Todd Lyden

Photo by Alvaro Serrano Dear Founder/Marketing Head/Product Development/Customer Funtime Lead, I am just writing this vague and boilerplate email to repond to the Nth Billionth email I've received from one of you with regards to your freemium, SAAS product/app of choice. Look, if I had questions or concerns about your product, I am a smart enough guy to find the email, contact page, or bot that you call a chat module to get an answer. If you want feedback, you really do need to give me enough time to actually use your product. Emailing me a mere day or two after I have only signedup for the product is not enough time for me to evaluate something. It finally occurred to me that you are like the waitress who comes back to the table right after dropping the food and asking if I like it before I've even begun to chew. So please, stop. Just don't bother. Use your email for advertising or something else, but pestering a potential client like this is a pretty good ...

Mr. White, I'd like to take a moment of your time to explain why there is a fairly decent chance you will not get my business again. It is not because your company provides poor product. I LOVE your HD DVR. My family has enjoyed your satellite based television service since 2007. As your customer service reps always reminded me, I always felt like a valued customer. That was until I decided to no longer be a customer. This had NOTHING to do with your service or product. In seven years and one move from one house to another, we loved having you. However, this past year we made the mistake of bundling your services with a well known internet service provider. The deal was good, but the ISP was terrible. We were locked into an internet provider that was terrible. We suffered through it but as soon as we could unbundle and then replace the ISP, we jumped on it. The only other decent internet provider in my area offered an insanely good deal on internet and television service...

Where was Dan Hesse last week? The CEO of Sprint was out talking about his product again. Ignored my open letter. Let me be clear with my eulogy: I come not to bury Sprint, but praise it. Twelve years is a long term commitment for those looking at their telephone service relationship. There were a few times that I was pretty sure I might leave Spring before now. But it took a temping harlot for me to turn my back on a company I have been loyal to for so long. My first day of Virgin Mobile service and I am fairly happy I made the switch. Despites complaints to the contrary, there was no issue porting my phone number over. The customer service was impeccable. The website easy to manage. So why did I leave Sprint? Money. Virgin Mobile is owned by Sprint and somehow can provide an individual with reasonably priced smartphones and good cheap service plans. I got an Intercept, a Droid phone . For $27, I have unlimited texting and data with a mere 300 minutes of talk- for $40 you can up th...

Image via CrunchBase An Open Letter to Dan Hesse , CEO of Sprint: Dear Mr. Hesse, I have been with Sprint for a long time. A real long time. I've been a customer of your company since you were working for the competition. I got my first Sprint phone in lieu of a landline in 1999. When I married again nearly 5 years later, we had a landline, but eventually we got my wife on another cell as she went back to work. Over 6 years ago, the contracts on both those phones expired which gave us the flexibility to leave without those high ETFs . I would call every two years when prices were dropping with other services, but your customer services reps bent over backwards to keep me. The last big push was nearly 2 years ago when my wife wanted texting on our phones and we got the eldest her first phone. You all caved and gave us what was an off the books plan! This last year, we had to add our eldest daughter and went with a traditional shared plan. For a shared 1500 minute plan and unlimited...

I got an idea- give me $500 and I'll start the next Groupon . Look at this list of ways to start your own Groupon-style website. http://www.agriya.com/groupon- clone http://enzolina.com/web/build- a-site-like-groupon- livingsocial/   Photo: elvissa http://groupon.comclone.com/ http://www.dailydealbuilder. com/ http://grouponclone.net/ http://uniprogy.com/couponic http://www.alstrasoft.com/ groupon_clone.htm http://bestgrouponclone.com/ http://groupscript.net/ http://wroupon.com/ http://www.massivecoupon.com/ deals/groupon-clone/ Yep, if want to go into business in the deal of the day realm all we need is sales people to go out and find 300-some odd deals for a particular area and make sure that it is promoted in a manner to get people to signup for it. Oh wait, that's right: Groupon is a glorified email list . Most people don't realize that Groupon started as a Wordpress site that offered one deal. Of course, the idea stuck and grew. Why? Because people WANTED the dea...

