The AntiSyphus Effect

Packaging counts

If you have children, you've no doubt felt the frustration of dealing with gifts. Whether holiday gifts, birthday gifts, or toys for no reason, parents have to deal with the horror that is the packaging of toys.

When I was a child, toys were simple: we'd take them out of the box and play. Nowadays, however, we've moved far beyond simple boxing. Instead, we have toys that are held in with wire twisted into configurations so complex that string theory seems simple in comparison. We have extra plastic pieces that are literally screwed into said toys, making it impossible to remove the packaging without precisely the right screwdriver. To get to a fairly inexpensive toy, one needs the handyman skills of Bob Vila.

I'm accustomed to this, and it doesn't ordinarily bother me. But today? Oh, today is a different story. My son and I ran off to Target so that he could buy a few items with the gift card he'd received from a friend. The first thing he grabbed was a small, remote-controlled car. Its price? A very reasonable $10.00. After picking out a few more items (including Season 3 of  Arrested Development - the best sitcom ever - for Mom), we returned home.

My son started to take the car out of the box, only to discover that he couldn't; this particular toy had both the plastic-covered, twisted wires and screws holding the car into the box. (I can't help but wonder how inexpensive this toy would be without all the extra packaging.) Not a problem, said I: just get the screwdriver, and unscrew the toy. Ah, if only it were that easy. In this case, however, we had an additional challenge: of the three screws holding the car to the package, two of them were fully stripped. No amount of work is going to remove these screws. This thing couldn't be more secure if the car were welded to the cardboard.

After a good half-hour of frustration, I gave up. Mind you, we cannot return the car to Target, because the majority of the packaging was destroyed in our attempts to loosen the screws. And so, I've sent a polite but firm e-mail to the manufacturer, asking for a replacement car. The company, for the record, is Jakks Pacific. I fully expect their Consumer Relations department to be responsive and responsible, so that I can end this story on a happy note and remind everyone that good Customer Service doesn't necessarily mean perfection; in fact, the best indicator of a company's level of Customer Service is the manner in which they handle problems. I'll be sure to update accordingly as the situation unfolds.

But I do have to wonder: why must toy companies make it so hard to enjoy their wares? I realize that the additional packaging is an attempt to minimize shrinkage (no, not the Seinfeldian shrinkage; I'm referring to the retail variety). I get that, and I support it. However - and it's a big however - is it really necessary to punish the paying customers in order to do so?

How to alienate your customers in three easy steps

My company has been running something of a makeshift second shift for a couple of months now; until we hire full-timers to staff it, we have our regular employees handling the extra hours. Because we're working pretty long days, we purchase dinner for the second shift employees each evening as a token of our appreciation.

Having found myself stuck late at the office tonight, I was privy to the mass confusion 'round about 8:00 when dinner had not yet arrived. And since I wasn't officially working second shift, I volunteered to hunt it down. I called the pizza restaurant, and spoke to a lovely young woman who took nearly five full minutes to verify that we'd even placed an order. But I couldn't be angry with her, because she handled the situation perfectly: she assured me that the pizza was, in fact, on the way, but that the driver had gotten lost. After apologizing several times, she promised that we could expect the driver "any minute," and that we wouldn't be charged for the pizza. She was polite, never left me holding for more than a minute without checking back to let me know she was still working on it, and she took accountability for getting the situation fixed. So far, so good, right?

Fast-forward twenty minutes, when said driver was still nowhere in sight, and the villagers were ready to take up their pitchforks and torches. I called back, and got a different young woman on the phone; this one was decidedly not lovely. I explained that I'd called at 8:00, looking for our dinner (which was supposed to have been delivered at 7:30), and that I'd been told we could expect it any minute, but it still hadn't arrived, and could she possibly find out where the driver might be? (Yes, that was a horrible run-on sentence, and I'll hate myself in the morning; right now, I'm too tired to care.)

She was clearly exasperated with me (strike one), and told me that she "can't find out where the order is; I can just tell you that it's in progress." I repeated what I'd been told earlier, and said that it seemed to me as though the other employee had been able to reach the driver, and asked her to see if she could get hold of him. Three minutes later (strike two), the manager took over the call, and informed me that they had no way to reach the driver. At this point, I was getting more than slightly aggravated, and I reminded him that earlier, I'd been told that the driver was lost; clearly, someone was able to reach him. The manager stated that the driver didn't have a cell phone, and I'd just have to wait. This might've been strike three, but it gets better.

As I was being told that they had no way to communicate with the driver, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a car with a Daddy Joe's Pizza (name changed to protect the guilty) sign pulling into our parking lot. And as the delivery fella got out of his car, I noticed - with no small amount of irritation - a cell phone clipped to his belt. Strike three! For the record, I tipped the driver anyway, because he was not really party to this mess. But I'm pretty certain we won't be ordering from this particular company again.

The morals of this story are as follows:

• Your customers are not an inconvenience. They are the reason you get to collect a paycheck. So don't treat them as though they are bothering you, especially when you goofed and they aren't being ugly to you.
• Don't leave your customers on hold for an extended period of time when they have a complaint. Doing so communicates that you don't really care, and further fans the flames of their annoyance.
• Don't lie to your customers, ever. Period. Even if the truth is that you completely messed up, we'll forgive you as long as you're upfront about it. But once you get caught in a lie, it's all over.

What are your dealbreakers when it comes to companies that want you to part with your hard-earned money?

Turning lemons into lemonade: how mistakes can cement your customer relationships

Last month, after living in denial for over a year, I finally decided that it was time to accept the fact that I couldn't read. Well, I could read; I just couldn't read small print. No, that's not quite accurate. I could read small print; I just couldn't read small print while wearing my contact lenses. Middle age, it seems, waits for no one.

I paid a visit to my local opthamologist, who informed me that I am an extra-challenging case. You see, in addition to being quite nearsighted and the new development of presbyopia, I also suffer from astigmatism. Now, multifocal lenses for the aging population are fairly common; toric lenses for astigmatism are quite common. Toric multifocals? Not so much. But I digress, because this isn't a story about my new (and fabulous) contacts; it's a story about a mistake that turned me into a loyal customer for life.

Because I knew that I wouldn't be able to wear my contacts every day, I ordered a pair of bifocals as well. I picked out some lovely frames, the optician measured... whatever it is they measure in order to figure out where to place the near-vision correction, and I planned to get my shiny new glasses in about a week.

A week later, I received a call from one of the women who works in the optical department; we'll call her Kristy, because that 's her name. I was conducting a training session that day, so she left me a message to tell me that there was a problem with the lenses, and she'd have to reorder them. This meant that I'd be waiting at least another week for my new glasses.

When I called Kristy back to ask what the problem was, she did something unexpected: she admitted that the problem was her fault. When she put the lenses into the cutting machine in order to trim them to fit the frames, she failed to secure them properly. The end result was that the lenses couldn't be secured in the frames.

Without any stonewalling, and without any excuses, Kristy took full responsibility for the error. Was I still annoyed? You betcha. But it kinda takes the wind out of my angry sails when someone takes responsibility for her mistakes. So I thanked her for being honest, and asked her to put a rush on the re-order, which she willingly agreed to do. Then she thanked me - repeatedly - for being so nice about it. As if that wasn't enough, Kristy followed up with me by phone every few days to keep me updated on the status of the order.

When the new lenses arrived (ten very long days later), I had some scheduling issues that made it difficult for me to get there before closing time. So guess what Kristy did? She offered to stay at the office until I could get there. She said that after the problems I'd had, it was the least she could do.

I'm betting that I wouldn't have gotten that kind of consideration from a large eyecare chain, for several reasons:

• Large companies have Big Books o' Policies that dictate every move they make; employees are discouraged from varying from The Book.
• A large company probably wouldn't have even bothered to contact me; they would've waited until I called them, and then I probably wouldn't have gotten the full story (I'm really not biased against big business, but I know that large companies breed bureaucracy and impersonalization).
• Large companies likely don't treat their employees as well as The Eye Center clearly does; let's face it, the CEO of your average Fortune 500 probably hasn't even seen most of the people who work there. That being the case, said CEO certainly can't have any kind of working relationship with the employees, which it turn makes it easier to ignore the needs of those employees.

That last bullet point is the single most important predictor of customer loyalty, in my opinion. Unhappy employees don't go out of their way to give the customer a delightful experience. Unhappy employees don't generally take full responsibility for their mistakes and then do whatever is necessary to fix them. Unhappy employees typically don't care if their employer loses a customer (or 1000 customers), because unhappy employees typically don't care about their employers' success.

So what's the moral of this very long story? First, that astigmatism becomes a real pain in the bum once you get past 40. Don't say I didn't warn you. On second thought, I suppose that's not a moral so much as it is a warning, so let's try that again: the moral of the story is that treating your employees well is one of the keys to building customer loyalty and a successful organization. If you treat your employees like faceless, nameless drones; if you make them feel insignificant and unimportant; if you treat them as costs rather than as assets... well, then you're missing a big opportunity to evangelize your business from the inside out.

The kind of passionate word of mouth you get out of customers? You just can't buy that. And whether that word of mouth says that you rock or that you suck is not up the CEO or the senior management team; it's up to the rank-and-file. Your front-line employees are the people who deal with your customers. Treat them well, and they'll treat your customers well. When you do that, everyone wins.

Ask yourself a few questions:

1. How much freedom do you give your employees when it comes to making your customers happy?
2. When your organization makes a mistake, do you admit it freely and openly, or do you try to hide it?
3. When was the last time one of your employees went way beyond the call of duty just to help a customer?
4. What's the one thing you can do today to make an employee feel special enough that s/he'll take that extra step for your customers?