In my house, we love DiGiorno pizza. One recent purchase turned out a little disappointing. A piece of the frozen pizza dough had been broken off and then simply packaged back up with the rest. This end piece had no toppings.

I called customer service and they apologized for the inconvenience. A week later I got two coupons for free pizzas.

These guys took to heart the lessons learned from Huggies earlier:

• Apologize for the problem and inconvenience
• Compensate the customer for their time and trouble

The 2 pizzas we got with the coupons turned out great and we’ve since purchased more DiGiornos.

When you fix a problem with your products, encourage the customer to return. Freebies often work because they show your customers that your products aren’t all bad.

The keys to recovering from a bad product are:

1. Immediate resolution:
   • Correct the problem
   • Replace the product
   • or Refund the money
2. Give a little extra bonus for having to put up with the problem. This could be a free coupon, a discount on future purchases, or anything to show that you are respectful of the customer’s inconvenience.

Harry Beckwith in his book Selling the Invisible notes that one major hurdle your potential customers must overcome is risk. They risk throwing away their money on your product or service. They risk purchasing a problematic widget or having to deal with poor customer service. There are numerous risks associated with buying your product or signing up for your service.

When comparing you to your competition, customers will choose the least risky option.

Becoming Less Risky

You can become the obvious choice for your customers if you mitigate what they view as risks. Try some of these techniques:

• offer 30 day trials
• guarantee your work
• have a friendly product return policy
• show examples of past work
• provide references or testimonials
• respond promptly to customer inquires

Be the least risky option and you will be the only option for your potential customers.

You advertise. You invest in marketing. You build your product or prepare your service for sale. Your customers arrive to give you money but you’re not there!

Home Depot made this dreadful mistake a few weeks ago. I went to HD to pick up some paint for our home. As I approached the paint desk, I saw two other customers waiting to be served. I didn’t see any HD employees.

I asked my fellow customers if they had seen anybody from the paint department. The response was negative. I started wandering around looking for someone in the distinctive HD orange apron. The first person I saw told me that someone would be with me shortly.

Shortly turned into minutes on end without anyone to help us buy our paint. Disgusted with the endless wait, all three of us walked out of the store.

Are you there when your customers expect you? Or are you too busy to help them?

You need to have backup plans for every way a customer can contact you:

• Are you away from your phone? Create accurate and informative voice mails.
• Are you away from your store? Have someone stand watch for you. Or leave a note for customers.
• Are you away from your email? Timely and informative autoresponders can help customers understand why you can’t respond promptly.

You can’t close the sale if your customers come knocking and you’re missing in action.

Be there for your customers.

On our first (and last) trip to a new Bennigans restaurant near our home we experienced the “flying server.”

Usually at restaurants your server will stop by after the food is delivered to see if everything is to your liking. The manager may also swing by and follow up with their food and service.

On our trip to Bennigans, our server or her manager would walk quickly by our table asking “is everything alright?” Before we could look up from our food she had disappeared around the corner to the kitchen. This happened every time!

Asking your customer questions is essential to verifying you are meeting their needs. However, you must stop to listen to their response!

When you talk with customers remember the following:

• Make eye contact
• Stop what you are doing to listen
• Reiterate what they said so you can be sure you are on the same page
• Take action: respond to the question, solve the problem, etc.

On the way home from our crazy timeshare presentation, we stopped at Outback Steakhouse for dinner. After our food arrived and I started eating, I realized that it was overcooked.

The server asked if everything was OK and I explained that it wasn’t. She then did the unexpected and asked me what I would like done. She didn’t tell me what they would do for me. She simply apologized for the problem (even though it wasn’t her fault) and asked what I would like. I chose to have them bring out some new meat. They brought me a new plate with properly cooked meat surrounded by all the trimmings.

I probably could have asked for a refund, a free dessert, or a new meal. By allowing me to decide, the server empowered me as the customer to chose a solution to the problem that I felt appropriate.

Let your customers decide

When something goes wrong with your product, ask the customer what they would like. If their request is reasonable and feasible, make it happen. If they give some outlandish response, explain what you can give them and then provide a few options of your own.

