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Sundance will be “Electrified”

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I mentioned in last week’s post about Torchwood that I would miss the first episode because I would be at the Sundance Film Festival, and promised more information this week.

I’m going out to the Festival to support a new client, Maxwell Street Documentary, at the premiere of the film, Electrified- The Story of the Maxwell Street Urban Blues.

The film will be launched at a party at Harry O’s in  Park City next Friday January 25th. In addition to the screening of the film, there will be a live performance by acclaimed blues guitarist Kenny Wayne Shepherd and blues legend Hubert Sumlin. Actor Chevy Chase will be master of ceremonies. Fender has also donated a limited edition “Electrified” guitar that film executive producer Les Walgreen will present  to online auction house Charity Buzz for an auction  to benefit The Center for Environmental Education Online.

I’m doing media/blogger outreach and developing a blog for the film. If you are going to be at Sundance on the 25th and would like to come to the screening, email or Twitter me.

Electrified tells the definitive history of the Chicago blues. Narrated by actor Joe Mantegna, the film chronicles how the urban neighborhood of Maxwell Street created a unique environment of commerce and cooperation that led first to the hard-driving sound of the urban blues, and ultimately to rock and roll. Interviews with many of the legendary bluesmen who “studied at Chicago’s Maxwell Street school of music,” including Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Charlie Musselwhite, Jimmie Lee Robinson and the “father of rock and roll” Bo Diddley, complement the film’s historical narrative and create an exceptional history of this important era in American music.

A companion film, Cheat You Fair: The Story of Maxwell Street, documents the last days of the historic Maxwell Street market. It premiered to critical acclaim at the Chicago International Documentary Film Festival in April 2007, and is scheduled to be shown at the Amnesty International venue at Sundance January 18-20 and the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago on February 2.

Both Electrified and Cheat You Fair were written, directed and produced by longtime Chicago resident  and Emmy nominated producer Phil Ranstrom who began the projects in 1994 shortly before the Maxwell Street market was demolished.

We’ve put some short clips from both films up on YouTube. They are all great, but here are my two favorites:

"We come up the hard way…" Uncle Johnny Williams on how the blues were born

Eddie "Jewtown" Burkes performing "Step It Up And Go"

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Customer Service: the final volley (for 2007 at least)

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(warning, long post)

Earlier this month, I wrote two customer service posts. In the first post, "if customer service is the new marketing,"  I wondered, if this is indeed the case — if  front line interactions with customers are as or more important than any marketing campaigns we might devise, why is so much customer service still so awful. The second post featured comments from two bloggers who recently wrote about their own less than stellar customer experiences, Mir Kamin and TDavid.

Originally, I was going to wrap up the series with an "objective" analysis of the customer service problem, to see if we might be able to understand the macro factors causing it to be so bad as well as the unique micro factors in customer service excellence that perhaps we could model in our own attempts to improve.

Well, all that got thrown out the window last Saturday. Instead,  I am going to share an "epiphany" I had on the whole topic after a most disastrous customer experience.

First the story. Saturday morning, December 21, my son and I were driving from our home in Mass. to our vacation home in Vermont. My husband had a few things to do at home so he was following later. We had a carful of stuff, including three of the family dogs. Just after we got on Route 89 — the one the runs the whole "width" of NH to Vermont, we got a flat and pulled off the highway. Not the breakdown lane, I got off the highway all together hoping to find a gas station. This was around noontime. I called my husband, who was still at home and then called AAA once I determined from my GPS that the nearest service station was more than three miles away.

And the comedy of errors began.

Call Number 1: Service Rep says that Southern NE AAA cannot help me so transfers me to Northern NE AAA. Except he doesn’t. He disconnects me.

Call Number 2 (immediately after): I connect with another rep, who really does try to help. I explain the problem and where I am — on the Hopkinton/Route 103 exit off 89 West in NH. Remember this part, it is important. She gives me a case number and promises to rush a crew out. I assume (yeah I know) that she knew how to do something that the first rep did not.

10-15 minutes after we hang up, inbound call: AAA trying to understand where we are. So I tell them, again. We hang up.

