Brian Feener

Word on the street is that McDonald’s is cutting the double cheeseburger from the dollar menu.

Sure, it’s a business decision, but how do you explain a business decision to your customers?  How do you explain that you needed to make sure that prices continue to stay low for the rest of your products while you raise the price for another?

I don’t believe the gas situation is ever going to get better.  Ever.  (Officially, I think alternative energy isn’t just an answer, but The Only Answer. (c).)  It is financially prudent for Micky D’s to cut the burger off of its dollar menu.

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I admit it - I wear one of those flashing Bluetooth headsets. It makes me look like I’m talking to myself, but it allows me to type and talk at the same time.

If businesses understood that a Bluetooth headset is the example that they should follow for their marketing strategy, their services would be more efficient and more user friendly.

1 - A Bluetooth headset eliminates the inefficiency of a wire in favor a semi-periodic charging time. (Over the weekend, I set up an internet service with Company X in my new apartment. In order to access the wireless password, I had to enter in a universal number while plugged into the modem. I didn’t know that I had to do this, but could have done so on my own with simple instructions if they were printed on the machine. Instead, I was on the phone with cust. service for over 15 minutes. )

2 - Your headset, once paired with your phone, does not need to be repeatedly paired again and again. (Over the weekend, I placed a technical support call into Company X. And then another and another and another. All-in-all, I probably called 10 times. I had to give my phone number at about 2.5 times for each call. If it took me 2 seconds to enter my number and 4 to speak it out to the cust serv. rep., figure that I wasted over 2 minutes on the phone JUST giving my phone number. Now times that by 1000 calls in a week. And a million calls over the year.)

3 - You can buy a headset for $10 (like mine pictured below) or for $150 (like the eliph Jawbone). Both are effective. I can use them with any cell phone with BT capabilities. (As a customer, I don’t care about “unusually heavy call volume.” All it says to me is that you haven’t planned ahead or haven’t found an innovative way to get me off hold, out of the queue, and get my problem solved without destroying your bottom line. It is YOUR fault, Company X.)

To summarize:

1 - Find inefficiencies by breaking down your process. There’s always SOMETHING that can make life easier on your customer and be beneficial for the company, too.

2 - If you aren’t doing anything to develop data past its pure form, then you’re wasting your (and your customer’s) time.

3 - Not everyone is the same or has the same needs. It’s not the customer’s role to adjust to your business - it’s the company’s role to adjust to the customer’s needs.

Jadakiss and DJ Green Lantern are still beefing.

What does this have to do with business? It’s the final quote by the DJ when he says that it’s “not on me, it’s on him” to reach out and try to resolve the issue.

Guess what, when your customers feel that you’ve slighted them with customer service, it will never be on them to reach out and try to resolve the issue. Even if their reaching out would create a real, long-term benefit to them, they will never give you an opportunity to ask for forgiveness in a gift basket.

You will need to make it your priority to MAKE the opportunity.

(Of course, there are limits. Like a theology teacher once told me: “An apology is like a FedEx package. You can always refuse the delivery. But it’ll never be accepted if never sent.”)

Flossing is generally considered a good thing for everybody. It promotes good gum health and my dentist always tells me that I need to do it more.

So what is the business application of this idea? I think it may just be good customer service.

• It’s a hard habit to get into, an easy one to keep doing.
• Small actions go a long way.
• It should be daily. Not just when you want to.
• The short term effects aren’t always palpable.
• The long term effects are always palpable.
• Both are covered in wax. (Ok… so maybe all of these don’t work perfect.)

Add your thoughts and ideas in the comments. What is the flossing of business?

[image CC from pjmorse]

(For anyone who is trying to get to this site through the main Brian Feener.com link - you can’t read this anyways. But my lucky Wordpress people can! We’ll talk to them… help is apparently on the way.)

Yesterday, I had registered a hosting plan to go with my domain name at GoDaddy. Stupid me - I ended up setting up a second account, so things weren’t getting linked together. So I called up customer service, and in less than 10 minutes, I had the issue resolved. Great!

Cut to 24 hours later when I’m trying to load my files into the site. It didn’t work and after 12 hours of waiting for things to load up, I decided to call customer service again.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the representative Destry and I went through about 10 possible solutions before he said “I have no idea what’s happening here.” I then mentioned that I had merged the account less than 24 hours ago. “Oh!” he said. “Then let’s check the IP address!” Sure enough, things weren’t pointing in the right direction. In less than 5 minutes, the problem is (apparently) solved.

Destry and I wasted 40 minutes of talk time because GoDaddy had not taken the steps to log my activity. A simple log would have shown that I had called up yesterday and made a change to my account. A simple log would have shown that I had talked to Sergio yesterday. A simple log would have made my day easier, Destry’s day easier, and GoDaddy’s pockets full of the $4.00 it took to handle my call.

$4.00 not a big deal, except that it is about a full month of my hosting plan, and times 1,000 customers, it becomes a big deal.

This proves that the more you work on the back-end of a problem, the more you think a step ahead of your customer, the more you anticipate possible scenarios, the better you are prepared to be remarkable. It’s harder this way, but it’s worth it. Business is chess, not checkers.

Understanding who your customer is makes you 1 percent more likely to make them happy.

Actually using that understanding to make customer service policy makes you 1 trillion percent more likely to make them happy.

Unless you are making sales to robots, you cannot speak to someone like they are a robot.  Just because you “live in a digital world,” your customer doesn’t.  They are calling on real telephones, writing real emails, having real frustrations, and having real emotions.

Customers have feelings too.