Anti-Social Media

Dear brand X...

I've got something to say to you:

Twitter isn't going to fix your bad customer service issues.

Your nice "how can i help you message" to my @customer isn't going to make anyone believe that you really care. And it definitely isn't going to fix your fundamental company wide DNA problem.

In fact it will amplify it.

So before you go into social media spaces, make sure you really mean it. Make sure you are really ready for it. Don't run the risk of turning social media into anti-social media and making my madder than I even was before.

So my advice to you?

Fix your business problem before you pretend to try to fix my customer problem.

Best Regards,

Your customer.

A Treatise On Being Treated Like A Person: Case Study The W Hotels

We often find ourselves in discussions on how to humanize brands. Over this entire W hotel experience (see my earlier post here) what I have come to discover is that it's not so much about making brands more human but rather having the brand treat me like a human. It's the action. It's the demonstration.

Case and point the W hotel. To sum up, I was thrilled with my stay at the W Lakeshore in Chicago except there was a billing error and Nansi the Blast Radius receptionist in the NY office had her credit card charged instead of me. Nansi was unable to convince anyone she spoke to at the W that they should change that error and thus I wrote a blog post. After I wrote the post, I shared it with Ross Klein the President of the W hotels. More an FYI and let me know if you want to do anything about this and I'll update my post.

Firstly, Ross emailed me back almost instantaneously. The email wasn't sent to a PR department or forwarded to some customer service person. Instead, he personally sent me a note that he was on it and he'll get back to me.

At that point, I watched the traffic to that post go through the roof as he likely forwarded it around to the appropriate members of his team.

Within one day, I had an email from Karen the credit manager who let me know that they had not only changed the charge but reversed it completely. When I thanked both her and Megan her assistant (as this is exactly the service i have come to expect and respect at the W), they also offered to send Nansi some goodies as a thank you from the W store.

Now that's what I'm talking about. Mistakes happen. Not every brand can be perfect. But the speed and diligence with which Ross, Karen and Megan addressed my issue is exactly why the W hotels are one of my favorite brands. They created a brand vision that's somewhat aspirational, but they have 'dimensionalized' and made it operational throughout their customer experience - from the mats on their elevators to the way they have now dealt with me.

Now if we could just do something about their website. (just kidding...sorta :)

How To Ruin A Perfect Customer Experience: The W Hotels

Last week we stayed at the W hotel in Chicago for business. The hotel was beautiful. The rooms were immaculate (i love their aubergine colours). The bathrooms were fantastic (I am all about the shower pressure).

I even noticed that they changed the floor mats in the elevators to reflect the time of day (good morning and good evening). The staff was helpful, the food in the restaurant was quite good - all and all a pretty close to perfect customer experience.

Until....

Turns out, my credit card didn't register with their system and the individual who checked me out didn't notice. So since I wasn't there, they just chose to use the credit card of the person who reserved the hotel. I'll call that person, poor Nansi. So poor Nansi is the receptionist at the Blast office in NY. She's one of the most helpful people on the planet and instead of having a good day today, Nansi has been fighting with the W hotel over this issue. Even though it is THEIR error they are not only requesting my credit card (which we gave them) but as well, a faxed copy of photo ID.

This is just unacceptable. Let me count the reasons why:

1. One can routinely purchase items online without any photo ID
2. They know the error was theirs
3. They know Leigh Himel (whose credit card they have now been given over the phone) was the person who stayed in the room
4. Blast is clearly a real company, with real offices, who clearly poor Nansi works for bc she was the one who booked the travel in the first place

Not only that, but they have now turned a perfect customer experience into a horrible one. I was just filling out my profile for travel and was asked what my hotel preference is. While I am a starwood hotel travel member, I am now rethinking the whole thing.

What a shame. It's why end to end is so important and why living the brand means more than following a silly un-customer focused policy book.

Update: The W Hotel rocks my world again....Read about it here

Random Acts Of Customer Service

I can sometimes really get ranty about customer service issues. Sometimes I just rant to my friends and family, sometimes I use the power of networks to get my way (give Leigh her $10 back Amazon!) and now I also use my blog.

