Day: 05/03/2012

Regards; The Sales Department…

/ Dominic / 1 Comment

A customer engages with you via email. You reply. The email obviously has an automatic signature. So what? For pity’s sake use a real name. Hank, Bill, Zachary, Claire, Emma, whatever. A pseudonym will do as I have no idea.

I just received an email signed “Regards, Sales Dept”. I wrote back – politely – suggesting that they use a name and the person at the other end, with no irony whatsoever , offered a reply to my original query and signed off “Regards, Sales Dept”. It’s enough to make you start looking for the hidden cameras. Or weep with despair.

The learning?

Email is accepted as a person to person medium so whatever the size of your business make your customer feel like they are dealing with a person. It shows a good deal of contempt for the customer not to bother to engage them on a personal level. What’s more, this is a no cost way of making your service personal. Who’d miss that one?

Messing About In Golfs

/ Dominic

I dropped in to see Simon Ashley of Fatdaddy fame from side-a today as he is my old smoking buddy, before I quit. Still a good friend though – in case he reads this!

Simon was very diplomatic in telling me that the current theme was rubbish and then immediately set about educating me in taste – a thankless and unrewarding task for him. Given that I am not keen to chuck money at this enterprise quite yet I left agreeing to change the free theme on WordPress. Voila, I hope you like it Simon because I don’t intend changing it every few days.

As this is a blog about the many facets of the customer I felt I ought to pay an homage to Apple with the previous theme as they have excellent customer service. This is obviously the result of a customer focus ethos that goes to the heart of their business. I think they are just as obsessed with the end-user as Johnny Ives is with product design. Although I am an Android user with an iClone I appreciate the aesthetic beauty and simplicity of the Apple designs. They seem to set the way and everyone else is falling over themselves to be “like Apple”. Reminds me of the great VW Golf ad we have in the UK. It ends with of car salesman demonstrating his wares and ending by assuring the prospect that, “it’s just like a Golf“.