Evil Doctor PorkChop: Irritations

As an Northwest frequent flyer, I don't get it.

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 08:17:14 GMT

Let me start by saying I like to fly Northwest. Even after all of the stress people there have been through, they've always been professional and friendly to me. Also, for my flying needs, they offer the best routes.

As a Northwest Airlines frequent flyer, I got an email today discussing the new Coach Choice program. Underwhelmed would be an accurate description of my feelings.

WHY?

I don't get it. Why on earth would I pay $15 for an aisle seat when I schedule early and get them anyway? As I'm one flight away from Silver Elite, it's actually a bad deal if you pay your $15 and get bumped to first class. In that case, you aren't refunded your $15 bucks. Also, is it $15 for each leg of the flight? I have yet to fly on less than 2 segments. Do I get a miles bonus for buying? I don't see the incentive here.

WHAT WOULD I PAY FOR INSTEAD?

How about a conceirge service where Northwest partners with a airport parking company at a special rate. They then pick you up and allow you to check in and check your bags more easily, either on the bus or at pickup. Then, when you leave, your bags are waiting for you on the shuttle to your car. That would be worth money to me. It has sometimes cost me as much to park and shuttle as it did to buy the airline ticket. While I think it's nice they offer special lounges and all, the reality is that I rarely have a layover long enough to take advantage of this. Helping me at the beginning and end of the trip is more valuable to me.

How about allowing me to preorder and pay for a meal with a credit card? Not airline food, but something from one of the airport vendors. My biggest challenge sometimes is finding a place to quickly get food when I only have 35 minutes to get from one end of the Minneapolis airport to the other. They could help me by having a pizza or even a number 2 combo with a Diet Coke from McDonald's. I would be okay with that!

How about renting me a power converter for airplane power plugs to a regular power plug for my tablet pc? Again, these are things I would see value in and would pay for.

PLEASE STOP!

They took away the pillows and blankets. The magazines seemed to have disappeared. They took away the pretzels. Stop taking stuff away. Stop nickel and diming me on every thing. Stop making me pay cash for things on the plane and please start offering me services that I need!

Northwest Northwest Airlines

What we have here, is a failure to manage customer expectations

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 05:57:15 GMT

Linens N Things has lost a customer this week.

They lost a customer for inadequately managing the customer's expectations in their online ordering and local store pickup process. As a result, the customer is dissatisified and gone. What happened?

LNT is guilty of being apathetic about managing customer expectations. They rolled out a new service and expected the customer to automatically have the right service expectations. They probably looked at the direct competition and thought they were ok. Hey, Bed, Bath and Beyond doesn't do this, so we should be good to go.

Note to the LNT Execs: When you introduce a service similar to one your customers already use with someone else, the someone else is managing the customer expectations for that service.

Unless you are rolling out a radically better service, you have to meet that same service expectation set by the other company in order to be judged successful. Failure to do so will result in customer dissatisfaction with your company and potential customer loss.

In many cases, the company setting the service expectation is not your direct competitor or in your market. For example, look at what Apple did to customer expectations around MP3 players. All of a sudden, Creative and Sony didn't control customer expectations any longer and had to play catch up to meet the new expectations set by a personal computer maker.

The customer doesn't see markets and segments, they only see products and services. If your service looks like XYZ's, then the customer expectation is that it will work just like XYZ's. If it doesn't, you should say explicitly how it's different.

LNT recently added the ability to browse and order products online and be able to pick up the product from the local store. Good ole Click n Mortar service. Cool. We use this functionality with several different stores, so we were looking forward to using it.

In particular, we are long time customers of Circuit City. Circuit City pioneered the click n mortar concept and in my opinion, has one of the best systems for this functionality, bar none.

Circuit City has set my expectation to be able to pick up a product ordered online by the time I get to the store. With having to load the kids and related support gear, it is usually about an hour between order and pickup. They have yet to fail me and I'm always in and out with the products I've ordered. I've always been a happy camper with their stores.