Then  it dawns on me. They think we are in Hopkinton  Massachusetts.   Even though I was pretty clear.

So I call back. This is my Call Number 3 to AAA. It’s probably around 12:45, 1 pm by this time. New service rep. Finds the file. Confirms my suspicion that they are sending the crew to the wrong place. Connects me to AAA Northern NE, who cannot figure out where I am. Umm. Aren’t they supposed to know the roads? Anyway, a very long call later, we *think* someone is on the way.

Around quarter to two, though, I get a little nervous so I call back. Call Number 4 if you are still counting. Unfortunately, I still have to call Southern NE AAA because that’s the number on my card, and I neglected to ask for the Northern NE number when I was on the phone with them. Rep manages to transfer me, and I get the information that a wrecker is on the way from Manchester. For those of you who don’t know the area, that’s not far from where I broke down. Maybe 20 minutes. She also gives me the direct number to call, which comes in handy a little while later.

So we wait. And finally around 2:15… my husband and a local cop show up at the same time. Yes, you read that right. My husband made it from Hudson Mass. BEFORE AAA from Manchester NH. The police officer calls AAA to see what the scoop is, and while he is on his phone with them, AAA calls my phone. The wrecker is lost. This is probably about 2:30 or so.

WIth directions from the officer, the wrecker finally finds us, and the mechanic quickly fixes the flat. We’re on our way shortly after 3pm, with another 90 minutes to drive to reach the house. It was a brutal day, but that’s not why I share the story.

Here’s the epiphany. The people weren’t the customer service problem. Or at least not the worst of it. The process was the problem.

Each person was  trying to help, but the system is set up so poorly that they just couldn’t provide a good customer experience. For whatever reason, Southern NE AAA can’t enter a problem in NH and have Northern NE AAA then pick up the call. And of course the whole mess was compounded by the fact that either the rep or the system made the initial faulty assumption that our Hopkinton was in Mass. I was also thrown by the fact that the reps — even the Northern NE AAA reps — we spoke to couldn’t figure out where we were. Don’t they publish maps??

The people sincerely wanted to help. But they couldn’t because the system got in the way. As a result, AAA failed miserably to efficiently deliver the roadside assistance service that is the reason I (and most people) joined AAA in the first place.  And my son and I were stuck by the side of the road for three hours on a cold but clear December day.

So when we experience truly excellent customer service, either the system is set up to allow such great service — think Nordstrom or Zappos. Or an individual rises above the inadequacies of the process.

Shouldn’t we be aiming for the former? Systems and processes that allow customer facing employees –whether service, sales or marketing — to deliver the positive experiences we all want.  I don’t tend to do big end-of-the-year posts, but if I were to wish for one thing for us as customers and marketers, it would be that: systems and processes that let us satisfy, not frustrate, the customer.

As for AAA, I do intend to contact the organization and share my concerns. I still think it is a great organization that delivers a valuable service.

I just wish it had done so a little better last Saturday.

A final postscript:  The local police officer only found us because a fellow cop coming off duty called it in.  It never occured to me (or apparently any of the many other cars that passed us) to call the police. He told me that you should always call the local police in an emergency, even something as simple as a flat tire. They often can get AAA or a wrecker out faster, and certainly we felt safer on the side of the road once we had the cruiser there.

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Customer Service (Part Two)

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(warning, long post)

As I wrote in my previous post, it seems we have a serious disconnect when it comes to customer service. At the same time we champion the "conversation" with the customer, the general level of customer service is decreasing. Sure, there are exceptions, but stories like Mir’s recent internet service "dis-service" and Mary’s lovely experience on American Airlines seem to be the norm.

I’ve been wondering, why? Do products just "suck more?"  Are the occasional wonderful customer service stories really that WONDERFUL or is it that they just exceed our now much lower expectations?

What is customer service excellence?

First, let’s hear from two of the bloggers I used in my examples: Mir Kamin and TDavid.They both replied to my questions in email so I’ll let them speak for themselves. In part three, I’ll share some of my thoughts on the subject.

