I’ve followed Christine Thompson’s Musings of a Marketing Maven for some time.

Her post is about a special occasion, great food and lousy customer facing staff. Bad or improperly prepared food you can always send back but how do you send the wait staff back?!!

No Technology Required

I heard back from the customer service department shortly after 4:30 this afternoon. Two days after my initial contact. Two days. In a FedX world. Hard to believe. Here’s the text of their email:

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately, we cannot open attachments in this system, therefore, we are not sure what you are referring to. We are sorry you had difficulty with the survey and will forward your comments to the appropriate department. We will enter your name in the sweepstakes for your trouble. Thanks for shopping with us.

Sincerely,

Harris Teeter Customer Relations

Reference: #836937

No “Dear Mr. Morris”, no “Hi Gregg”, not even a “Dear Harris Teeter Customer”. Nope, no niceties from this group. No greeting whatsoever! Do they have any idea how that makes them look? How can my “neighborhood food market” be that impersonal? Now, I can understand about the mail attachment issue maybe. But I have to ask. How is it that a company can put their president in front of customers the way they did with this survey and then answer a customer inquiry the way they did here? There’s a big disconnect there someplace. The folks in marketing understand the mileage to be gained by putting the president up in front of the paying folks and having him engage. The folks in customer service are hiding behind a big brick wall. For some reason or another. On the plus side though, they entered us in the drawing. Knew that was coming didn’t you?

Your customer service department let you down here Mr. Morganthall. A not so good customer experience and they could have turned it around without a whole lot of work.

Update:I should get them a copy of Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do. That might help with the disconnect.

This just came through my feed reader (NNW of course).

Don’t treat your customers like thieves

It was listed in a feed update I did shortly before lunch but had been removed by the time I clicked on it. I have a feeling they took it down for an edit or two given the potential volatility of the subject. I’m delighted to see that it got reposted. We could spend a lot of time (and I plan to do some of that in future posts) talking about the software industry in general and piracy in particular but it’s not often that you see this sort of transparency. I have long held to the 90-10 theory of software piracy. 90% of the people are honest and will pay you for your work. 10% aren’t and no matter what you do or how hard you try they will find a way to pirate it. If you were to take all of the time and effort that you spent thwarting the piracy of your product(s) and put that effort into making your software better for the 90% who support you, piracy would be a very small blip on your radar screen. Now, that’s not to say that I support piracy in any way, shape or form. These guys that sell illegally obtained software from the like of Microsoft, Adobe, etc. and make millions doing it need to be stopped. And generally it seems as though they are sooner or later. But software activation schemes and other methods that “phone home” just get in the way of the paying customer and do little towards thwarting full scale piracy. We always felt that if you bought our software you could put it on all of the machines that you used. If your fellow workers wanted to use it, or your family members, or whoever, they had to buy a license. Plain and simple. Marcus’ post is well thought out. It’s refreshing to read.

My wife came home from one of the Harris Teeter stores that we frequent and handed me a receipt stub that invited us to tell them about the shopping experience. It promised a chance to win $1000 worth of groceries. While this is not the sort of thing we’d readily participate in, given the times and financial conditions I figured it was worth a few minutes time. Here’s a copy of the receipt stub:

I opened up a new tab in Safari and went to HTsurvey.com. Here’s a copy of what greeted me:

Very nicely done. And the start of what would hopefully be a good user experience. Mr. Morganthall introduces himself, thanks us ahead of time for the time and effort we’re about to invest, hangs the $1000 grocery carrot out there, and tells us how they strive to have top quality products and the best in customer service. I was impressed, as I’ve always been with Harris Teeter. As background for those of you not in the North Carolina area, Harris Teeter is a regional grocery chain that has always ranked high in grocery store surveys. The stores are clean. The people are friendly and helpful. The produce is fresh. I could go on but I’m sure you et the idea. The only negative I ever hear about them is that the prices have always seemed a little bit higher than those of the competition but that’s not enough to have ever made us think seriously about shopping elsewhere to compare those prices.

So, I clicked the Start Survey button and was taken to a screen that asked for my entry code. Here’s what that screen looks like:

Again, very nicely done. Nothing too extemporaneous to what was needed. The cursor jumped to each box as I input our entry code. I was impressed. This was looking like a very good customer experience indeed. After completeing my input I clicked the Start Survey button and here’s what I got:

OUCH! That wasn’t so pretty. Could be the browser I’m using I thought, but then again, if there were browser issues with the site surely they would have sniffed that out at the beginning and told me my browser wasn’t compatible or whatever. But since there was none of that I figured I’d just try again. So, I closed Safari, restarted, cleared the cache just in case, and tried again. Got the same opening message, clicked on Start Survey, got to the page where it asked for my entry code, entered that, and I was stopped dead in my tracks. “This code has already been used” or something along those lines. What?!! How lame is that? What was looking to be a great customer experience just headed south in a hurry. Now I felt cheated at not being able to get a chance at those free groceries and I had to start asking the kind of questions about the organization that they’d probably just as soon I not ask. All because of a poor user experience and all more than likely because some web developer or content writer didn’t take the time to test the survey in a variety of browsers.

I figured I’d at least alert them to the problem and give them a chance to respond. I rooted around on their site and found some contact info (that could have been easier to find as well) and I sent an email at 3:23 PM ET on Monday, the 26th. A little tongue in cheek as far as the tone goes chiding them about the experience , but respectful I thought. I also sent along a screen capture of the redirect problem. I ended it with “Best wishes” and my name and sent it along. Now, almost two days later and I haven’t heard a thing.

Nada. And that’s just so hard to reconcile with the experiences we have had in over 15 years of shopping their stores. So, Mr. Morganthall, I have a question for you. Is this really the best in customer service? Do those people in your customer service department answer each and every email as you might assume they are doing? Are your web pages tested in all of the browsers? And for those of you running other companies, are you in tune with each and every place in your organization where customers interact with your business? Every one of those provides a customer experience and the sum total of those dictate how much or how little business a customer does with you.