You are a worthless customer

Artscow.com, Thank you for telling me how worthless I am and giving me something to write about.

While this post is a dedication to artscow.com, the major focus of this post is “What is a customer worth to you”.

I am aware that there are more than a handful metrics and formulas you can use to figure out a $ amount; but this post is directed more towards the ethical and monetary value of a customer.

So let me start with a series of events…. Which were actually related to my wife’s interaction with an ecommerce purchase:

We have been long time customers of shutterfly, we love their customer service, product quality and the variety of products and services they offer…

Shutterfly does entice us with special offers and discounts and many times we pay full price for their products, which compared to professional studio and/or printer are a steal with as good or greater quality. Whenever there is a need, we have obtained products from them…

However; every now and then, you come across an offer that doesn’t cost you anything, and you say why not… One of these offers was artscow; they were offering 30 8×10 prints for free; all you had to pay was standard us postage, roughly $3.

My wife ordered the prints; a decent looking website.. The eCommerce/cart was slightly underpowered compared to shurterfly (boy is that an understatement) but it was a Fairly painless process.

A week or so went by and the prints showed up in the mail. We noticed that these shipped out of china (nothing wrong with that) and upon opening then, the print quality was decent; I.e nice color and gloss… However upon inspecting the images, the pictures were cropped left and right. From the 15 prints, 2 were usable.

My wife got on gmail and contacted customer service; a day went by and the response we got was instructions on placing items in cart and ordering them. None of the content in the response addressed the issue with the print.

Now I had to get involved; I took pictures of the pictures and emailed them over along with what it should have looked like. Also took a screenshot of their webpage that showers thumbnails of what was being ordered.

What I was expecting was a “Thank you for the details, please use this coupon to reorder your prints. While reviewing your images, we notices that the image is slight larger than what 8×10; even though it would have fit as the proportions were correct, out tool does not resize/shrink. Hence the cropping”…..

What I got was, “you didn’t adjust the image, so your got that”..,., and that was it…

I guess, we have been spoilt by shutterflys tool that notified you of any potential issues you may run into if your image is larger than the print or the image resizes, or crops.. but is that really our fault?

Here is where my “You are a worthless customer” statement ties in.
1. We were given FREE prints
2. We paid about $3 in shipping

How hard would it have been for artscow to say “Let us fix your experience, here is a coupon for another set of free prints” and maybe they could have even thrown in a “and you don’t even have to pay for shipping this time”… keep in mind, we still had coupons in our account for free prints which artscow.com would have been aware of… so I guess, we were not even worth $3 to them 🙂 what does it tell you about such a vendor?… so what is their official policy? “ArtsCow.com offers 30-day money back guarantee on all products. If you would like to return or exchange an item, please contact us to fill out a request form, and we will instruct you on how to send the item(s) back. Please keep in mind, shipping charges are not refundable”…. go figure…

Let me compare this to similar situations with shutterfly, at one time we ordered prints using low res images instead of the high res ones. When they got printed, the pictures were pixelated, obviously customer fault; however, shutterfly reprinted and shipped for free! I believe our order was worth $65; doing a comparison on “how much a customer is worth” I would have to say that we were at least worth the $65…. Now should the order have been $600 and it had been customer error; I do not know if shutterfly would have given us the same “let’s fix it for you”… eventually it tapers off and vendors will only pay so much to hold onto customer loyalty… however, their policy “If, for any reason, you’re not happy with a purchase, we’ll replace your order, at no charge, or give you a full refund.”….

Enough about shutterfly; let’s talk about Zazzle.com. We purchased a Groupon for $50 for $25; went online, customized some invites, ordered the invites; got them in the mail; somehow the “customized text” was replaced with the “generic text” that was shown as an example.
1. Customer error? No, and even it was….
2. Cart/Website should have caught the issue as no one would be buying customized invitations and keep the generic/sample text

The total order was worth $87; I chased Zazzle customer service down on twitter and had them help me with an emailed request to customer support. We got our Groupon certificate replenished and balance refunded and we placed our order again. Customer worth? $87 in this case…. and actually, if you look at Zazzles policy “If you don’t love it we’ll take it back”..

Now let me mentioned another eCommerce vendor that i actually know more about, and that is blank-label.com.

I know that at blank-label.com we care about customer satisfaction and loyalty, on the front page currently we have “Our Custom Fit Guarantee You will be completely satisfied with your custom fit dress shirt. If not, we’ll take it back and try again–free of charge.”. We toyed with 100% refunds in the beginning and then moved onto free remakes and we have been thinking of going back to 100% refunds or remakes. We moved away from 100% refunds was because we really wanted to do a good job of making sure that we met customer expectations and simply giving the money back wasn’t cutting it for us; if we still messed up after the 2nd try, we do refund the $’s and if someone really doesn’t want a remake, we refund in those cases as well… it’s just not a published policy 🙂

What is blank-labels customer worth? I have seen transactions in the $300 range been credited back to customer service; if you have not yet tried a custom shirt from blank-label.com I suggest you give them a try.

In summary, Customer satisfaction brings customer loyalty; if you do not care about your customers, they will not care about you…. especially if you make them feel worthless.

Apple, I love to hate you.

I am no fan of apple products; To me, it is a symbol of capitalism at its fineist. Microsoft has been sued over and over again and has given in to the EU and others for various demands to change the way the products are packaged; yet when it comes to Apple we ignore the majorly “closed-system” and the way their system AND products are even more monopolized and closed to the public…. but anyway

Growing up; I have loved the software (and company) that gave me the blue screen of death every few days; my primary coding background and architect skills were based on just MS products; that has changed over the years… but choice #1 is still MS when it comes to a lot of things..