Mir:

"I think the norm of shoddy customer service,and yes, in a lot of ways I do think it’s become the norm) is yet another symptom of our "fast food society." Look, I’ve said it over at Cornered Office (and somewhat more obliquely, at Woulda Coulda Shoulda), but I’ll spell it out right here: I was on a plan that only cost $6.95/month. I’m not saying I necessarily DESERVED to get screwed, but honestly, what did I expect for that amount of money? We want it faster and cheaper and as a consumer body, THAT is what we demand, rather than quality and courtesy, sadly.

That said, lesson learned over here, bigtime. I can make all the excuses I want — they promised me service, I bought that plan when I was first starting out and was worried I couldn’t afford more, whatever. I’m paying a lot more for my new service, and at least this has taught me that it’s worth every penny.

The businesses that triumph in America right now are the ones that can do it the cheapest and the most conveniently. That’s why the Walmarts continue to thrive while the heart-and-soul community mom-and-pop stores struggle. You can’t be cheap, convenient AND personal. It just doesn’t add up. And most of us simply cannot afford to go top-shelf for most things.

Until we as a consumer body start making a lot of noise and putting our dollars where our mouths are, it’s not going to change.

Think about the best customer service you’ve heard lately. I’ll bet it was the Zappos story of the woman who not only ended up having them basically white-glove a return for her, but sent her flowers in condolence because when she was talking to the rep she mentioned that her mother had died. Zappos is committed to customer service and they do it better than almost anybody out there, right now. They are also INCREDIBLY expensive. They have to be.

Now. All of that said, I think a VAST IMPROVEMENT in customer service is possible without spending billions of dollars, and that’s to encourage CSRs to act like they care. In my situation, a lot of my ire could’ve been circumvented had the CSRs involved simply apologized and/or seemed less apathetic. That doesn’t take that much time and it would’ve made a world of difference. Maybe in today’s "GIMME" society "the customer is always right" is an impractical goal, but when did we just plain stop being NICE to the customer?"

TDavid:

Do products just "suck more?"

"Either it’s very coincidental or there is a direct correlation between more ad-supported software and services and negative customer experiences.

Somewhere along the line beta and release software and, as in the Xbox 360 case, hardware have merged. This has noticeably lowered the overall quality of products and services on a wider scale. In some cases these days customers are being expected to become unwilling beta testers and sometimes even paying for the privilege like the Xbox 360.

It’s one thing to not be charged in a beta test, it’s another to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars and be told the only solution is out of warranty repair or buying more of the same faulty hardware.

Microsoft in their much publicized Red Rings of Death warranty extension didn’t cover another common problem: game/DVD disc read errors. So if you have a machine that’s older than one year and doesn’t read discs any more, they’ll expect you to pay to get that fixed or you’ll need a third party warranty.

On the software side, the amount of time new/upgrade versions are being turned around seems to be shortening so that just when you start to get to an acceptable level of usefulness and value, you’re being asked to pay for a new version and rinse, repeat."

Are the good stories really wonderful or do they just exceed our now much lower expectations?

"Expectation levels are lower now, but there are still some positive stories out there. Harder to find, but they’re out there.

These days if a company ships something that runs on the computer without causing installation migraines or turning our computing experience into slow-mo that’s cause for joy, where that should be expected. Demanded.

We’re putting up with more negative customer experiences in web 2.0 than we should. Sites, services and mashups being engineered poorly that if they become popular won’t meet demand without major restructuring. Some services have come to the rescue like Amazon S3 to address these needs and that’s a good thing, but I see a lot of web 2.0 headstones over the next couple years that couldn’t make a viable business plan out of being ad-supported. VCs are already pulling life support systems, flatline imminent.

But it’s not just Web 2.0.

Marvel came out with a paid product: their comics online for $9.99/month and they couldn’t even scale up to demand. Spider-man is on the phone looking for help.

How funny is that? If we paid to access comics — and couldn’t because the site was down — would we receive some proportional refund of the time we couldn’t access?"

What is customer service excellence?

"For web services: fast response time, good, reliable uptime (at least 99.5%). Essential for paid services.

For all services/products: Minimum amount of time and hassle solving issues and problems. Being treated like an important asset of the business rather than a nuisance. In the case of faulty workmanship on a product, fixing it with as minimal hassle as possible. Companies that recognize and reward loyalty through better deals on future business being conducted, sharing income from referral sales and creative promotions are providing a valuable service.

