Guest Post from the 'Crazy Customer on Phone'

It never ceases to amaze me how stupid people in positions of authority can be when it comes to email and customer service. Personally, I like to correspond with both my own customers, and my vendors, via email where possible. Every business talks about its great service, but usually email isn’t the venue where it occurs.

When it comes to banks, this holds true as well. I went through 6 people last Friday when calling about a $148 overdraft fee I didn’t deserve (My corporate account was not negative at any point). If you’ve ever tried to fight a bank over an overdraft fee, you know how unpleasant the whole thing is. I finally ended up speaking to a branch manager at the next branch over, who assured me things would be resolved and he’d get back to me via email. He didn’t. So I called him and got his voicemail. Yesterday morning, I received the email from the attached screenshot. I’ve redacted the bank name and details, but this was a superregional bank, with no branches here in MA. So, I responded asking about the $400 that had since accrued to my account as a result of the first $148.

I got no response so I called the manager this morning at 9am. He claimed to know nothing about calling me crazy, so I told him to check his email. While he was doing that he asked me, “Exactly, what is it that you want?” An intelligent manager apparently…what did he think I wanted? So I told him I wanted my money back. He must’ve found the email at this point because his whole tone changed and he apologized profusely for calling me crazy, and then came up with this thing about submitting my account to customer service to be reviewed. Within 30 seconds of hanging up the phone with him, I checked my account online and every single fee was reversed. Imagine that!

While we all know that customers are not always right (even though I was in this case), we do know that they are the customer and should be treated with respect, no matter how badly they may be treating you. And you never, EVER, write anything negative about them, especially in an email! The manager who sent the email to me was clearly not the person it originated with, nor was the person before him. I suspect it may have come from the customer service manager at the branch who I had spoken with, but I have no proof. Even with the entire contents of the email chain being erased, all it takes is one negative subject line, or a careless “forward” to the client, and a major situation has occurred. And to make matters worse, this was my corporate checking account.

So, for any marketers and executives reading this:
1) Proofread your emails before you send them, and
2) Don’t write negatively about your customers, EVER!

Ed. Note: Some stories just need to be told, so I asked Rob Torte to tell this one. We've taken out the names to protect the guilty, but that doesn't blunt his point. Treat your customers with respect! Or pay the price in poor customer experience!! Thanks for sharing this with us, Rob.

Email on Steriods

Email marketing isn’t going away any time soon. Can it be made more effective—even viral—by including social networking options in email? Silverpop thinks so and has a product to do just that. Their Share-to-Social product was introduced in early October, so it’s a bit hard to find examples of use, but the prospects are fascinating.

Basically the product allows Silverpop clients to embed links in their emails that allow recipients to easily post messages—social emails?—to their social network pages. It’s new, and there are no detailed case studies. Two users identified in the Silverpop white paper are Diapers.com and GodTube. According to the white paper:

• One of Diapers.com’s emails was posted on 50 different social network profile pages. That kind of customer endorsement turns email “push” marketing into a powerful “pull” campaign. (page 2)
• GodTube, a global technology company that creates social networking tools for the faith-based and family marketplace, achieved significant viral activity from its social email marketing campaign. An email sent with Silverpop’s Share-to-Social links had an open-to-click rate of 31 percent, and nearly 15 percent of those who clicked in the email posted the message to Facebook or MySpace. Astoundingly, 25 percent of the posted emails generated additional clicks, compared to MarketingSherpa’s estimated average clickthrough rate of just 2.5 percent for BtoC marketers using third-party lists. (page 4)

The potential communications impact is obvious. Beyond that the product allows the marketer to track the resulting messages, something that can’t be done on the social network sites themselves. According to the Getting Email Delivered blog:

The SilverPop service also offers tracking “which social network the recipient posted the message on, telling marketers which one achieved the best results. Silverpop creates a unique tracking code for every shared message, so marketers can tell, for example, that an email posted by a recipient on Facebook was opened 1,000 times while one posted on MySpace was only opened 100 times.”
Their tracking system even measures the number of click-throughs generated by the posting at a given Facebook or MySpace page, so you can know which of your user’s posts to Facebook or Myspace generated the most clicks. SilverPop suggests that you can use such tracking to spot and target influencers, saying that “Such sought-after influencers are easily identified and targeted. Lists of social influencers can be created in Silverpop’s solution with one click by simply viewing the “recipients who forwarded” list.”

Again, under ordinary circumstances you can’t track what’s happening to messages on social networking sites. Once they move from your own page, where you get limited stats, you don’t know what’s happening to them.

Here’s more on how it works for Diapers.com from Internet Retailer:

The widget, plugged into e-mails, allows Diapers.com to embed in the e-mail a set of links that allow recipients of the e-mail to easily share content of that e-mail on their Facebook or MySpace page, by automatically creating a thumbnail image and a blurb of the featured item the e-mail recipient wants to share. The e-mail recipient can then add this summarized content to her own social network site page, e-mail list or blog for distribution—and that content includes links that allow viewers to see the full, original e-mail which contains links back to Diapers.com to view and buy the product.

