eCommerce and

Providing excellent service in today’s highly competitive marketplace is somewhat difficult for call centers. Even more difficult is the task of servicing multilingual customers.  Dealing with Hispanic customers encompasses customer relationship opportunities that are not necessarily typical to other demographics. There are a few differences that make it more difficult to “seal the deal” on a purchase, but that can create a pathway to repeat purchases.  I know these things from experience, not only am I myself a Hispanic, Bilingual woman, but I come from a family that encapsulates the Mexican culture.

From my experiences I have learned three key things about Hispanic consumers who decide to purchase from an unknown company and these are the things the look for prior to completing a purchase.  The three key elements I am referring to are: simplicity, relationship and security.

Simplicity

Having a website that is easy to browse and understand is essential when dealing with Hispanic consumers. They want to feel like they understand and have control of the website, not fearing that they may get tricked, or that there is a chance they make a costly mistake. Another feature that may be the most important is the ability to locate a contact phone number; which brings us to the next feature they look for, a relationship.

Relationship 

Having a relationship with our customers can be very time consuming and costly, especially when time is money. With Internet sales sky rocketing, the seller-consumer relationship has dropped considerably. There is no need to talk to someone if you can do it alone, online. Hispanic consumers however, think differently. Though they might be using a different mean (store vs. online) by which they are purchasing an item, a relationship is still essential. Spanish speakers want to be able to ask many questions, talk about the products, and even want to be walked through the ordering process. But the relationship does not stop there. After the sale has been made, Hispanic consumers expect a phone call or an email with updates on their order.  Just as simplicity builds upon the relationship aspect of this purchasing decision, relationship builds on the next point, security.

Security

The relationship that is started with a Hispanic customer brings about a sense of security for the customer. They know two things:

1. They purchased an item from an actual “person”.
2. That person took the time to know who they were and what they purchased by simply picking up the phone.
   

These two simple facts reduce any fear that they might have had from purchasing from a new vendor. Thus allowing the customer to relax and patiently wait for their order.

These three features, while often difficult to provide, can and will give a company a competitive advantage. When fully satisfied with the above, a Hispanic customer is more likely to become a return customer. Loyalty has to be one of their greatest attributes. When a Spanish speaking customer finds a company that provides them with a relationship, that company becomes a “friend”; a friend whom you trust and continue to do business with. 

Opportunity for Growth

According to ambicultural.com there are 37 million Hispanics in the United States alone.   An estimated 15 million use the internet, and this number is expected to increase by 20% year over year.  Based on these attributes and our desire to create these relationships, we ourselves have been able to track remarkable results in this demographic.  We have experienced a 4.7% increase in repeat purchases with this customer base. We understand that a customer will not be purchasing a faucet monthly or even yearly, but the fact is that with our Hispanic customers, loyalty stands and we see that revealed in our numbers.  As this market continues to grow so does the opportunity for all internet retailers. 

The presenter for this session was Bryan Eisenberg, Co-Founder Future Now Inc.

Bryan is a great speaker, he got his plugs out of the way and let us all know that his company has gone public and his new book is coming out any day now.  He was also nice enough to share that the audience there was a talented hard working experienced group, and that he thought the challenges we are facing here are at a different level than those he has experienced at the many other conferences he speaks at.  He then added that he believes there is a disconnect between what we are saying about our websites and how great they are and what our websites actually look like. He goes on to say (this quote and the others are paraphrased) "At work we wear superhero capes, and disconnect ourselves between who we are when we go home and shop."  He believes that there has been more change to commerce and customer behavior in the last 7 years than the past 500.  He explains this theory in discussing what people do when they watch T.V. and that television advertisers have had to essentially surprise people to get their attention.  This is because as he states "People who are watching T.V. are multi-tasking, in fact a Yahoo study shows that 40% of the people that are watching T.V. are asleep".  His point about this was all leading up to the revelation that those who are shopping online, can't really be actively doing something else, like sleeping, while they are shopping, he reiterates the point by reminding us that these customers are actively involved in our websites.  He challenges the crowd to stop being so busy with the daily tasks that seem urgent and instead re-focus and on the important.

