Daily Nonsense

Since November 19th, 2007, my ‘Worst Customer Service Award’ has been held by a company called goingTODAY.com.  You can read how they came to hold that title here:  GoingTODAY.com? GONE today!

Well, today I have nominated a new company for that singular honor.  The company is called Casanova Enterprises, Inc. doing business on EBay as jayco_tech.  Despite their 20119 comments and their gold star status on EBay, they have done nothing else but lie to me and disappoint me with their products and their pitiful attempt at customer service.  (Using that phrase, customer service, belies the total indifference and apathy I have experienced in all dealings with them).

I recently purchased an MSI Wind U100- 10-Inch Netbook computer.  It is being used to help stimulate my creative urges by allowing me to schlep the little thing around and work on my book when and where I want to.  One thing that wasn’t working well was the RealTek wireless card that comes standard with that model.  It works fine in Windows, but I’ve loaded Ubuntu 8.0.4 and there is no direct support from RealTek.  I decided to forgo compiling drivers myself and chose to buy an Intel Pro 3945 Wireless MINI Card on EBay to use as a substitute for the RealTek product.

After some careful searching I found this card from jayco_tech.  I thought that the price was good, the shipping was free and that I would have the card in a short amount of time.  Figuring that card only weighed a couple of ounces I guessed (correctly as it turned out) that it would be shipped USPS First Class Mail.  Coming from McAllen Texas, that should only have been a couple of days.

So, on April 1st I clicked the ‘Buy It Now’ button, paid through PayPal and awaited my new WiFi card.  On April 2nd I received an email from jayco_tech stating that my product had been shipped!  Well, that was the first lie.

But, what did I know at that point.  So I waited.  And waited, and waited……… Until April 9th when I received a message from from jayco_tech stating that my product had been shipped.  Huh?  Wasn’t it shipped on the 2nd?  A little research shows that the Post Office didn’t actually get the package until the 7th, 5 days after I was told it shipped!

So, now it is 9 days and counting.  4 days later,  on the 13th, I finally get a bubble envelope from Casanova Enterprises.  Guess what was in it?  No, really, guess….

The wrong frickin part is what was in it.  Click the pic below to see a bigger picture.

I immediately sent an EMail with this image attached and was surprised to receive an Email with the following explanation:

Sorry the boxes are right next to each other the guy who boxes these up probably reached into the wrong one. well really i can send you the right one or i can refund your money. let me know.

- jayco_tech

And again,this is from a company that has 20,000+ positive responses?

I followed up with an email asking what I should do with the wrong part.  I was told that my correct part would be shipped the next day and I should just put the wrong part back into the envelope when it arrived and ship it back.  they would credit my PayPal account with $3.00 when they received it.

OK, supposedly they shipped on the 14th but I have had no additional communication from these deadbeats.  I sent a follow-up with no reply.  So, today, 22 days after I initially paid for a part I haven’t received I went to the PayPal resolution center and started the formal complaint process.

But, since they do seem to have a high turnover I though I would publish my complaint in a forum where it will be more difficult to ‘hide’ it under the rug.

So, to conclude, there are tons of places on-line to spend your money.  Don’t spend it with Casanova  Enterprises, jayco_tech or goingTODAY.com.

Some additional jayco_tech issues that I’ve found on the interwebs:

• Dell 600M motherboard scam: http://www.hillcroftconsulting.net/index.htm
• Negative Feedback Removal Bribe:  http://www.djselectronics.com/TRUTH.htm

John Mashek, a retired political journalist and part time teacher has a Blog over at U.S. News and World Report where he is busy commenting on politics. He posted some thoughts yesterday that struck a chord in my battle weary heart. He was referring to the Mukasey confirmation votes by Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein and how there may have been a measure of sobering reality in their decision.

Would the petulant Bushie Boy have offered up anyone better if Mukasey hadn’t been approved? I think not. In fact, the childish response that many people seem to think would have been the result might have given us a choice that was actually worse than Alberto! Yes, it is possible to have someone worse than ’Berto, but that level of incompetence boggles my mind and gives me headaches.

