4M

About a year ago, a colleague mentioned that there was an online seminar about how to write better web content. I was new at YVOD and thought it would be interesting. Our then salesperson, CEO, Art Director and I gathered in a room and watched the presentation. It was phenomenal.

The speaker? Gerry McGovern. The people who brought his ideas into my life: Marketingprofs.

So the seminar was a hundred bucks, totally reasonable, and opened my eyes to the worlds of Content Management, Information Architecture, all kinds of things I had never heard of before and now comprise the majority of my day. About a week later, I got an email asking if I’d like to add another hundred bucks to be able to get seminars like that for free for the rest of the year. Heeeck yea! Signed up and started getting always-relevant, pithy little articles in my inbox and attended about one seminar a month, all of which were interesting. Well, that’s cool.

So my year membership comes due, I have trouble on the checkout page trying to re-up and forget to follow through. Then I realize I’m 3 days away from expiration and I really need to take care of this. But I remember that two weeks ago they offered me 20% discount on re-upping, and wouldn’t it be nice if I could still get that discount, even though I was a dufus and didn’t take care of it right away? Well, there’s no harm in asking. So I send an email saying, hey, can I get that discount?

I get a reply almost immediately. And I quote:

Hi, Marisa –

Use coupon code XXXX for a 20% discount.

Contact me directly if there’s anything else I can do for you!

Regards,

:: Shelley Ryan
:: Customer Service Samurai
:: MarketingProfs.com

Three things went right in this scenario, and I have to comment on it because it should be commonplace but it isn’t, because most people do NOT get this sort of thing right:

1. I got a real, human response. Immediately. From someone empowered to do something about my problem.
2. They gave me what I needed. With no questions asked and without making me feel like a dufus. Immediately.
3. MarketingProfs folks have the coolest titles ever. Heh.

Think about it: They could have hassled me. They could have ignored me. They could have politely declined my goofy little request. But they didn’t. Here’s what so many companies do not understand when they are being penny-wise and customer-foolish:

It might have saved them 47 cents of Shelley’s time to just send me an autoreply.
It would definitely have saved them 40 bucks to decline my request.
But it netted them, not only my next year’s renewal, but my loyalty for life, and my evangelism. Now maybe nobody reads my silly little rants about why customer service matters and why design matters. But then again … maybe somebody does.

Thanks, Shelley.

And thanks, MarketingProfs. If for nothing else than giving me the opportunity to hear Gerry say “don’t be a putter-upper” in that oh-so-charming Irish accent.

And hey, you two or three people out there reading this: go get yourself a premium membership to MarketingProfs. I guarantee you it will be the best 2 hundred bucks you invest in your business this year.

~m

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Marketing, Rants & Raves, Life on the internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.