9 posts tagged “service”

Yep, another of those "you can have any two of the three" type scenarios (quality-service-price) is out. Of course, if you position yourself in the middle, no one will even know you are there. You can find it at Branding & Marketing.

There was a great hew and cry when Wal-Mart dropped its layaway service and the impact that would create for their poorer customers. Looks like layaway has moved online, but that probably will not help those lower economic bracket customers. Springwise reports that although there are no really big online retail players involved yet, the service looks promising. Customers pay a percentage upfront and when they complete paying eLayaway the goods get delivered. 

On the Southwest Airlines blog, a new power station was introduced. It is being field tested at two gates at Dallas Love Field. Note the feedback and SWA's responses. This is a perfect example of corporate blog usage to introduce a product/service and collect feedback from far more people that they would get from those actually using the p/s. 

With Netflix's arrival on the DVD rental scene, many were predicting the demise of Blockbuster. But like any wise company that understands marketing, they did not go head-to-head with Netflix but rather used their brick and mortar units to make a difference. Blockbuster's online customers do not have to deal with the vagaries of snail mail and the question of when something made it back (possibly a deliberate ploy to delay shipping new DVDs out) by allowing their customers to return the online-ordered and snail-mail delivered DVD to any of its stores getting immediate check-in, coupons and so on. Total Access, the program, may be hindered by Blockbuster as it closes down some units meaning longer trips for many people to turn DVDs in physically.

(VIA)

Neatorama had this bit on an underwater hotel in Dubai. It will be about 20 m below the surface and will have 220 suites. Opening expected end of 2007.  Sorta, really, strongly phallic.

Hydropolis-dubai-underwater-hotel

Seeing this reminded me of a rant I did back years ago (well pre-Katrina) about how come the idiots at the oil companies would not build their oil facilities on the ocean floor and use a retractable system to fuel ships. When hurricanes come along, that surface unit could be "sunken" by winding it back down to the ocean floor where it would remain safely until the storm passed. Sure there would be problems, but all the money lost in both repair and by the rise in prices because of damaged platforms over the years should make this economically feasible. Of course, the oil companies have no downside to the current periodic losses, they just rape us at the pump each time it happen. 

Brandcurve covers Smallbusinessbrandingblog.com giving some interesting numbers on customers abandoning a brand: 43% of customers who leave a brand do so due to poor service, 77% of those people blame poor employee attitudes, and then, to top it all off, 83% of people who have bad service tell someone else. Not only that, as I have posted before, they will YouTube you. It is not how many people they tell directly, but the cascading that may occur.  

WOW! That makes vending machines about 2023 years old? There were vending machines for "holy water" in Alexandria's temples?  Coming via Resource Shelf, NAMA has a time line of vending and coffee service. 

MarketingVOX, covering an AdAge article, writes that some major players are moving a small piece of their European ad budgets to mobile marketing signaling the "medium is moving out of trial mode." Of course your mobile phone company likes it because it means more bucks for them from two sources, one definite - the advertisers, and second from potentially marketing a higher-priced mobile plans sans all the ads. Like the oil companies, mobile companies will get up coming and going.

This USA Today piece has a lot of good information on personnel - customer interactions and some of the techniques being used to bring those interactions up to today's speed. Gen-Xers like authenticity, not sterile corporate feels that boomers liked (well, even though a boomer, I'm more Gen-X in that respect). Training may include benchmarking where you are at and where you are strong or weak so you can better handle the customer. There are lessons here for any customer-centric business. Scripted responses are out - oh my, the implications for sales, and genuineness in.