So, the conclusion that Mashek comes to is that Mukasey and his history of fairness on the bench are the absolute best the Justice Department could have hoped for considering the circumstances.

I personally think that sucks. Why is it that we have to ’settle’ in a situation like this? Why do we have to settle at all?

Liberals: Give Mukasey a Chance

November 15, 2007 12:22 PM ET | Mashek, John

There are times when liberals need to be scolded. The confirmation process of Attorney General Michael Mukasey is one of those times.

Right-wing conservatives are often holier-than-thou and all-or-nothing partisans. Some liberal critics of Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California fit that profile regarding Mukasey.

The two, as members of the Judiciary Committee, voted to confirm Mukasey, thus assuring his confirmation by the full Senate.

The critics, mostly outside the hallowed walls of the Senate, jumped all over the two senators. It was not their finest day in op-eds and blogs.

A former federal judge with a reputation for fairness, Mukasey was breezing to confirmation until he was asked about waterboarding as a form of torture. Mukasey hedged. He ripped the practice but avoided labeling it torture, possibly because of legal culpability.

You would think that he had gone around the bend. Here is a reasonable successor to the totally incompetent Alberto "I Don’t Recall" Gonzales, and some senators balked. Waterboarding of prisoners is wrong, but it should not have been used as the sole excuse for defeating Mukasey’s nomination.

Did the opposition think the president would name a better man or woman than Mukasey? Given Bush’s usual temperament, the next nominee would really be flawed.

On the Senate floor, Mukasey garnered little support from Democrats, some of them apparently cowed by the piling-on of Mukasey.

Mukasey will be in office for 14 months. The Justice Department is a shambles and low on morale after the miserable tenure of the president’s Texas buddy Gonzales.

I’ll wager that some Democrats, at the end of Bush’s term in January 2009, will say that Mukasey was all right under the circumstances.

Ben Popken over at The Consumerist just posted about a new service called Catalog Choice, an Opt-Out service for those nasty and unwanted catalogs you get in the mail all the time. Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center whose mission is is to reduce the number unsolicited catalog mailings. Sounds good to me! I’ve already joined and added three catalogs to my list!

Now if someone could start a service like this to get off the mailing lists of Clearwire and the 47 versions of the yellow pages we get.

My favorite marketer, Seth Godin, re-posted a very interesting article to his blog the other day. I’ve gone back a couple of times since to review it and finally decided that it bears repeating.

Seth maintains that since things are becoming less scarce, things are becoming less valuable. Well, we all agree with that concept, right? It’s only the unique or near unique that demand the highest prices.

Seth has placed the concept of uniqueness in terms of the business world and crystallized something I’ve made reference to in other customer service posts. Business today needs to rely on not only the product, but their ability to service the customer in a way that leads to trust. Trust is key to both sides of the equation and can result not only a deeper, more meaningful business relationship but foster additional business relationships by word of mouth from satisfied customers.

The Scarcity Shortage

From four years ago:

What’s worth more: a pile of gold or a pile of salt? Throughout history, many people have chosen the salt. Gold is pretty, but you can’t live without salt, and when it was more scarce than gold, it became valuable enough to use as a currency itself. (The word "salary" is even related to the Latin for "salt.")

Today, of course, salt is close to worthless. Given the choice between a pile of salt and a pile of gold, you’d go for the gold every time, because there’s less of it around.

Scarcity, it seems, has a lot to do with value.

[Read on after the jump, it’s worth it]

My brother-in-law Will (lovely man, great father, green to the gills), has documented a recent Verizon customer service issue that caused is mother Grace (lovely woman, cool mother, lives in Jersey) to cancel her newly installed Verizon DSL account due to speeds LOWER than 56kps. I didn’t make a typo there, modem-like speeds at DLS-like prices.

His Blog documents the errors on the part of Verizon and lays out a guide for Customer Service Don’t-Do-It-This-Way. Verizon is currently $79.00 in early termination fees the richer for the experience but potentially out 13 or more cell phone contracts. All of our family uses Verizon, but to be honest, in today’s market it could just as well be any other phone company. My cell phone bill averages $99.00 a month and over a year that is a nice chunk of change. Multiply that by 13….. Hmmmm, much bigger number than 79.

I’ll tease you with a paragraph or two of Will’s post and leave you with the link.

Verizon: A Case Study in Bad Customer Service

My mom moved about a month ago, and signed up with Verizon DSL in her new house. I first learned she was having problems with her Internet service when I emailed her a movie I made on JumpCut, and she wasn’t able to view it. It turns out that Verizon gave her a DSL line that had less than 56kbps speeds. Yes, that’s right – Verizon was charging her DSL prices for less than dialup speeds.

• Verizon Mistake #1: If you aren’t providing the product or service you promised, don’t charge the customer. Verizon certainly could have monitored the quality of the connection and measured the transmission rate and determined that they were never delivering on the promised broadband connectivity. Therefore, they shouldn’t have charged for it. This wasn’t merely a case of "results may vary" – Verizon agreed that the speeds were excessively slow.

After several frustrating customer service calls with Verizon trying to resolve the speed issue (including one marathon session that went on for several hours), she gave up, and decided to get a broadband cable modem instead.

More after the jump.

[Thanks, Will]

We’re heading out to spend the weekend in Portland but I thought I just had to post quickly about this news story from Australia. You really need to read the whole article. The additional commentary is priceless for those of us who are not in the publishing business. Here’s a link to the story with commentary CLICK HERE

A couple of months ago I stumbled across a site that made me say, ’Huh?’. Scott Ginsberg, that guy with the nametag, was recently featured on 20/20. In the interview Scott maintains that he is the luckiest guy he knows and it’s all due to the nametag. The nametag opens doors for him that might otherwise remain closed. Watch him explain it in the clip below.

What do you think? Do we make our own luck? Can introducing yourself to someone new make that much of a difference in your life? I’d say yes.

Scott’s Website

Scott’s Blog

 This is an old article I found in my drafts section when I imported all of my posts from my old BlogSpot blog.

I’ve recently been lax posting to this and my other blogs. I got a new job and just don’t have as much time as I used to. But there is one story that has piqued my interest enough for me to make the time for a little posting. And that story is the downfall of Starbucks.

I’m not talking about anything bad from a bottom line sense. At least nothing that I know about. What I am talking about are the bad or at least mediocre marketing decisions they seem to be making.

[Thanks, Gizmodo]

Yet again Seth Godin hit’s the proverbial nail right on the head. Why don’t companies encourage their front line troops to engage the customer in a playful manner? The ability (and permission) for that robot-ish cashier who’s working the McJob to have a little fun would be absolutely priceless. Priceless for both the customer and the cashier. Let’s all have a little fun today. I’m VERY sorry that I missed this promotion. We don’t have California Tortilla here in Seattle or I would have eaten fast food (which I never do anymore).

Rochambeau the front line

Freaknomics points us to the greatest fast food promotion in memory. Beat the cashier in a game of rock paper scissors and save a buck.

What I absolutely love about this idea, other than its obvious remarkability, is the way it humanizes the previously automatonized front line worker. Instead of making them invisible, it makes them part of the deal. "Tell your Starbucks barrista a really funny joke, get a free biscotti (knock knock jokes not valid in some states.)"

Why not do this with your accounts payable people? Or give the customer service people the ability to give a prize to the nicest person who calls in each day? What’s the worst that could happen–they might use a little judgment, might enjoy the day a bit more, might even start to care.

If you let them.

[Thanks, Seth]

“May I help you?”

Some of you may know that I once lived in retail-land, far above the Caramel Mountains and beyond the Sodie-Pop Sea. As a Staples employee I was taught to ask the question “What Can I Help You Find Today?” This is an open ended question and pretty much demands anything other than a Yes/No answer. The rationale here is to engage the customer, not simply point the way. Pointing the way simply shows the customer where the product is. It doesn’t show the customer why he should buy it from me.

Seth Godin, a man who is quickly becoming my “Marketing/PR/Why Do I Exist” go-to answer guy, posted about the basic futility of the question “May I Help You?”. That question really isn’t about opening a dialog, it’s about finishing a conversation.