Companies are of course struggling with this as they find their disgruntled consumers "opinions indexed in Google right next to the evil corporation that just screwed [them] over and other scenarios familiar to anybody who has read the Cluetrain Manifesto."

Naively I thought I would ask the question this morning as to why more Corporations are not doing random acts of customer service? The truth is, most of us usually only attempt to index issues that have really pissed us off. I mean those incredibly dumbfounding moments when you find yourself speechless at the complete ineptitude of how you have just been treated.

Why wouldn't we want to blog about the reverse? An act of kindness. A program of good will. An unexpected surprise that delights one enough we can't help but blog about it.

Thought of the day: Less bad shocks, and more delightful surprises. Random acts of customer service - maybe someone should give it a try.

Protection Good....Lack Of Service Bad....

Glad to hear Ebay/Paypal are trying to do something about the myriad of Phising scams.

However, as a user, I have to say, I was pretty pissed off earlier this week when PayPal suspended my account to ensure that I was verified as a 'real' user.

Now why did this happen? Because I am an idiot. I sent a Phising scam email to PayPal to their Spoof@paypal.com. Next thing you know I have three verification things I have to do, the last of which tells me that until i get a letter IN THE MAIL I will not be able to use my Paypal account.

The mail? What the hell is the mail?

Argh. Well anyway, once they fix this problem if they could only move on to fix the problem with their ridiculous fees. ;-)

Mybloglog's Been Yahoothanized

*Argh* You would think after all the years, all the partnerships, all the product launches that Yahoo could get the migration thing down.

Case and point - Mybloglog. So I ended up not having my computer this weekend where I have all my auto passwords saved. I go to mybloglog to log in to check my stats (which I paid for) and what do I get? Please enter your Yahoo ID.

Well I don't have one. It doesn't really explain why i need one - it doesn't say for current mybloglog users click here. Actually it says very little. When i try to figure it out (using google's search engine of course) I find this page.

It's all upside down and backwards if you ask me. I should be able to sign in using my normal user id and THEN I should be able to create a Yahoo ID that they could then merge together. But it should be up to me which ID i use. I mean for goodness sake, I have about 1000 user names and passwords - the last thing i need is to remember one more. Blogger (aka Google) doesn’t force me to use a gmail account. Why does Yahoo?

Back home and safe with my auto saved passwords I finally get access again... at least for now. But it's just a matter of time before something happens and I'll have to decide keep mybloglog with a forced Yahoo ID or get rid of it and move on. I'm leaning towards the latter. As one person said to me not so very long ago...Mybloglog? I kinda lost interest in them as soon as they were bought by Yahoo. Hum.. I wonder why....

Lessons From Club Penguin

Wonder why the kids love Club Penguin? My daughter showed me this yesterday (see pre-Disney buy email below). She's 11, totally passionate about Club Penguin and was very humbled by the fact that Club Penguin took the time to write her back. Wow. From time to time, i send companies feedback on their products and generally speaking, I never hear boo and if i do it's usually some boring automated thanks for your feedback message. Lessons from Club Penguin. I love it.

From :
Subject : Club Penguin Support RE: Ticket: [1007094-21152]

Hello CeeCee,

Thank you for the great ideas.

It would be fun if we could actually eat and drink. It would make the pizza and coffee shops even more fun.

A mall would be fun too, especially if we could shop from all different kinds of shops.

I will be happy to pass on all of your ideas and the fact that you would like to see more games and rooms. If you have specific ideas for games, please feel free to share them with us. I cannot promise that we will be able to use your ideas, but I can promise that we appreciate the inspirations.

Keep up the creativity!
Julia
Club Penguin Fan Mail

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From: CeeCee
To: support@clubpenguin.com

Dear Clubpenguin,
i love your site!
I think we should be able to eat food from the restaurants and drink shops, we should also be able to work take orders and serve other penguins at the restaurants. You should open up a Mall that you can buy more things from and that members and penguins that are not members can shop from. Also there should be lots more rooms and games added. I hope you listen to my ideas.
ceecee