I focused much on customer service two weeks ago and I really can't escape it. I was on a call yesterday making a large order for lunch coming up. The woman on the other end was insanely pleasant as she tried to walk me through a new menu and my inability to be more quickly decisive. She did have to put me on hold an inordinate amount of times and each time was PROFUSELY apologetic. I was prepared and thankfully not in a hurry. I can quickly imagine someone else taking conversation and turning it into a complaint (unjustified, but I can see it). Amber Naslund has a related piece back last month that I liked discussing our aptitude to taking complaints online. I agree with Amber that #FAIL is overused, but also we need to be aware that failure or BAD customer service is in the eye of the beholder. For companies, SMALL mistakes can be huge to a customer. Like I said with my example, I could easily see someone taking it out of hand and quickly getting annoyed. I knew ...

Seemed like my past week was about criticism and customer service. It so happened one of my favorite examples of great customer service needed a calling this week and I thought I would share the experience. This is going sound oh-so testimonial, but I'm really just trying to illustrate a point- really! Swanson Vitamins has been around for over 40 years.And I've been ordering from them for the last 10. Why do I love their customer service? No Wait on the Phone Seriously, I've called and within one ring gotten a rep who knew it was me because of caller ID. I actually chatted with an online rep and ordered over the phone. It appears that they use Mitel for their overall system and it works! They have immediate access to your previous orders and are ready to take the next one. Unlimited Shipping They want you to order as much as you can from them at once. How can you tell? They ship as much as you want to the 48 states for only $4.99. Wow. It pays you to o...

Image via Wikipedia I really liked this piece on the lessons learned on customer service during a recession. Lesson #1 Putting in an interactive phone response is not likely to help your customer service nor breed loyalty. Lesson #2 Embrace the multiple channels- they are not going anywhere, but find the best way to get them into your current structure of tracking. Lesson #3 Point of contact needs to be improved constantly. It can never be personalized too much or treated too little like an opportunity. Too often it's forgotten that a representative is probably the best chances for maintaining customer loyalty. People trust people, not gadgets or websites. Related articles by Zemanta What Drives Customer Loyalty? ( customerthink.com ) 4 Marketing Lessons From the Walgreens Transformation ( mpdailyfix.com ) Maritz and Bunchball Team up to "Gamify" Customer Loyalty & Employee Engagement ( eon.businesswire.com )

"Responding to online complaints is a tax that companies pay because of the chronic mismatch between what consumers expect from brands and what they ultimately get. An individualized response might momentarily bridge the gap, but it won't fix it. Never will." I am coming back to Baskin's piece on the Twitter Tax .  The quote above defines that tax as the cost that is being paid by companies that are not particularly forthcoming or effective about what they are going to provide their consumers. He suggests that not everyone is that savvy with the technology and the basic implication (I think) is that there needs to be a better job with addressing the expectations and providing what customers want. He also suggests ... disconnects can't be overcome by novel new technologies or brilliantly creative marketing (at least not often, and certainly not consistently).  But then in the next paragraph states For every tweet we catch, there are likely dozen...

Caught you with that snazzy Progressive insurance tagline? I used it because I was reminded of Progressive's promise to find you the best deal- even if it isn't their insurance. Most people have always thought the novelty of comparing rates and then MAYBE sharing competitors information is counter-intuitive. However, the Progressive strategy coupled with their latest Flo campaigns where she describes the specific plans to customers illustrate the importance of catering to your audience. I can think of an older example of "catering." Remember the  Subservient Chicken  from Burger King? You could plug in orders and the actor in the chicken suit does what you want. I don't think we want THAT much service. More recently, Bridgestone Golf has created a new line of golf balls that are geared towards average players. Knowing that you can't hit like John Daly or Tiger Woods, why would you use the products they use? To advertise the balls, they have creat...