communication. community. cognition.
Archive for July, 2009
Be Where the Talk Happens
“Stake out the watercooler all day long, but you can’t make people drink your Kool-aid; however, if you’re not at the watercooler at all, you can be sure no one will sample it.”
Mathematical Marketing
“Ads now feature 3-ply toilet paper, a 4G network and 5-bladed razors; you’ll soon need a math degree to go shopping.”
HELLO Ruby Tuesday!
Jul 20th
Every month or so, we’ve included Ruby Tuesday in our post-church Sunday lunch rotation. (exact location here). The kids are old enough now to not freak out that the chicken comes in real strips instead of molded nuggets, and will occasionally deviate from chicken tenders and find other things on the menu. My daughter even sneaks a piece of lettuce or so from my wife’s salad.
For us, the salad is the visit. The salad bar at Ruby’s is pound-for-pound one of the best you’ll find. I use the arugula mix and spinach leaves as my base, and add on whatever looks fresh from there. For the past several months, we’ve enjoyed the avocado ranch dressing.
Yesterday, it was not there.
I didn’t throw a fit, but I did let loose with a barely audible exhale. A passing server asked if I needed anything, and I told her there was no avocado ranch.
“We don’t make that anymore.”
I asked if there was anyone we needed to write to lobby for the return of the best salad dressing ever, and that I would buy this stuff if it were ever sold in the store. She said “Hang on, I’ll be right back.”
Within 20 seconds, Susan the manager walked up and said “We don’t make it anymore because it doesn’t stay fresh long, but let me see if we have any avocados in the back, and we’ll bring it to your table.”
I was amazed.
Not only did they bring it to the table, they gave me a take-home tub with the rest of the batch.
Good morning, corporate America. This is your Customer Service wake-up call. Rise and shine!
(This bout of sane customer relations is not an anomaly at this location. One day, when my son really wanted pizza, one of the servers made him some using texas toast, marinara, and mozarella already in the kitchen. He got a big tip that day, too…)
Strike Two
Jul 10th
This is not a baseball story, but there is some batting involved. Specifically, the kind of batting that is used in making quilts.
My wife is an award-winning quilter (yes, she is good, and no, she will never admit to being as good as she is), and needed a couple yards of batting for one of her projects. We have a neighbor whose children are younger than ours and doesn’t get to the stores as often, and my wife graciously offered to get her a yard while she was out.
At a certain crafting store that we reserve the right to name later, my wife asked for three yards of batting, cut into two-yard and one-yard lengths.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, we can’t do that.”
What???
Apparently, store policy dictates you can’t get multiple pieces of the same fabric, just one chunk. When asked why this policy was necessary, my wife was told:
“We had a woman come in here and ask for 11 one-yard segments, and she ended up returning two of them for refunds.”
Well, it would seem to me that’s a shady transaction on the part of the buyer, but the appropriate policy adjustment might be to just not refund money on cut cloth. (After all, once it’s cut, you can’t un-cut it…)
My wife proceeded to buy her two yards, and left, determined to buy the other yard of batting at a competing store. While on the road, she called the manager, a clueless 20-something that we will, for the sake of fun, call “Skippy.”
Skippy has very little people skills, even less managerial aptitude, and from what we can determine, it’s a toss-up as to whether he knows less about marketing, word-of-mouth, or even quilting and crafts. Skippy didn’t offer to make it right, just stuck by the ‘policy’ the store itself had imposed.
My wife called me from the road, and started to feel bad. Not for the store, but for her friend who needed the batting. I advised her there might be a way to still get the batting and deliver the message that poor customer relations will not pay in the long run. I told her to get the name of a regional manager, and to take matters one level higher.
Back in the store, my wife encountered the same woman back with the batting, and is not entirely certain the woman even recognized her from an hour earlier. My wife asked for a yard of batting. As the employee measured it, she said:
“There’s just a little over a yard here, let’s just give you the rest.”
Well, maybe – just maybe – here is a little bit of contrition. A way to satisfy the customer who not long ago threatened to not come back. And it’s not like it cost the store anything to do it, because once you have a leftover piece that’s less than a yard, you’re likely just going to throw it away because it’s too small to be useful.
At the register, the batting rang up at $10.99, which was unexpected, since the price was $6.99 per yard.
“Ma’am, you have more than a yard here.”
My wife did not (as I would have fantasized) shove the batting down the employee’s throat and order her to sing opera. Instead, she marched her to the cutting block and got her yard, not an inch more.
So, store-to-be-named-later, you are on notice. You’ve got two strikes, one more and your outed.
Noise cancellation
Jul 2nd
I don’t talk much social media anymore, and certainly not here, but I need a place to offer up a simple suggestion about how to use tools to help others cut down on information overload.
I never mentioned this, but it came to mind during a brief discussion with Chris Brogan and Mack Collier about when to “unfollow” people on Twitter. I typically don’t worry about who decides to follow or unfollow me, and I don’t bother with any of the services designed tokeep everything artificially reciprocal. I can understand why Chris does, though, because he follows more than 80,000 people, and is followed in similar numbers.
I was convinced that I didn’t want to follow more than 500 people, but for personal reasons started expanding my local network, essentially following most Birmingham-area people I came across. But I know of several who, over the course of months, have dropped me. “Nothing personal, you’re just noisy.” And I certainly can be that.
On my Twitter policy page (which anyone who clicks over from my profile will see) I outline my behavior and my expectations. I’ve tried to make clear how I feel about forced reciprocity, and my desire to engage does about every conversation that comes my way. Several people have freely cribbed my guidelines, modified them, and clearly set their own expectations for visitors. (By the way, this is also a great Best Practice for corporations and organizations…)
Recently, I added a way for the noise-averse to still know what I was up to, without being “in their stream.” It’s a link to the Twitter search page for ‘ikepigott’, so it includes all the people who reference me. Instead of being a direct link to the page, I’ve taken the RSS feed for those results, and put them through Feedburner for two reasons:
- I get a better sense of how many people would rather me not be in their Twitter streams, and
- I have the flexibility to alter that feed in the future by changing the inputs. For instance, I might change my mind and want just my Tweets instead of mentions, or if I want to include misspellings of my name.
It’s just offering people a different way to engage, and not feel left out of the party (or sheepish about unsubscribing.) For those hung up on numbers, the Feedburner stats aren’t reliable on any given day, but over time you’ll get a better sense of your reach and the measurement you crave.
