My dad in Indonesia
My dad is in Indonesia for work right now (he travels quite a bit overseas) so naturally I asked him if he has seen a Komodo Dragon yet - his response was too good not to share:
There is a komodo dragon in my hotel room. I have been kind of worried about it, but fortunately it is a pretty big room (suite actually).
Customer Service and internet retail
One lesson that I have learned in business over the past few years is the importance of customer service. First let me start off by saying that top-level customer service is one thing that we pride ourselves on at Sewell - I credit our tech support guys and customer service reps for our above-average ratings. Putting the customer first has to be a primary goal for management also and at Sewell I believe it is.We gauge our success with customer service through Bizrate, an independent third-party service. Our average negative feedback over the past several months is 4%. This may sound bad, but in our industry it is surprisingly good - keep in mind that the nature of our business (primarily connectivity at this point) naturally leads to a high rate of compatibility issues that neither us nor the customer can predetermine - to our employees credit they have maintained a 96% satisfaction rate while dealing with such compatibility issues and while the company is growing at a triple-digit clip - kudos to them.Customer service seems expensive to short-sighted (and usually short-lived) companies, but poor customer service is always more expensive. Treating your customers right results in residual sales that will continue for years with no marginal marketing expense. Sometimes marketers talk about the “lifetime value” of a customer, but this is never an easy number to quantify and it is almost impossible to discount into a present value - it seems that even the most aggressive estimates of the lifetime value of a customer don’t account for other benefits such as free marketing (word of mouth). It is no secret that this was one of the primary keys to New Egg’s success in reaching $1B in sales within 3 years - a sales volume that took Wal-mart 17 years to accomplish.I first learned the importance of customer service while working at Ukrop’s, a grocery store in Virginia, in high school. Ukrop’s was fanatical about customer service - all employees were required to go to monthly customer service training meetings and the training was meticulous. As a “courtesy clerk” (a euphemism for a bag-boy) we were never allowed to take tips - you would get fired for taking a tip. If a customer ever said “thank you” we were supposed to thank them for shopping at Ukrop’s - we were always supposed to have the last “thank you.” If a customer asked where something was we were never supposed to tell them where to go - we had to take them there. When a new family moved into the neighborhood Ukrop’s sent a greeting with some coupons and an invitation to meet a manager of the store for an introduction and brief tour to get them oriented.My most important take away from what Ukrop’s accomplished, however, was what that extreme commitment to customer service did for the company. Ukrop’s never claimed to have the lowest prices and never had to use gimmicky promotions to get shoppers in the store - everybody in the community knew that they would pay a little more to go to Ukrop’s yet they had a virtual monopoly in our community.The same is true with internet retail - providing premium customer service protects you from having to compete solely on price, exposing you to the risk of a cheaper competitor with lower costs putting you out of business. It promotes viral advertising as satisfied customers talk about your products and service. It also helps keep your employees happy as I’ve noticed that there is a strong correlation between the way a company treats its customers and its employees.If you are considering building a business that will stand the test of time I strongly suggest that you invest in quality employees that will treat your customers well - you cannot afford not to.
Sewell wins 2006 Utah Work/Life Award
Sewell Direct (my employer) won the Utah Work/Life Award for the state of Utah from the Department of Workforce Services. Basically it just confirms what we all already knew (that Sewell is officially the best place to work in Utah).OK, to be fair to other companies here in Utah we were only 1 of 3 micro business awarded (businesses with fewer than 50 employees), but we are very honored to be included on the list. We had ten employees nominate us for the award and the judges personally interviewed most of our employees. Flexibility with scheduling, higher-than-average wages and the opportunity for upward advancement really set us apart.
Google Finance
I always thought it was funny that when you searched for a ticker on Google that the results linked to Yahoo finance and I figured it wouldn’t last long - apparently they released Google finance this morning.Having played with it for a few minutes the thing that I like the most about it is that when you change the date range on the chart the page doesn’t need to be refreshed - I’m not sure what the technology is here (ajax?) but so far I like it a lot better than MSN money or Yahoo finance.