Copied below, in it’s oh so terse entirety, Seth’s Blog post:

“May I Help You?”

… is almost a useless thing to say.

If you want to end a conversation with a teenager, just ask, “How was school today?”

If you want to end a conversation with a customer, just ask if you can help. Instead, ask, “can I get you a hot drink?” or “what’s the worst thing about your insurance company?” or “one slice or two?”

[Thanks, Seth]

Starbucks Redux…

On the 3rd of March I posted an article about Starbucks and the loss of corporate vision which has reduced the Starbucks experience to something akin of getting a cup of bean at a fast food restaurant. Time Magazine on-line put their own spin on the story with a couple of eye-opening thoughts:

You can’t wake up and smell the coffee at Starbucks. That’s the lament of Howard Schultz, the founder and chairman of the ubiquitous java chain, in an internal memo that recently became external. In this wistful missive, Schultz fretted that, because coffee is delivered in flavor-locked packaging, the atmosphere had changed, the romance evaporated; the Starbucks “experience” of baristas grinding beans, pulling expresso shots and hand-crafting beverages had been automated away by machines that can knock out an expresso with the press of a button.If I may be so bold, Howard, smelling the coffee isn’t the problem — it’s getting to it. In the ‘Bucks nearest my office, I’d venture that two out of five days I don’t have the 15 minutes to wait to purchase a simple cup of black coffee. Just coffee. No milk, no sugar, no syrup, no fooling. No way.

It’s not the atmosphere, Howard. It’s your incompetence. Or at least that of the executives who work for you at your way too laid-back HQ. You’re talking atmosphere when you should be talking about front-end operations. Instead, in my Starbucks we have the morning chaos, the lines stretching all the way to the ludicrously heavy doors, a drill duplicated at the coffee hour of 4 p.m., where they’ve mastered the art of have exactly one less person on hand than needed. Then again, I can’t blame the local manager for this parsimony, since she hardly has any room for more people. The place is too cluttered up with displays of coffeemakers, mugs, CDs, books and that other crap you can’t sell.

Read the full story here!

[Thanks, Time]

Starbucks Smells the Death of Its Brand Experience
CEO Confronts Missing Aroma of Fresh-Roasted Coffee

Wow, this is a great article. It really brings home that there is more than just one thing, a sign for instance, that are involved in branding. Starbucks had branded itself with a smell as well as a little green sign. Now that’s missing from their stores and people are noticing. Read the text for more!

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — What does your Starbucks smell like? Probably not fresh-roasted coffee, one of the many things

that has the chain’s boss worried his all-powerful brand is getting cold.

Internal memo
Last week, the blog Starbucks Gossip turned up a memo from Howard Schultz in which the chairman criticized a number of decisions that “have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience and what some might call the commoditization of our brand.” Mr. Schultz, who doled out some blame to himself, pointed in particular to the disappearance of the in-store coffee scent and the cookie-cutter feel of the stores.

It’s a major epiphany for a brand that’s been one of the marketing world’s premiere case studies on how a commodity can be transformed into a premium-priced object of desire, or habit, by creating a comfortable spot in which to buy and consume it — that third place that’s neither home nor work. Starbucks’ brisk growth — stores now number more than 13,000, and the company wants to get to 40,000 — raises the question of whether it’s possible to scale the kind of experience that made Starbucks what it is without losing the flavor.

In-store coffee grinding eliminated
In the memo, Mr. Schultz blamed automatic espresso machines that don’t require baristas to pull shots and that prevent customers from seeing drinks being made. He blamed packaging, chosen because of the need to distribute coffee to every North American city, that locked in flavor and eliminated the need to grind the coffee in-store. “We achieved fresh-roasted bagged coffee, but at what cost?” And he blamed uniform store design, financially efficient but suggestive of a “chain of stores vs. the warm feeling of a neighborhood store.”

As it’s grown, Starbucks has worked to keep consumers interested, though many innovations have taken it far from java. WiFi and CD racks have been added in recent years, and the menu has been expanded to include breakfast sandwiches. Last year, Starbucks got into the entertainment business with the release of the film “Akeelah and the Bee,” and it’s expected to announce another book or movie project early this year.