Allowing customers to decide upon a problem resolution makes them feel like they won. They got what they wanted. When customers win and feel good (even after a potentially bad experience), you have a greater chance of them returning in the future.

In part 1 of this series, I mentioned that your website must be easy to use. However, just because it is easy, doesn’t mean it is efficient.

Improved efficiency means getting big results from minimal effort and work. Your website should be efficient to both you and your customers.

Customer Efficiency

Because visitors to your site don’t have to drive to your store or office, your website could be considered efficient. However, let’s not stop there. Your site should help your customers:

• Save time
• Save money
• Find what they are seeking quickly
• Answer their questions
• Provide them the information they need to make the decision you want them to take

Company Efficiency

The beauty of ecommerce is that it is automated. Your website should be an efficiency gain for your company, not a burden. Not surprisingly, there is some overlap here with what a customer needs. Whereas your customers need your website to be efficient one at a time, you need things to be efficient on a larger scale. Your site should:

• Save you time – you can automate processes that you currently do manually
• Save you money – by automating your sales process, customer accounts, etc. you can do more with less overhead.
• Make you money
• Be scalable – can it handle 1 customer as easily as 1000?
• Work while you are sleeping – Your store or office doesn’t have to be open all day to serve your customers. Leave that to your website.

When your website is efficient, your customers are empowered and you reap the benefits. Examine the points above and see if your ecommerce solution is really as efficient as it needs to be.

Buy 1776

David McCullough’s nonfiction work 1776 guides you through the military campaigns of the American Revolution during the historic year the Declaration of Independence was signed.

A collaboration of quotes and facts from historical records, journals, and letters, 1776 narrates the story of strategy, battles, and hardships from both the British and American perspectives. You hear from the common soldier and his leaders to create a vivid picture of the challenges and trials faced during this pivotal year in America’s struggle for independence.

So what does this have to do with business and marketing? As a lover of history I’m reminded of the famous saying: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

In your business today you are struggling for independence against numerous forces. You have competition, trials, disasters, and great victories.

About half way through this book I was thinking, “how did we even win this war?” Turning that question to business merits the thought: how will we ever succeed in selling product XYZ? Or, how can we outperform our competition?

McCullough’s 1776 gives some stirring examples that can inspire you to succeed in your business. You’ll read of leadership, strategy, resourcefulness, failure, perseverance, and more.

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We’ve all gotten those postcards in the mail that tell us we’ve won a guaranteed prize of a cruise or some other sunny vacation getaway. Just such an announcement arrived to our home a few weeks ago. The catch of course, is that we’d have to go listen to a 90 minute time share presentation.

My wife and I had heard from some friends and family that you really do get the prize, so we called up and traveled an hour and half out of town to attend our 90 minute presentation and claim our prizes. We visited the Silverleaf Resorts’ Hill Country Resort nestled between San Antonio and Austin.

We listened to the presentation, took the tour, and after over 2 hours got back to a table and were ready to hear the salesman’s closing arguments. Our “tour guide” (read: salesman), brought over a finance person to convince us of the great deal it would be to finance the timeshare purchase price over time.

My wife and I weren’t too impressed with the resort and wouldn’t take on unnecessary debt even if we were. So we told them no thanks. Up to this point the sales experience had been cordial and professional. But once we started saying no, the monster within our finance guy appeared:

• He kept writing down random numbers on the paper and asking if that would work.
  Problem: Failure to explain what you are talking about confuses customers.
• He tells us he has another job to support himself, but to think of our salesman who has 4 kids to support.
  Problem: Our salesman had gone on at length about his 3 kids and their numerous costly international vacation trips. Don’t lie to your customers and don’t try to make them feel sorry for you when you obviously aren’t struggling financially!
• He tells us that we should never come to these presentations if we don’t intend to buy.
  Problem: The information we got in the mail was vague and only said we won a prize. We came to the presentation to get information and collect the goodies. Commitment to buy was not a prerequisite for visiting the resort.
• When our salesman realized we weren’t going to buy, he says: “I guess this isn’t for you then” and whirled around and walked away. We never saw him again. Our finance guy, when he gave up on us, got up and huffed off crumpling our paperwork loudly as he walked away, grumbling to himself all the while.
  Problem: This left us with a really bad taste in our mouth. Don’t end your interaction with a customer on a bad note.