MAP and free shipping
A lot of the suppliers we work make us agree to MAP - minimum advertised price. On the surface this looks a lot like price-fixing but the technicality is that you can sell below MAP - you just can’t advertise it on your website. This is why sometimes you read a website that says “The price is too low, add the product to your cart to see the price” or “Call us for pricing.”In some ways MAP is ideal - you have semi-protected margins and if you are a good marketer you will probably win some market share. The problem with MAP is that sometimes it forces you to price your products above the level that you would price them at in a competitive environment - for this reason suppliers with MAP do not generally appeal to internet retailers that compete solely on price.One way to stay competitive when dealing with MAP is to offer free shipping to your customer - in essence you are discounting the price of the product by subsidizing their shipping which leaves you, your customer and your supplier happy. Some companies go as far as to offer 2′nd Day or Overnight shipping on high-margin products.
Inventory Counts
Recently we started showing how many pieces of each product are available on the product page. Check out our USB to IDE Adapter and look under the “Add to Cart” button - pretty slick, huh?We are just experimenting with this right now - if our conversion rate improves even slightly we will probably continue doing this indefinitely.
PQ DVD - Don’t use it
Update: The iPod DVD ripping software that my dad likes so much is called Cucu Soft.I recently purchased a software program called PQ DVD to rip DVD’s to my video iPod. I was pretty happy with it at first because it worked great on the first DVD - then on subsequent tries the video and the audio seemed to always get off track.I was concerned about this but decided that I would just deal with it. Somehow the program was removed from my computer when I did a system restore following my messy experience with ie7 - no big deal, I thought, I can always just reinstall it. It let me reinstall it fine but now they want me to pay for another license. They now are telling me that I have to contact the online retailer of the software for a refund and then repurchase the software from the same place to get a new code.Customer service this bad is the reason that people don’t want to purchase things on the internet - needless to say I will never use PQ DVD again and I will warn anybody who will listen that they are not worth dealing with. My dad found a better software that does the same thing - I’ll post the name of that when I talk to him.
Cross-shipping
At Sewell we have a pretty cool program in place where we reward marketing employees with incentives when they hit predefined financial goals. For instance one of the first incentives for new marketers is the promise of a dual-monitor setup that allows them to be more productive (and, of course, show off how valuable they are to the company).Judging from Towering Intellect’s recent post dealing with multiple monitors we have definitely created a few multi-monitor monsters. We generally purchase monitors from Dell because they are inexpensive yet pretty high-quality. Recently, however, one of Nate’s (aka Towering Intellect) monitors went bad. I tried to call Dell’s technical support and after I was “unintentionally” disconnected the second time I tried using their online chat support.I was very impressed with their chat support and I encourage all internet retailers to consider online chat as a sales and support tool. They quickly identified the problem (which wasn’t difficult - the monitor was fried) and determined that it was still under warranty. What really impressed me is their practice of cross-shipping.I assumed that I would have to send back the old monitor and wait for them to test it before they would send me a replacement - that is, after all, what most internet retailers do. Instead they went ahead and shipped me a replacement and gave me two weeks to ship back the bad monitor before they would charge my card for it.The new monitor arrived with a shipping box for the dead one. Somehow we forgot to ship back the old monitor, but I was really impressed that Dell sent me an automated email after a week reminding me to return the old monitor or our card would be charged - we promptly threw the old monitor in the mail and avoided being charged for the old one.As far as customer service goes I was blown away - Dell minimized Nate’s frustration of being without a second monitor by shipping his replacement right away and ensured that we couldn’t take advantage of them by holding on to both monitors - we are now exploring the possibility of implementing our own cross-shipping policy - thanks, Dell.
NBC’s misleading radio ad
I was listening to the radio on my way to work the other day and I heard some “radio announcers” talking about what was going to be on TV that night. I knew they weren’t the regular morning show hosts so I was wondering what was going on.I quickly realized that they were talking about NBC programming that was going to be on that night and I figured that it was some kind of creative ad designed to sound like a normal morning show. Then one of their “hosts” said “I hope that NBC doesn’t screw this show up…” That made me think that it probably wasn’t an NBC ad.Apparently NBC anticipated that most people would be fooled as I was by throwing in a derogatory comment. Sure enough it was an NBC advertisement trying to pawn itself off as an independent review - I think this is pretty misleading and NBC is taking a big gamble that their viewers won’t be smart enough to figure out what they are trying to do. I’m not sure that this breaks an advertising code of ethics but it definitely smells fishy.