So, we've been looking at Roombas. With cats and children, the carpet always has an interesting collection of things on it which need to be vacuumed up. A robotic maid for this chore would be a perfect fit.

So this adventure started when my wife got an email from LNT saying their Roomba is listed at the lowest price we've seen anywhere. Out comes the credit card and away goes the LNT order for the Roomba. We leave to run errands as you can't yet order online from Target and Home Depot. After 4 hours, we figured the Roomba should be ready to be picked up. Hey, everywhere else we use this type of service, the product's been sitting there for about 3 hours. We checked webmail on our cell and saw the confirmation email. Yipee, we're about to be proud owners of a new robotic rugrat!

We walk in the store and there's a nice display of about 20 of those bad boys sitting there by the registers. I ride herd on the kids while my wife goes off to score our new little red robot.

She comes back a few minutes later, madder than a hornet. It seems that LNT doesn't process the orders in real time. The lady at the service counter said it could be 2-3 days before they fulfil the order and that they would call us to pick it up. To make matters worse, the LNT person was a bit snippy about the whole affair as she seemed to think we were being unreasonable in our expectation of picking up our order a mere 4 hours after placing it.

Based on her comments, we probably would have gotten the Roomba sooner if they had just shipped it to us or if we had just come to the store to get it. Except now, they had our money and wouldn't give us the product.

We left, mad and empty handed. We were standing in front of $4000 in inventory of the product we ordered and had proof of purchase, but couldn't get our order because of their kludgy process. Strike one.

When we got home, my wife called the LNT 800 customer support line to cancel the order. Guess what. Once the order goes to the store, you can't cancel it. Yep, you have to trot back to the store in 2-3 days after they get around to calling you to pick up the order. Then you have to take it to the store's return desk to return it.

Sweet! Let's throw a little salt in the wound here, why don't you. Not only did you take our money and not give us our order, but now you are going to make it a real pain for us to get our money back due to our dissatisfaction with your lousy process. Strike two.

We also submitted a customer complaint email to the website. We've not even received an email that the submission was received. I mean, come on, LNT can't even set an autoresponder for this sort of submission to their mailbox? Based on the email contents, I would have expected some sort of response from the company by now. Strike three and you are out of there!

It will be the last time we ever go there and I'm taking the time to tell everyone I know about the experience.

A side note. We decided that we really needed the big Roomba, after re-reading the specs while grousing about LNT's crappy process and drinking coffee. It's twice as much as the one we ordered from LNT. We'll be visiting another retailer who will gladly give us the product for our money, after we get finished returning this one to LNT.

Too bad Circuit City doesn't sell Roombas.

Trackback Spam now? Geez!

Thu, 19 May 2005 04:45:25 GMT

I just realized two non-blog link ad sites had tracked back to one of my posts. I guess the spammers are on to new tricks...

If I didn't need a cell phone, I would do without...

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 06:36:42 GMT

As you can tell, I've been on the market looking for a new cellphone for the wife and I. All I can say is that we are going with the provider that was the cheapest since they all equally suck otherwise.

I work for a company that makes a point of greeting incoming customers at the door and marshalling them through the process. Too bad it doesn't work that way at Verizon. I walked into Verizon, casually looked at every phone and was not even given a glance. If they can ignore potential customers, I can only imagine what customer service will be like. Grade of F all around.

T-Mobile doesn't service our area even though the deals looked good. Oddly enough, they still advertise in our area. Oh well.

Cingular. Their phones suck. Yes, they have the Scoble phone, but I'm a PalmOS user so Windows Mobile has no appeal. Also, no Treo 650, only the 600. Come on, get with the program guys. The 650 has been out for awhile. I will never own another Motorola phone based on past experiences. What you are left with is a couple of Nokias. The plans are ok but the phones just aren't what I need.