My wife and I laughed all the way home about our time with the timeshare people. This doesn’t bode well for Silverleaf Resorts when we talk to our family and friends.

So, you don’t get the sale…

In your business you don’t always get the sale. For any number of reasons, your potential customer decides to walk away. The thoughts going through their heads and the feelings they are having will impact your future bottom line. Here is how to leave customers with a good impression and get the most out of customers who don’t buy:

• Thank them for their time.
• Tell them that if their needs change in the future to give you a call and hand them a business card.
• Ask if they know any one who would be interested. Gather names and contact information.
• Tell them to have a great day.

These last few steps should be said with a smile and without sarcasm or an angry tone. If you avoid the pitfalls of Silverleaf and follow the steps outlined above, your prospects will turn into a positive marketing tool and not negative publicity.

Update:
Yes, we did get the cruise. However, it won’t be our dream vacation.

My wife and I pulled up to a Sonic drive-in for dinner the other day. She had seen the commercials for the mini banana split and that prompted us to pull over when we saw the Sonic. The big menu had a huge beautiful picture of the 99 cent banana split. After getting our food we were very surprised to see the great disparity between the picture and our desserts. We had half melted ice cream and the whole container was small enough to fit in our palm of my hand. When compared with our expectations, the item we ordered didn’t match the picture and was too small!

Product Descriptions

The words describing a product should accurately reflect reality. The tendency in marketing is to make something sound greater than the actual product. This works well for selling the product for the first time. However, if the customer finds the product or service to be vastly different from what was advertised, they will not return.

Product Imagery

A picture is worth a thousand words. We see glossy pictures of products everywhere. These are often doctored after the photo shoot or feature perfect specimens. Rarely, does the delivered product match the high standards of the sales poster. With photography, the customer has an image of the product already in mind when the product arrives. This creates immediate and obvious problems when there isn’t a match.

Take the Test

Take a fresh look at your marketing copy. Next, look over your product brochures and product images. Now, go look at your actual product. Do they match? When you look at your product do you start to laugh? Does it pale in comparison to what you previously saw and read? If so, you need to do one of two things:

• Change your advertising and marketing content to match your real product
• Improve your product and bring it up the high quality described and shown in your marketing materials

Both are tough to do but are well worth the effort. I’d vote for the latter. If your product or service was as wonderful as that glossy ad shows, you’ll have customers coming back in no time.

The “e” in eCommerce stands for electronic. However, your company needs to make sure that “e” stands for more than just that. eCommerce should be:

Easy to Use

Customers are looking for convenience when they use your website. They’ve come to your website because they don’t want to wait on hold after calling nor drive to your store or office. Your site must make life easy for your customers. Your site should facilitate these actions:

• find needed information
• contact you
• purchase your products
• subscribe to your service

Whatever the objective of your website is, you must pave the way for your customers to achieve that goal. Make it simple and straightforward.

Easy = Usable

The key to ease of use is to follow standard conventions that are used across the web. Take the shopping cart for example. Web users understand this is a place to store their items before purchase. If you use wording, mechanisms or other
elements on your site that have never been seen before, you may be endanger of confusing your visitors.

When your site is usable and people are successfully completing their objectives, your site becomes easy to use. If customers stumble over problems on your site, they find it difficult because they can’t effectively use it as they wished.

Find a Role Model

As you use the web, look for sites similar to yours. Examine the leaders in your field. What are they doing that works? What do you see that you don’t like? Just because something has never been done before, doesn’t mean you can’t. Just be cautious and always help your visitor understand what is happening.

Further Reading

Sign up for these great newsletters for insights into creating easy to use websites:

• Jakob Nielsen’s www.useit.com
• Jared Spool’s www.uie.com

I’ve also read these books that offer some solid information on website usability that you can use to improve your site:

• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
• Designing Web Usability : The Practice of Simplicity
• Defensive Design for the Web : How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points