was more obvious was that because of her convenience she had a booming trade. In fact she went so far as to say that it was quiet on the holiday’s because all the mum’s are away. This has really hit home to me the importance of being convenient these days. It is right up there with being good.

If you can have good and convenience you will win hands down. Being good in many industries can lose to being average if there is enough resistance when trying to acquire the good. So the real questions (assuming you are already good) is not how can I turn good into very good (although important) but rather it should be:

“How do we make our good product or service convenient”

An easy way to deal with excess customers … hang up on them

I have just called someone to book an appointment and you can guess what happened. The phone just hung up. As soon as I pushed option 1 “to book an appointment” the phone call ended. Thinking this may just be one of those lovely Telecom glitches I called back. And again the call ended once I pushed option 1.

Being interested I called back a 3rd and 4th time. Again the call ended when I pushed option 1. I got the distinct impression that they didn’t want to speak to me. I suppose I will have to try again tomorrow.

I personally don’t think it is a great idea to just hang up on people if you can’t speak to them. At the very least a message saying you are busy at present, or if it is out of hours an out of hours message. I called at 3.30pm which isn’t out of normal business hours. Maybe the out of hour’s message kicks in at 5.00pm.

A little bit of thought can go along way to keeping customers happy. The world today has too many options for us to think that just because they are already a customer we don’t need to treat them with respect.

Interesting to note is that I was making an appointment to close our account.

Self checkout now at a supermarket near you

I just went into a local supermarket this morning. As I went through the checkouts I found that they had installed “self checkout” checkouts. It was an interesting novelty. Next time I go through I will give them a go I think. It got me wondering though as to why the supermarket has gone to these “self checkouts”.

Would it be as a way of saving money, or is it to provide a better service to its customers. The guy that I saw using the checkout was having to think hard about his options. It wasn’t a stand and wait option. He had to figure out how to process his avocado (it didn’t have a barcode), and he had to figure out (at least the first time) how to process his pick and mix items.

So the question still beckons, is it really about creating a better service for the customers? I imagine that even once you are skilled at processing your own groceries you would still be slower than the checkout operator. And what happens if the “self checkout” gets popular, you will still end up waiting in line.

It seems to me that these self help things while a novel and interesting use of technology they are simply a way to cut costs. The “self checkouts” don’t require a $10.50 per hour person. If you can reduce your staff bill by 2 people that is $40,000 plus in savings each and every year. It appears that the supermarkets are just catching up to the services stations policy of no one on court.

While it probably wont affect many people’s buying habits. It will be interesting to see how long the lines start to get.

Junk Mail vs Spam – which one would you want?

I have been thinking today about SPAM (I don’t really get any so I am lucky), and Junk mail in my mail box (I get tons of this stuff). I was wondering if I could have one or the other which one I would rather have less of. It is a bit of a hard question because I don’t have to clear 100 odd emails out of my inbox each day.

I imagine though that I would rather have Junk mail. Why because at least it is simple to gather it all and throw it all away. With Spam I imagine that you have to be more careful that you don’t throw away legitimate emails.

The next big thing will be Mobile phone advertising, I think I would still prefer Junk mail over that medium too.