Of course, I had to figure that out for myself since the lone person working the counter at the Cingular store was doing her best to service the line of customers in front of her. Even with that, she greeted me and asked me to let her know if I had questions. I'll give her a B for trying, an F for phones and a D for Cingular short-staffing the store so badly.

Alltel. Well, I had Alltel before and aside from the fact that no one could ever get through to my phone, they were fine. So, they weren't even a consideration.

Nextel. My goodness, they want a small fortune for their stuff. Push to talk just seems like a great way for other people to hear both sides of the conversation. Too much for too little, F for little value to me.

So, I went to the Sprint Store. Twice. They are trying this new queueing software for customer service. I was lost from the queue after a 30 min wait and couldn't seem to find anybody who found the situation alarming or who would do anything about it. Ok, I don't have time for this, I'll come back later. The second time, I showed up with the wife. We got in the queue at number 6. 30 minutes later, we are up to 5, at which point, all of the customer reps went to the back. Again, I don't have time for this. F for store customer service. Of any of the companies, I think Sprint has the best phones so I give them an B for phones.

In the end, we wound up getting Treo 650's with Sprint solely due to price since our corporate program provides such a deep discount. We used the website for ordering. It took 4 tries as the site crashed 3 times. On the 4th try, it goes through but says customer service will contact us tomorrow. Hmmm. Sounds like it's going to be another fun filled day dealing with cellphones.

Is this what it's come too? A wealth of mediocrity? If I didn't really need one for work, I don't think I would have one. It's just too damn hard to purchase either in person or online.

Why My Mom won't be using Spaces

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 06:36:26 GMT

It's laudable that the Spaces team wants to roll out a blogging tool to enable the typical web user to utilize the best of blogging. However, I see one major issue that stands in their way to having this adoption take place. This issue seems to be common to most of the MSN tools.

Training or lack thereof. As is the case with MSN Spaces, Messenger and other MSN tools, there is no training available to show you how to leverage these tools. The help basically tells you the steps, but assumes you know what you are trying to accomplish to start. It also assumes you know why you need the tool. There is no scenario based online or offline training.

Generation Gap on Steroids. For example, I've been trying to get my Mom using Messenger so that she can see her grandchildren via webcam from 1000 miles away. My wife and I did this successfully on my last trip to Redmond, so I thought I would get the Grandmas hooked up.

Basically, my Mom doesn't get IM since she's never done it and she's never seen it. We are talking about someone who is happy with dialup, doesn't see a need for a cell phone and probably goes to the same 10 websites each time she logs in.

She was able to install MSN Messenger and create a Passport, but that's as far as we got. She simply doesn't know what to do next or where to begin. This is all very new and very intimidating. Google turned up no tutorials, guides, etc that address this.

Now, imagine I throw Spaces at her. We could create a Family Space to share family news, etc. I don't think I would get as far with Spaces as I would with Messenger.

With the exception of my wife and I, the rest of the family is very technophobic. For adoption of these tools to occur, MSN needs to better address the needs of the true newbie.

Suggested Model. I think MSN could take a cue from a competitor in this respect. PalmOne solicited for "community experts" to write solution guides on how to leverage their products for given needs such as managing the family calendar. I think a similar approach could work here. Again, the focus of any materials needs to be from the target audience, not from the dev team since the dev team is so immersed in this. You can't assume the other person has the background knowledge to understand your message.

I feel if this need isn't addressed, the blogging experienced will stay with TypePad and other more advanced blogging tools while the rest of the community will be left scratching their head going "What's this Spaces thing?"

Questions, comments, philosophical statements?

Why is Microsoft trying to take ownership of content?

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 14:41:39 GMT

This irks me to no end. Microsoft has decided that if you use MSN Spaces, they can do whatever they want with your content. Hunh? Why is it they are the only ones that are doing this? I'm ok with some use, but sublicensing????

Here's an excerpt from the Terms of Service for Spaces.msn.com

"For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a "Submission"), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission."