Review: Vanguard Financial Services Holiday Email

I expected to have received many more Christmas emails / Holiday e-cards by now. Sure I got lots of sales messages from Amazon, Buy, Verizon, Palm, etc. But I want a non-solicitation message wishing me the best. This is what I got.

My rating system is simple. By default, these companies get 1 star just for taking the time and effort to send me a stand alone Christmas/holiday email message.

You get another star if you have something interesting to say or pretty animation for me to look at.

Today’s review:
Vanguard ( 1 star )

Subject: A holiday message from Vanguard

A holiday message from Vanguard
Delight in the poetic magic of the holiday season.

In My Humble Opinion (IMHO): Could that email be any shorter? And what about that Flash animation. Wow, although I like Robert Frost, that execution was incredibly boring. Boring. BORING! This was just slapped together and the marketing department should be ashamed of themselves.

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Merry Christmas!

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

Holiday emails from companies that want my business

I expected to have received many more Christmas emails / Holiday e-cards by now. Sure I got lots of sales messages from Amazon, Buy, Verizon, Palm, etc. But I want a non-solicitation message wishing me the best.

What I got was mostly disappointing. I’ll review each email in separate postings.

Advice to Marketers: Next year, send me something like Go Daddy did or this. It’s hysterical, fun and a lot more memorable.

Merry Christmas!

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

Article: Consumers Punishing Physical Stores for Sins of Online Counterparts

eWeek reports: Consumers Punishing Physical Stores for Sins of Online Counterparts

“Nordstrom, for example, has a reputation for delivering extremely personalized and attentive customer service for people visiting their stores. That high-touch attribute is quite difficult to replicate online, setting the company up to disappoint online visitors. Those disappointed online visitors could then potentially punish the brick-and-mortar locations.”

“Retailers have been very slow to understand that, to the consumer, it’s one brand.”

“The retail brand today transcends the channel. When [customers] have a poor Web experience, as in poor page loads [or] unsuccessful transactions, it’s taken out on the storefronts, too. Consumers don’t understand the complexity of delivering an optimal Web experience.”

Key take away: A company must work hard in both the physical and online worlds to deliver a consistent message and high user experience. Failing in one environment will discourage the consumer to interact with the brand in the other.

-Roland

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

Listen to your client when collecting user requirements

This might seem obvious, but listening is key. This becomes painfully obvious when reviewing work with a client and discovering that she/he had something very different in mind. Are you sure your user requirements are really what the client truly wants? Or are you making assumptions based on what you think the client needs? Have you asked enough questions or the RIGHT questions to clearly define what the client has in mind? Most importantly of all, are you sure the client really knows what she/he wants?

Collecting user requirements right the first time is critical in terms of defining project scope, managing to budget, managing time invested and ultimately delivering a successful project. Needless to say, if you get it wrong, your client and team may loose confidence in you.

I wish I knew who to credit for this original image, but I found it on this blog.

When the client first proposes a project, I like to ask for a project brief. If I can’t get that, I summarize the scope as I understand it and make the client review and confirm. Another kickoff exercise I like to use is to have the client fill out a Marketing Questionnaire and/or Technical Questionnaire with many questions about what the client wants to accomplish and how it will be measured. This homework assignment is good to get the client thinking about the project. Then I’ll follow-up with more probing questions.

In summary, take the time to do the due diligence and get the user requirements accurate the first time. Your project and reputation may count on it.

Good luck.
-Roland

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

Bad Customer Experience? Complain about it!

Recently we took our kids to the restaurant Mars 2112 in NYC as a birthday treat. They were excited and looking forward to it for weeks.

We waited patiently for an hour to get in. We took their 5 minute “rocket ride” to Mars. Inside, the atmosphere is awesome. It looks like a futuristic restaurant inside a cavern (in the 2 story basement of a Manhattan office building). The kids loved it. The waitress who took our order and the roaming “aliens” were friendly. Everything was fine until a server with a nasty attitude dumped our food on the table. While the kids didn’t notice, the 3 adults at the table wouldn’t stop talking about it.

To leave the restaurant, customers get to “beam” back to the lobby using their teleporter. You enter a room, door closes behind you, lights flash as you are demolecularized and reassembled back on earth. Then another door opens and you exit to the lobby/gift shop. Unfortunately they choose to leave both doors open and the kids could see straight through from the restaurant to the gift shop, which ruined the illusion. The kids would not stop talking about how disappointed they were.

This week I ordered a dehumidifier from Lowes.com. During the online order process, the Web site clearly promised me that I could pickup the product in store 2 hours after I received a confirmation email. The email arrived at 2:14pm. I arrived at the store at 5:45pm. They had 3.5 hours to pull the product and queue it for pickup. The store was not busy. The customer service rep immediately found my order in the computer. Yet it took 40 minutes for them to find the product and get me out of the store. There were a dozen employees in blue smocks standing around talking to each other. While the employees were friendly, my time was wasted.

What to do? COMPLAIN!

I filed complaints. I wasn’t nasty or angry, but I clearly explain that the company failed on a customer service promise.

Chances are you wont get anything more than an brief apology, but it is critical to bring things like this to the company’s attention. Otherwise, the company will blissfully go about business as usual.

How to complain:
1. Set your tone. Don’t be nasty or angry.

2. Do not nitpick about stupid things. Instead position them as suggestions for improvement.

3. Clearly explain the circumstances and why you think your expectations were not met.

4. Provide details (i.e. store info, product info, day/time, names of people you talked to, etc.) so the company can easily figure out what went wrong and who was responsible.

5. Post product reviews online to share your experience. But be fair and wait until after the company has had a reasonable chance to respond to your complaint. Then be sure to explain in your review what went wrong and how the company may or may not have tried to correct the problem for you.

Be sure to imagine yourself in their shoes. If you got an angry complaint with no details, how seriously would you take it? But if you get constructive criticism with details, then you can take meaningful action.

I hope this helps. Go get ‘em!
-Roland

Roland Reinhart is an interactive marketing professional. His observations can be found at NewMediaSandbox.com and Chaos365.com.

©2006 Roland Reinhart. All Rights Reserved.

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