Future Now Studies

His company, Future Now Inc., consults websites and benchmarks the industry.  One of their studies showed that 76.7% of internet retailers did not pass their test.  He adds that this is "Frightening".  He lets us know that we are getting better at optimization according to his studies, but those of us who have been only using Google products will need to move on to something more sophisticated if we want to keep up, his explanation is that Google products are cool because they get smaller retailers started with testing and optimization but there is a reason they are free and it is because the paid versions offer more.  (As an aside, and this is me, I have talked to other retailers of our size who have tried analytics solutions that they paid for and went back to Google analytics, so this may be true for some of these solutions, but I don't think that it is true of all).  Now back to the customer experience study that his company released, the 2007 Future Now Customer Experience Study found that the average score was 43 out of 100, and of the retailers that were looked at, only four would have passed.  Some of the things that they looked at were: Product presentation, delivery options, checkout processes, and customer service information.  Some of the things that they deliberately left out because they didn't believe they were factors related to the actual customer experience were price and the ease of finding products.  *Update, Bryan was nice enough to clarify that he didn't say that these points were not part of the customer experience, and let me know that one of the reasons these pieces were left out of the study was the ease of measuring.*(I agree in some aspects, but the ease of finding products is questionable as far as I am concerned, as I think it is a big part of the experience.  Take for example if I went shopping in a store today and I had a hard time finding what I was looking for, I then get frustrated and have to find help, in the internet retail world that would mean calling a customer service rep or sending an email or reaching them by LiveChat).  Bryan then started sharing some of the results of the study: 62% of online retailers only had a brief blurb in the product description, only 11% had exceptional ad copy (he did clarify that this was the only opinion question included in the study), 67% of customers who come to an online retail site to buy leave because there was not enough product information.  He boldly states what we should all already know, but I guess it needed to be said "If you don't have enough copy and the right images people will not buy from you".

Think Like a Customer

He moves on in an effort to explain further, "customers are like toddlers with money, their favorite question is why.  Why is this product better?  Why should I buy from you?... They have all of the same questions but less attention span than a child".  Next he starts showing examples of a search he did for digital camera on both Bestbuy.com and CircuitCity.com, the screen shots showed a list of cameras and a list of attribute refinements, but the attribute refinements listed are based on pixels, and brand, etc.  He then asks the crowd if we have ever bought a camera and gotten frustrated about the speed in which it takes pictures and been disappointed when the camera was too slow.  Yes was the prominent answer in the room and those that didn't answer seemed to be able to sympathize with the example.  Bryan then asks us all why we aren't merchandising it if we know the problem exists?  Like a lot of other things that Amazon does well it was the one site that he found, that sold cameras that had reviews about the speed of the camera.  While other sites may have had reviews, they weren't used in the attribute refinements or the descriptions, but because Amazon is Amazon there is a Firefox plug-in called Pluribo that will "magically summarize the user reviews on most electronics pages".  (Cool tidbit that I didn't know about, does that mean I am kicked out of the nerd club?) 

