You have all heard of the jokes that all start, “How many X does it take to change a lightbulb?” You can find whole websites dedicated to humble lightbulb humour.  We love them because we all know that generally it only ever takes one person with a step-ladder about 3 minutes to change a lightbulb – and it is the absurdity of all the alternatives that makes us laugh.

But what happens when things suddenly get serious? I drive a late model Camry and my front left indicator lightbulb blew on Saturday. So I pulled into the nearest car parts store, pulled out the manual and headed into the store to buy a bulb.

Wrong!  Apparently Camry in their design wisdom have placed this disposable piece of equipment in a way that can only be changed by a mechanic … in a service bay … with a hoist … and removing side panels of bodywork and other bits and pieces under the bonnet. And it only takes a minimum of 1 hour to do (all the while with labour costs ticking over).

Talking with the car parts guy, I have got off easy. There are some car designs where the lights are fully sealed units, so when a bulb blows you have to replace the whole light assembly.

Now is it me, or is this not a bit like having to remove the ceiling to replace a ceiling light.

Lightbulbs are by their very nature designed to blow. They will die … often. So what genius decided that good design meant putting a disposable item in a non-accessible place?

Ok – I’m heading off my soapbox now … But at least I know in reality how many people it takes to change a lightbulb – 2 mechanics, an apprentice, an admin to book me in, an admin to run up the invoice. Pity it’s no joke!

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance writer

It’s easy to stand out in business when you are the only one of your kind, but what happens when the goods or service you offer are exactly the same as everybody else?

I am currently in Cairns getting ready to present at a conference today. Now, Cairns is a tourist town. Every street corner has a hotel or motel – all jostling for the tourist dollar. With all of this competition, how does  a tiny, unremarkable hotel stand out from the crowd?

The place I am staying in is called Inn Cairns on the main pedestrian mall. It doesn’t have  a flashy entry, the rooms are normal hotel style rooms and they don’t supply meals. So why am I writing about it?

Last night when I arrived the owner Selwyn was at the door, greeting me by name (this is my first visit so his crystal ball was great). He held the door open and welcomed me to his place – and not just a pat greeting, a warm heart felt greeting. He introduced me to his son and son-in-law who run the place with him – one of them had been up to my room to turn the lights and air-conditioning on for me. They gave great tips on local food and things to see and were just genuinely nice people.

They turned a room for the night into an experience of being a welcome guest in their home. So what is remarkable when you are the same as everyone else? You are. You need to bring your whole self and your passion to your job and your role. If you do that – people will love you for it and you will become remarkable.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance copywriter

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Following on from our post in relation to can your customers deal with crowds, how many of you have tried mystery shopping your “help desk” (and yes, I am talking to you Telstra hiding over there in the corner with your hands in your ears).

Telstra is one of the main providers of internet and phone services in Australia, and have a history of, shall we say, less than stellar service. Recently they have been moving all small businesses over to small business internet plans with the lure of 24/7 service and faster speeds (and before you say anything – where I live you get Telstra or Telstra for ADSL 2+ internet – there’s no other options for our street).

Last Friday I woke to a dead internet, which in my business is also termed a disaster. At 5am I tried ringing the 24/7 help desk. It rang out. I tried again at 6am and gave up after I had cooked and eaten toast and made and devoured a capuccino, while still being on hold listening to bad music and ads.

At 7am I decided to stay the distance suitably fortified by another coffee. This time the phone rang through to the Business internet help desk. I heard people typing and talking – but couldn’t get their attention. Faulty connection I thought, so I tried again. Same story – except this time I did what my grandmother told me never to do (sorry Grandma) and yelled as loud as I could into the phone. I heard a scrabbling of a headset as it was being placed on someone’s head.

A human!  And a mature aged Australian female. I thought my luck was in until I described the problem. I was told to turn off the machine and turn it back on and when I told her that I already had, was told “that is all I know what to do” . “But … but … but … aren’t you the help desk” I asked in confusion? “I had the same problem a few months ago and the help desk on Bigpond talked me through what to do”. “Well Bigpond has different help desk information, all I know how to do is tell you to turn your computer off and on. I will have to escalate your problem to a senior technician and they will call you back before lunch”.

We then proceeded to have a very bizarre conversation where she kept on demanding my URL – www.heartharmony.com.au I said.  A few minutes of very slow typing noises – “Can you spell it” “w-w-w.h-e-a-r-t-h-a-r-m-o-n-y-.-c-o-m-.-a-u”  A few more minutes of typing noises. “Still no good. Do you have other URLs”. I proceeded to list all the URL’s I own – accompanied by more typing and gradually getting ruder – “No! I need your URL”.

A lightbulb went off above my head – “do you mean the address where people send me emails?” I said suspiciously. “Yes – your URL” she said.

I then proceeded to educate the business internet help desk person on the difference between a URL and an email address and how asking for the right thing may make her job a bit easier. Her comment “Yes, well I am really bad at computers”.

I waited for the Radio station to say it was a gotcha call as the comment was so bizarre … but it didn’t come.

Luckily the senior help desk did know what he was doing (even if he didn’t know what day it was and booked the wrong day for the linesperson to fix the line), so by Tuesday lunchtime everything was back to normal.

But I couldn’t help but wonder – who hired someone who was not good at computers for an IT business help desk? That made me think further – how many businesses actually mystery shop their own help desks to see what sort of service their clients get?

I know it is easy to laugh at Telstra, but I suspect there are many more less than helpful help desks in the world. Want to share your help desk horror stories?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Get Response is an autoresponder company – a very successful one. Previously many businesses chose to use them due to their reliable delivery, great pricing structure and useful features. They were rapidly closing on some of the big companies such as Aweber. But then …

… things turned sour. They undertook a massive overhaul of their system. This overhaul was announced to subscribers as a brilliant event that would give even more functionality and features. They explained that there may be the odd one or two glitches on changeover but to rest assured that within 24 hours all would be ironed out.