Silverpop says that in order to make this work the marketer must identify the “hot buttons” to which her audience responds and align messages closely to recipient interests. This capture from the white paper (page 3) is probably the best example of how the service works short of getting an email from a user. They also point out that once the content is posted on the social network page it’s under the control of the user, no longer the marketer.

It’s interesting to consider the two sites that are in the news as having successfully used this service. Diapers.com serves a target market—young mothers—that is notoriously communicative. Consider GodTube’s own stats on its audience. For different reasons both these target audience are responsive to particular messages and are eager to share with other people like themselves, including through their social networks.

If you have a good product—one that people will like to talk about and to share with their friends and families—then this type of email sharing is going to be of interest. For the right targets it's a great way to get your customers to share your messages with their own contacts--improving not only their reach, but also their credibility!

Online Content Sharing - The New WOM

The company responsible for the ubiquitous ShareThis icon (see the bottom of this post) has just released a study called “The Ins and Outs of Online Sharing.” The study, conducted by Forrester, provides some fascinating insights into content sharing on the web. Let me give you some of the study highlights.


Who Shares?

A majority of Internet users do share. Interestingly, more adults share email. Not surprisingly, youth (13 to 17) do more sharing of other media types. Are you using videos, wikis (that one surprises me; are there wikis that reach young people, or is it just Wikipedia?), and walls/discussion boards to reach young people?


What Do They Share?
Just read down the list. They share a lot of things! And the only content area where there’s a large difference between adults and young people is the entertainment category. That’s not surprising; how similar adults and youth are in the sharing of other types of content is. Are you providing the kinds of content that your audience most desires?

How Do They Share? Adults mostly use email. Young people share through IM, mobile, and their social networks. That’s hardly a revelation. But marketers need to think about their audience and how they want to share information. Are you making it easy for your audience to share content?


Why Do They Share? Read this one carefully—people share because they want to help others. (I’ve seen/heard that before, especially in discussions of travel sites where you can share experiences.) It’s an overriding motivation, and it doesn’t differ much between adults and youth. Users also share because they’ve found shared information useful, to share information about product quality, and just simply to show their enthusiasm. Wow—the top 4 reasons are positive. Dissatisfaction is number 5 and the incidence is much lower. Are you making it easy for customers to share their experiences with your product?

Is It Easy to Share? The good news is that it’s generally pretty easy. The number is well under 50% for most types of sharing. Youth experience more problems. That’s not surprising; they are sharing various types of media and that makes them more likely to run into problems. Are you removing obstacles that inhibit your audience from sharing?

The study also identified an intriguing segment—the Power Sharers. Power sharers use technology other than email to share content at least once a week. They also:

• Share with more people, regardless of the channel they are using
• Share different types of content more frequently
• Share for additional reasons. They are more likely to be motivated by community and by what the report characterizes as “self-expression.”
• Face more obstacles to sharing, especially lack of relevant contact information.

Pure and simple, these are opinion leaders. They’ve always existed and they’ve always been powerful. The Internet lets them exercise their particular expertise and passions in ways never before possible. It gives them the potential to reach more people than ever before.

Are you trying to identify opinion leaders and harness their enthusiasm in the service of your community?

Take another look at the Pickens Plan. I got an email from two individuals as soon as I joined; one was the regional coordinator. He’s being very quiet about how this now-sizeable community is being run, but I assume these people are volunteers. If I’m right, it’s an impressive harnessing of the enthusiasm and outreach of opinion leaders.

The report is lengthy and well interpreted. You can request a copy from Jeremy Bock at ShareThis.

These data remind me that Web 2.0 isn’t about technology. While Web 1.0 was about communication, Web 2.0 is coalescing around the concept of community. This study goes one step further in suggesting that we have to build those communities around (multi-media) content that is relevant to people’s lives (B2C) or work (B2B) and make it easy for people to interact around that content. People are voting with their Send, Forward, and ShareThis commands.

Are you letting them vote for your brand?

Using the Tools

It’s always a pleasure to receive an email from your daughter, especially one that has a picture of your adorable grandson. This one was special.

Her family signed up to participate in the Walk for Animals sponsored by MSPCA and Boston’s Angell Memorial Hospital earlier this month. The email included a link to their personal page complete with a picture, personal fund-raising goal and a link to their bulldog group web page. The scrolling list of donors indicated that various people and pets had already contributed.

Sure, I would have made a contribution anyway; they are my kids. But this made it easy for me. Even better, it made it easy for them. It was personal and appealing but very soft sell. Because it was a simple text email it was easy to forward. I did, and my friend’s cat made a contribution also. The system also provided an email template for participants to thank their donors along with the standard email acknowledgement by the MSPCA.

I wasn’t there, but I’m told that people, dogs, and a pair of ferrets had fun. The cats on leashes and the parakeets in birdcages strapped to strollers didn’t look as happy. But, according to the MSCPA, they raised over $330,000 with this event. Every communication provided links to the website and the HTML ones included a lot of the site functionality.

All this was powered by Convio’s TeamRaiser fundraising software. That made it easy to replicate some of the MSPCA home page components on the personal pages. It also interfaced with the MSPCA donor database, capturing new names and updating donor records.

The participants are an integral part of an event like this. Using interactive tools to improve their experience and produce desired results for the organization is a win-win.