Apple is at the bottom of my list… Yet, I own a 1st Gen iPhone, an iPhone 4 and an iPad (compliments of blank-label.com)… I even own a HP laptop that runs OSX on it! (debuging and r&d purposes ofcourse) and I have OSX running on virtual machines..

To me; it is a love-hate relationship, its like a bad relationship, where your partner is abusive and beats you every night but you still hold onto them..

The iPad is also the first mobile platform we exclusively developed the blank-label.com native application for…

Even though our website and shirt builder are accessible from an iPhone and/or an iPad and pretty much any other mobile device as we do not use flash or any other memory intensive plugins, I decided to build and deploy on an iPad because the user experience is different for a mobile, native, touchscreen app vs a browser/hosted app. A user with a mouse will have a different user experience than a person who is able to interact by touching a screen. In addition to enhancing the UX; we wanted to see if we could learn anything new from the iPad. There were a few features that would have worked great in our web-based shirt builder that would have worked well with “clicks”. We wanted to test out the enhanced UX features and see what (if any) the user feedback was… to see if we wanted to offer similar enhancements to our web-based configurator.

Version 1 has been out for about 3 months; the responses, reviews and positive feedback we get for our iPad app has been much higher than was anticipated; infact, within the first few weeks; we had already broken-even and went positive on our ROI.

So all the above sounds great…. but as expected I learnt a lot about what needs to be changed for our next release… which infact is underway and should be out soon :)…

Rather than spill the beans on whats coming, ill touch upon the things that people didnt like.

1. Must receive an entire app update for new fabrics
2. Must login every-time an order is placed
3. Application is not iOS4 compliant
4. Cannot zoom
5. No order history
6. Its pretty, easy to use, but things can be made easier, i.e. less taps
7. Application crashes if the iPad has been running a lot of other memory heavy programs
8. Cannot use coupon codes
9. Cannot use gift certificates to pay…

The above are all valid points and they have all been addressed in version 2 of our iPad app

In addition to releasing an update for the iPad platform; we will be releasing versions for the iPhone and the Android platform(s) as well…

Be on the lookout for an update to our iPad app…. and visit us on blank-label.com

The best type of customer

Recently thinking about sales, user experience and friction points for blanklabel.com (blank-label.com) I started thinking about our customers…
And soon I was trying to answer the age old question that plagues many, “What type of a customer qualifies as the best customer?”

I pondered between “does a customer who know what they are looking for the best customer?” or is a customer who I can educate the best customer? Money? Male? Female? Age? Income?….

After getting no where… I decided to analyze, “what type of a customer am I” and then it hit me…

“I am the best customer”!

So what type of a customer am I?

I am an impulse buyer… And impulse buyers, on my opinion are the best and hardest to sell to…

Why?

Well, we have the money and will spend it in a couple of seconds and will think about our decision later… What makes that hard? Well, impulse buyers have an attention spam that goes from “must buy” to “I’ll think about it” to “won’t think about it again” in a few seconds….

Are most buyers of this type? My observations tell me so; but will need to collect some statistics to prove this observation. High bounce rates for sites/pages that cannot successfully funnel a sale in a few seconds (clicks) will validate my claim.

If you have to educate this customer; you’ve probably lost the impulse sale, but may get them at a later time.

So how do you sell to buyers like me?

Convince the user that it’s okay to buy on an impulse because you will happily refund their money if they are not happy will feed into their impulse.

Don’t make me enter a whole lot of info, capture my credit card ASAP.

If I can connect to the details visually; don’t make me read

Do not give me a lot of options, funnel me!

Most buyers don’t know they want to buy something…. Most buyers are browsing the net aimlessly… I certainly am…

If it isn’t
1. That’s cool, I could use that
2. I believe that it’s worth the $
3. Ready to buy
4. Sold
5. Within 1-120 seconds

…..You’ve lost a sale.

Startups – importance of your team

As far as I can recall, I have always been trying to build something.

In high school it was a community magazine. In college it was a BBS (bulletin board system).. Then towards the mid/end of the 90’s it was a subscription based web publication system and an online food court.

Let’s just say it was the wrong county and maybe the wrong time.

But moving forward came the idea of an online community that connected people, services and things based on geolocation…. This is before twitter, facebook, myspace, groupon, etc, etc.

Re-evaluating all my projects; I had realized that it was the “lone-star”ness that should be blamed for the failures.

I decided all my projects eventually failed because I was doing everything and eventually burning out and loosing interest on my own project.

August/September 2009 I decided I was going to have a team for my next venture. Started looking at startup job postings, contacting startups, etc… Wasn’t going anywhere until on twitter I found a post from Fan, looking for a techie to help with blanklabel.com and I reached out as in the early 2000’s another idea I had toyed with was online tailoring…. A year+ blanklabel.com grows, at a rate that far exceeds the expectations of our followers and probably our competition.

At home, many times I use to find an abandoned coffee cup; forgotten, unfinished and left in place. Credit goes to the now wife… I would ask her “what the hell is this?” and her response would be “a chemistry experiment”.., hence my motivation for making the following analogy…

A team is like the tube in a particle reactor and the particles are the team members.., you could state it’s an experiment where the tube contains the particles and helps them move towards the desired direction. Why is it an experiment? Well, you hope that the constant colliding will produce the energy/effect desired and not blow up the entire reactor. So it’s also important that these particles mix well.

Without this tube and other particles, I’d still be a free radical… A lone star that would eventually burn out and have no potential of creating and being part of a “big bang”.