Hopes and expectations were high. The IT community waited and watched. Changeover day. One by one web forms failed through their 93,000 customers. Emails were sent multiple times or not at all.  RSS feeds failed, attachments disappeared and newsletters no longer were delivered. Basic features such as unsubscribe or change my details no longer worked. A litany of errors created a massive train wreck.

Aside from the techincal failures, they also had business failures. Pricing – one of the main USPs of the company was jacked up to the same level as Aweber, removing that competitive advantage. So people now were paying the same fees for a bug riddled system.

Throughout it all the customer support people wrote warm reassuring “your feedback is important to us … send us a ticket and we will get back to you” comments on the forum. Meanwhile tickets were never answered, Live-Chat timed out, forum posts only recieved the standard response and the phones rang out.

The CEO disappeared into hiding – throwing in the odd comment about how “the majority of customers were happy” without realising that the majority of his customers probably had no idea that their autoresponder system no longer worked. His big clients – the ones who made thousands of dollars per day or who simply were IT aware and tested things were not happy … And more importantly were telling all and sundry about their unhappiness on forums, Twitter & blogs.

Yes, errors are slowly being resolved day by day (it is now nearly 3 weeks since the changeover), but clients have to totally recode all of their webforms, and in many cases rewrite each and every email campaign. People are defecting in droves and it is a PR disaster of monumental proportions for Get Response.

What could they have done differently?

In the testing phase they could have listened to the feedback they were given.  Reading the forum posts, people who were involved in the testing had advised GR of the problems that resulted. Do not ask for feedback from your customers unless you are going to action it.

Test on all major platforms and browsers. Looking at the forum posts people are being advised that GR works in Firefox. That’s lovely but the majority of the world still uses Internet Explorer. In addition WordPress is the market leading blogging platform – it would have been useful to test the changeover on a test WordPress site.

If a program you launch generates the online equivalent of the Exxon Oil Spill – you need to hire a disaster recover PR company and get cracking on providing a highly visible, co-ordinated response. The CEO needs to be seen everywhere, explaining the situation and the steps to resolve it.

Rolling back to the previous version (similar to the Facebook debacle and New Coke launch) is a definite option that shouldn’t be discounted in the early days when it becomes apparent your launch has bombed.

Get back to people - if people complain with an issue, then the least that can be done is an acknowledgement of some form. Ideally there should be an ongoing list of bugs and the status of the fixes.

Hire people who can speak English and who can spell. The new website (aside from all the technical bugs) is full of spelling errors, typos and is very poorly written in parts. This is totally unacceptable for a major company. At the very least hire an editor to proof everything before going live.

Compensate loss – at the very least offer some compensation such as waiving of fees in acknowledgement of your error.

It will be interesting to watch over the coming months whether Get Response works its way out of the mess it has created, or whether the huge weight of public opinion and bad press will crash the company.

In the meantime – my apologies to each and every one of my clients. Please let me know of any further or continuing problems that you may encounter with my emails, newsletters, product delivery thanks. I will find a workaround wherever I can.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Galaxy research has released a study that shows that queuing in stores is the fastest way to lose sales. In the Australian Queuing Behaviour  Survey it was shown that 67% of people will abandon their purchase if it means standing in line and 75% will take their money elsewhere in future. Danger times are queues over 5 minutes in length.

We are also less tolerant of queues in particular industries. If you have a queue at a fast food restaurant you will have more irritated people than if you have a queue at a supermarket.

And what the cashier is doing while the queues are in place are also a problem. If your cashier is not hurrying but is taking their time you can expect more people getting hot under the collar than if they appear to be moving quickly.

I will quite happily admit to being someone in the 75% category. Recently I had to buy joggers for my daughter so off we went  to Super Amart All Sports. There were about 4 staff at the shoe section – all milling around vaguely helping people and generally doing very little in particular. We ended up just locating the options ourselves and headed to the checkouts.

With three possible terminals, only one was working. There was only on assistant on the terminal – who just happened to be a person I had sacked in a previous role for poor performance – not a good sign. Well she hadn’t improved at all and if anything reinforced my previous decision. She was very slow (walking through custard slow) and pfaffed around with each item for the customer she was serving.

Did I mention that by the time we joined the queue there were 20 people already waiting – and it took her 5 minutes to process one transaction. A person at the back of the queue grabbed one of the sales team and directed them to the register (there was no manager in sight to control the rapidly worsening situation).

The sales assistant looked at everyone and said “we are out of register rolls for the other machines” . “Is anyone getting more” “I dunno”. The assistant then proceeded to slow down the processing even further for the lucky next in line.

At that point I put down our purchase of high priced joggers, and walked out. We were followed out by another 5 customers who put down purchases of everything from smaller items to some who were buying very high priced gym equipment.  A very expensive loss of sales for a few register rolls.

If you make people wait – you lose sales. It is that simple.

This is also true of online businesses. If you are selling a product and then don’t give people to opportunity to pay immediately you are losing sales.  The more hoops you make people jump through the harder it will be to get the sale. So asking someone to email you their order and you will call them to confirm it, is the equivalent of a queue over 5 minutes in length in a traditional shop. You will lose sales.

Ideally allow people to buy and then instantly download your product. People are time poor and want to buy and have it now.

If your product is a tangible product that you are selling on the net, the way to get around this objection is to specify the shipping time for your product – and deliver within those timeframes. Allow for express shipping wherever possible to make it even less of an issue. Many people will happily pay the premium for faster delivery.

There is a saying that time is money. It is!  Your money if you make people wait.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Copywriters