Or pay $10/month.
Or pay $12.50/month
I got a phone call this evening from "Joe". (I don't think he'd mind my using his name, but I didn't think to ask his permission before writing this, and I don't want to bother him needlessly.)
Joe wanted to get into his website, and couldn't figure out how to get into his website, "Joes-site.com". We talked on the phone for ten minutes. His site uses Drupal, and I went into his site, set up a new username and password for him, and he tried using that without success. Was he inserting spaces anywhere? Was he capitalizing something that ought not be capitalized? How about flushing the cache on his browser?
The thing that was most confusing to me was that his site wasn't recording any failed attempts to log in. I had him open a DOS window and "ping" his site, to make sure the DNS was resolving to the right address. Finally, I asked him whether he was trying to connect on port 2082 or 2095, which are used for pulling up the administrative panel and the webmail interface. Finally, I realized that he was trying to log in to the Drupal site, not to his own. Once he went to http://joes-site.com, he logging in right away, slicker than, well, really slick.
If it was puzzling and frustrating to me, it must have been incredibly puzzling and frustrating to Joe. It's no secret that the "Whatever for Dummies" books are runaway best-sellers, not because the books are particularly helpful, but because people consider themselves dummies.
You know what's worse? Companies let their customers think they are dummies. Joe was NOT making a stupid mistake. It was simply an uncommon mistake (as far as I can tell.) Once you know better, you don't make that particular mistake again; but isn't that the way it works with everything?
The fact of the matter is, if the customer makes a mistake, it's the fault of the company for not setting up the system better. If you make an air conditioner, you shouldn't mark the temperature control "higher" and "lower", because it's not obvious whether "higher" means "make the air conditioner work harder" or it means "make the air condition work less hard, so the temperature is higher". Instead, you mark the controls "warmer" and "cooler".
For a long time, we did support by email. Finally, with trepidation, we got a toll-free telephone number. An experiment, we announced. We might not be able to afford it. It turned out that the phone bill was pretty small.
In fact, you could say the phone bill was negative. Instead of spending 20 minutes reading an email, trying to figure out the problem, and writing an email in response, and trading 5 emails over the course of a week, someone would call us up, we could ask the questions and get immediate answsers, and in many cases, we can solve their problem in 10 minutes, while they're still on the phone. It's really made our support job a lot easier.
More important, though, it's made our support better. E-mail has reached the point where it's almost unusable. More to the point, can you imagine what would have happened had we tried to solve Joe's problem via e-mail? Joe would have given up in frustration after three e-mails, thinking he was hopelessly over his head. That's obviously not true. Joe's a smart fellow. And we'd have lost a customer.
That's why we're not just willing to have customers call our toll-free line, but we encourage it. Call with problems. Call with questions. Call if it's Friday night and you're alone, and your ex- just announced his engagement to your best friend, and you just need to talk.
They say that in the middle of the night, you can call any phone number to find out what time it is. ("Do you know it's twenty after three?") Hey, call us. And it's OK to use us as a suicide prevention hotline, too. We know that dead people often stop paying for their websites. Besides, we've been there, too. You don't need a shrink, you just need a friend, right?
In the 1980s, we all saw a lot of bank mergers. If there are two branches of Starbucks a block apart, Starbucks is likely to build a new branch between them, but bankers don't work that way; they sell off their redundant branches. And with fewer banks around, a lot of those branches ended up in the hands of other companies.
When I saw the variety of businesses that were taking great advantage of those drive-thru windows, I decided that anyone with a local office really needed one. Your customers need to drop off papers, or make payments, or whatever, and if you make it possible for them to do that without leaving the dog locked up in the car, without showering and dressing up all spiffy, without letting the ice cream in the trunk melt, then they're going to be highly reluctant to do business somewhere else.
But drive-thru windows also isolate your customers. One business management expert tells small businessmen - and would-be small businessmen - that they should never use the drive-thru window at their bank. They should go inside, dressed impeccably, and be sure to be kind and complimentary to everyone, because when push comes to shove, you want every bank employee to be pushing and shoving on your behalf for that line of credit you're applying for. And at the drive-thru, you're just a cylinder that goes through a pneumatic tube.
It works that way with customers, too. So if you have a drive-thru, you want to do everything possible to get your customers to park and come inside, so that they develop a personal relationship. Hey, c'mon in, we've celebrating Joan's birthday, and there's cake. Hey, c'mon in, we just opened a branch in Cameltown, and you can go fishing for a prize. Hey, c'mon in, it's Wednesday, and we've got free hot dogs.
It's going to cost something to acquire a customer - and as a businessman, you need to know how much. A tax preparer will spend $100 in advertising to attract each customer whose annual fees total $100. A supermarket will spend $10 or more in advertising and loss leaders for each customer who comes in for their weekly shopping trip. A cable television franchise or a daily newspaper may spend $250 for each new subscriber.
And it costs just as much to lose an existing customer, even if you only see it in terms of slowly dropping revenue (or gains that aren't what they should be.) If you buy a popcorn machine for $600 and offer free popcorn every Friday, at the end of the year, you may have spent $700 or $800 - and earned it back ten-fold in customers retained, and customers gained. They don't do business with you because they get free popcorn. They do business with you because you're the kind of guy who is generous with his popcorn.
Joe Girard made it into the Guiness Book as the world's greatest salesman by selling cars for Merollis Chevrolet in Detroit. He'd ask if you smoke - and once he found out what brand, he didn't just give you a cigarette, he tossed you a pack of your own brand - he kept them all on hand. Want a drink? He had a bar in his office. After all, the Chevy he could sell you came from the same factory as the Chevy sold by the dealer across town.
His notion was that you already had made the decision to buy before you visited the showroom. The only question was where to buy, so his entire sales pitch amounted to "You're a helluva good guy, and I'm a helluva good guy, so why the hell don't you buy it from me?"
Shortly before I was first married, I was stressing out over details of the wedding. "Listen," my younger brother advised. "There are some battles you don't want to win - and this is one of them." It's always important for a businessman to keep an eye on costs - but customer support isn't a frill. It's the reason customers choose you rather than your competitor. You need to spoil your customers rotten.