And good customer service includes having an easy to find telephone number on the company website with an operator on the other side — preferably without having to navigate through a machine — that speaks clearly and doesn’t resort to some canned script to answer questions.

Bad customer service is forcing customers to email their responses, fill out a form or navigate through some confusing knowledge base and wait who knows how long only to be sent a scripted response. Or being told you have to pay $$$ just to talk to a human being about the problem installing the software or hardware you just purchased."

Thanks, Mir and TDavid for giving us such meaty food for thought. Tomorrow, I’ll share some of mine.

Update 12/10: Just a couple of links apropos of the customer service conversation. Geoff Livingston tells us about the Comcast must die blog and Lauren Vargas shares a piss-poor email response from a craft supplies company.

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If customer service is the new marketing (Part One)

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(warning, long post)

If customer service is the new marketing, why do so many companies have such crappy marketing?

In recent posts, Brian Solis and Kami Huyse both argued, with slightly different but generally similar perspectives, that customer service is the new marketing. In simple terms [and without any of the great nuances they shared, so read their posts 🙂  ] what they are getting at is that the customer’s experience with the company, with the product/brand, is what forms his decision to purchase, or not. And that experience is created by much more than exposure to a few marketing campaigns or the occasional customer service call. Blogs, online forums, word of mouth are all becoming part of this experience, and companies need to understand and respond appropriately.

Companies also have to understand that now more than ever, it is ALL about the customer. No matter how great the product, how wonderful the blog, without a customer, there is no business. Everyone in the company is in customer service. This was of course true before as well, but it is so much more obvious now. Simple things like an ill-placed blog comment or "astroturfing" positive anonymous comments on posts negative about a product create far more complications for a company than a rude customer service rep could in the "old days." We’ve got the proof, you see, in the email and RSS trail.

I agree with them on pretty much all counts. I have always believed in placing the customer at the center of our marketing activity. This is not an equivalent to saying "the customer is always right." She isn’t. We aren’t. But there are positive ways of handling negative situations, whether the company’s fault or the ubiquitous "operator error." It is possible to say "no, you can’t have it for free" or "not under warranty" or whatever it may be in a way that doesn’t leave the customer feeling cheated.

Why is it then, that there seem to be so many instances of bad, awful, terrible, nasty customer service? Here are just some of the more recent stories I’ve heard or read.

Popular mom blogger Mir Kamin’s websites went down in November. Her Internet provider WiredHub was unresponsive (and that’s putting it mildly) even after multiple days of outage. Yes, you read that right: no information, no response. And when the response did come, it wasn’t terribly comforting. Read her post for the details.

On her way back from Europe, marketing blogger Mary Schmidit got tagged with an overweight baggage charge from American Airlines. Even though the bag was an acceptable weight for international travel, because she switched carriers and had to recheck her bags,  the domestic carrier AA charged her the overweight tariff. She describes the tremendous sympathy of the airline employees here.

Shel Holtz learned that the motto of bank Washington Mutual didn’t extend all the way to actual practice when he tried to send money to his son, a soldier about to deploy to Iraq. The bank had closed his son’s account for being overdrawn $0.98, without any notification, and refused to reactivate it so Shel could deposit funds. He could open a new account, but that would mean a new ATM card, which would not reach his son before he left for Iraq. In other words, SOL. The good news: another financial insitution came through. [Kami Huyse also posted about this.]

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote about brands that didn’t respect his time. So far the only one mentioned in his post that hasn’t responded to him in some fashion is Delta Airlines. Jeneane Sessum wrote about Google inexplicably losing email messages.

These are just a few examples from the blogs I read from the month of November. Imagine what I might find if I really started to dig. No, in fact, don’t imagine that. It is too depressing.

I also had my own little customer service contre-temps in early November with a small specialty goods catalog company. I didn’t blog about it then, and am not naming the company here because it eventually was resolved satisfactorily, but it illustrates how the intermediation effect of email escalates situations.