Robert Passikoff, founder-president of the consultancy Brand Keys, said Mr. Schultz’s concerns are legitimate. “They took their eye off the brand,” he said. In Brand Keys’ annual study of customer loyalty, Starbucks was knocked out of first place in the coffee-and-doughnuts category by Dunkin’ Donuts, the first time in five years Starbucks didn’t dominate.

‘Lost its differentiation’
“You probably wouldn’t leave a Starbucks dissatisfied,” he said, “but satisfaction is just the price of entry. It has lost its differentiation, its crispness of experience.”

The Feb. 14 memo, which the company confirmed as authentic, “is a reflection of the passion and commitment Starbucks has to maintaining the authenticity of the Starbucks experience while we continue to grow,” a spokeswoman said. It didn’t suggest a specific course of action; rather, Mr. Schultz, a Brooklyn-born, rags-to-riches story, asked CEO Jim Donald and top managers to “get back to the core.”

He described the situation as “self-induced” but nevertheless one that’s led to competition from fast-food companies and mom-and-pop operators. These rivals “position themselves in a way that creates awareness, trial and loyalty of people who previously have been Starbucks customers. This must be eradicated.”

“We do not embrace the status quo and constantly push for reinvention,” the spokeswoman said. “This is a consistent, longstanding business philosophy to ensure we provide our customers the uplifting experience they have come to expect.”

Good luck to Howard and his boys on that. I actually have never found a coffee joint to be an uplifting experience…..

Monster.Com E-mail Virus

This morning I received a horrible email purporting to be from Monster.com. You know them, the resume site that helps join up jobs with workers. The start of it is posted here:

So, running my cursor across the links I found three links to monster.com and one to http://khbdqnnkrgrl.com/ (Which is actually hosted by Yahoo Small Business!)

Being curious and working from the computer outside my DMZ I went ahead and clicked on it.

The aVast! On-Access Scanner caught the virus attempt and stopped the download of the trojan. But of course I worry about those folk who get this and don’t have a good virus scanner in place.

Next I tried to send a report of this to Monster. Sounds like the neighborly thing to do, don’t you think?

Here is the web page at monster where I’ve entered my info and the ‘text’ of the email. There are no live links in this, OK? Just the text.

When I hit the send button I get this:

Now, on that reporting page there are three options, the e-mail, a live chat with a monster rep and an 800 number. Shame that because I’m feeling anti-social monster ain’t going to get notified by me about this one………

Starting over with customer service

As some of you know I’ve worked at Staples for about 6 years now and have a few stories to tell about customer service. I have enjoyed working at Staples for many reasons one of which is the level of customer service that the company DEMANDS we provide. I really want to help most customers (now let’s be real, there are always some that grate…) and Staples gave me the opportunity to do so. But…..

I’m a consumer too. There are some stores I won’t go to any more. Someone, a cashier, an associate, a manager, someone ticked me off. I’ve know for years that customer service outside of Staples, is hit or miss.

Seth Godin recently wrote about it on his blog and I was impressed by his insight:

Customer service is broken. Not just because of bad management, though we have plenty of that to go around. Customer service is broken for three reasons:

1. The internet has taught us to demand everything immediately (and perfect). As a result, we expect that every single time we pick up the phone or deal with someone in a retail setting, we’ll be dealing with the Senior Vice President of Customer Satisfaction, the head of accounting and the chief of quality control, all at the same time. We expect instant results and undivided attention.

2. The rapid proliferation of choice has taught us to demand that everything should be cheap. As a result, we won’t pay extra for superior service, which means companies need to hire cheap.

3. The availability of blogs and other public histories means that it is harder than ever to treat different customers differently. Word gets out.

As a result of these three inexorable trends, companies are on defense. They are forced to add a new layer to their pyramid, and yes, it’s on the bottom. This layer consists of lots and lots of people, the cheapest the company can find. These folks are ill-trained, poorly supported and under lots of pressure. There is a lot of turnover (what a surprise) and most are working with nothing more than a simple manual and a lot of metrics.

[Thanks, Seth]