The details:  I had ordered something more than a year ago. Manufacturer delay upon delay, they could not deliver the products. They had charged my credit card upon the order (not really good policy BTW), and when the product could not be delivered, instead of refunding the money, they issued a store credit with an expiration date.

Now, as we all know, this in itself is not legal, on two counts, but they are a small company, so I was willing to let it go and use the credit. Until  I placed an order on the website, and couldn’t use the credit.

So I emailed them, and learned that I had to call with my credit card number in order for the credit to be applied. They could not get the information from the web order. This seemed odd although I am certain the answer to that lies somewhere in the shopping cart they use.  So I tried to call. And there was NEVER any answer.

I finally followed up with yet another email asking them to resolve the situation, and was met with amazing email hostility from one of the business owners. Rude and disrespectful doesn’t even begin to cover it. It was apparently up to me to keep calling until I could reach someone, and I could not cancel the new order either. It was sounding more and more like they just didn’t want to give the credit.[ Twitter friends may recall this because one Sunday morning, I asked for opinions on whether to blog about it. ]

In the end, I didn’t over-react, sanity prevailed, and I got the credit. And the new merchandise I had ordered. But, just think about it — the vendor felt perfectly justified being downright rude to a customer. How can that happen? Sure, it is easier to be rude in bits and bytes than face-to-face or even on the phone, and that certainly creates some of the negative customer service that happens these days. But not all. Mary Schmidt was at the airport. So was Jeremiah. Shel Holtz went to the bank. 

If we can’t get this most basic thing right, how can we possibly expect to have a mutually beneficial "conversation" with our customer? Why is courtesy so uncommon in so many customer service situations?

I haven’t even touched on the issue of shoddy products. They are even more central to our experience. And just as much of a problem as poor customer service. Here’s just one example. Technology blogger TDavid has had five Xboxes in the past year. All but one returned under warranty. This can’t be helping the bottom line, yet wouldn’t we all say that a bottom line mentality is what causes the shoddy products in the first place?  

Now, of course, there are exceptions.  Who hasn’t heard the wonderful story of Zappos sending flowers to the woman whose mother had just died?  That’s exceptional customer service. In fact it is more than that. It is exceptional humanity.

But most positive customer service stories are much more mundane. Do we call them great because our expectations are so much lower, or is it truly great? For example, on two separate occasions, I had some problems with my Blackberry. Both times, Verizon call reps did a great job solving the problem, and following up with me to make sure the problem really was resolved. Do I call it great simply because cell phone providers usually get bad marks for customer support and my previous company  (rhymes with singular) did a horrible job? Or was it really great?

Part Two will try to answer some of  these questions, with some input from Mir and TDavid who were kind enough to share their thoughts with me.

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Announcing Photographic Memories

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Cross-posted to Snapshot Chronicles

As I’ve mentioned here before, I occasionally help HP with social media projects. I’m thrilled to announce that the most recent one, Photographic Memories, went live today.

Part of the US launch of HP Photo Books, Photographic Memories is a series of interviews with mom bloggers about the photos that have captured the memories of their lives. I interviewed 23 women across the US – young moms, older moms, moms of newborns, toddlers and teens. Working moms and stay at home moms. Professional photographers and moms who simply carry a point and shoot in their pocket, just in case.

HP Photo Books are a great way to share photographic memories, and in these interviews, the moms share theirs with us. The first group of 10 interviews was posted today and the rest will follow later in the month.

A little bit more about HP Photo Books

With an HP Photo Book, you can easily create a professional quality photo book at home. Particularly cool is the innovative binding system – think of a big clip – that lets you replace or rearrange pages and add mementos like invitations, children’s artwork and so on. They are available in two sizes, 5×7 and 8.5×11, and multiple colors.

If you’d like your own Photo Book, HP is offering a 20% discount until the end of the year.

Or you can take your chances in one of the many contests and sweepstakes the women in the Photographic Memories series will be having on their blogs over the next couple months. Some contests have already happened, others are going on right now, and some will be starting next week. As I get the details, I’ll add them to the Photo Contests list in the sidebar of Snapshot Chronicles.

Later this week, I’ll be writing more about the project. For now, please enjoy the interviews.

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