Understand the Decision Making Processes

As a sociology major Bryan learned about personality types and how that effects purchasing decisions, he gave us a site called Capt.org that summarizes Myers Briggs personalities for reference.  He thinks that marketers are intuitive by nature but that we need to think more like our customers that are probably the opposite as 72% of the populations is a sensing type and not intuitive.  He adds that spontaneous personality types like top sellers and new releases, those that are considered humanistic like reviews, but methodical people will search by the category, and those that are competitive will search by a specific term.  He adds that if we don't have the ability to showcase our products in this way our customers will bounce.  He uses Overstock.com as an example as he had a success story about how the changes Future Now suggested for their movies category page dramatically increased sales.  He gives us a lesson on how we can add reviews to our product description when it seems appropriate.  What he does is look at all of the reviews for the product he is working on, he then begins to plot them on a graph.  The graph is categorized by positive v. negative and logical v. emotional.  He adds to this by giving us some more examples so that we can put what he is saying in to perspective "25% don't have options to enlarge the image, 65% don't have multiple images, the basics are what is missing not the innovative.  Too many websites have difficult to read fonts, and that is coming from a study where the average age of the sample was 30.  13% of those reviewed don't let the customers change the font size, 61% don't offer live stocking, 59% don't offer expedited shipping, and 41% don't provide assurances during the checkout."  By assurances he means showing the returns or shipping policies at checkout, and having copy that reads on the order of: Easy returns policy, money back guarantee, free return shipping, etc.   He continues "45% display customer service hours, 59% correctly answered email questions within 24 hours and of those the answer was completely irrelevant 50% of the time".  He gives an example of Zappos.com and how they received higher scores because they were able to answer the question properly and able to do so within two hours.  He then adds that only 20% of multi-channel retailers had order online with in store pick-up, which seemed to be a common theme throughout.

The Golden Rule of Merchandising

Bryan then asks us all what the Golden Rule was, in unison the crowd chimed "Do unto others as you would want done to you".  Bryan agrees and then explains that the Golden Rule of Merchandising is similar but has a twist to it; he remarks confidently "Do unto others as they want done unto themselves".  He closes by reassuring us that he knows and agrees that there is a balance between being customer centric and staying within the numbers.

Q and A

This is also paraphrased.

Q: Why would we need to move away from Google Optimizer and studies have shown that customers don't like to read so why should we add to our copy if we want them to read it?

A: Google Optimizer isn't bad because it gives retailers that aren't currently optimizing or testing at all to start out small but once you get good at it I would suggest moving on.  As far as ad copy goes it should help the customer reach their goals, there is a saying that ad copy should be like a women's skirt, short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the essentials.  Test what works so that you can balance what customers want to read and what they need in the product information.

Q: If you had to suggest what should be optimized and by whom what would it be?

A: Web analysts are hard to find but find someone with a background in analytics and good designers and copywriters so that you can test all of these areas.

Q: What was the Firefox plug-in?

A: Pluribo and it only works on some categories right now.

Q: If you had to suggest the top 3 priorities that we can implement now what would they be?

A: There is a hierarchy of optimization that you can find on our site that lists several steps in the hierarchy.  Off the bat I would say better copy and better images but this could take a lot of resources.  On an intuitive level you have to think about what gives people assurances throughout the checkout.  If you are thinking on this level then you would consider general usability, because online shopping is like the evolution of cell phones, they may be different but the basic functionalities are done the same.  Accessibility, how easy is it to get to your site?  Functionality, make sure that everything works.  Then start looking at 404 errors, when I was shopping for that camera I clicked on a walmart.com ad and I got a 404 error, not only did they pay for the click but I was an automatic bounce, and I will make sure to tell Raul about it after.  Then start moving on to in stock messaging and more.

Q: Who is doing all of these things really well?

A: We published a list and some sites may have improved by now, but I know one is BlueNile and others I would have to get back to you on.  Some websites did really well in certain categories for instance Zappos.com scored really high in customer service.

The short answer is “Yes?”. Your customer is the reason you’re able to stay in business, especially in these tight times. This does not, however, definitively mean that “the customer is always right”. Harry Gordon Selfridge, founder of Selfridges department stores in the UK in 1909, is credited with coining the phrase “the customer is always right”. Mr. Selfridge likely did not intend to be taken literally. Rather, he used it to change the psychology of his customers and employees. Customers would, perhaps, feel that a company cared for them. Employees would be continually exposed to the notion that a customer could not be wrong. Presumably, this would result in a prevailing attitude among employees to treat customers positively, regardless of how the customers treated employees.

The unfortunate thing is that customers have latched onto a widespread disposition that they cannot be wrong. Even more unfortunate, as a privately held, small business, we are not able to afford the Nordstrom customer service model. We have customer complaints. But, we were unable, financially, to accommodate every customer request. It may sound terrible to think that a company would take the stance that the customer isn’t always right, but it’s true. Please do not misunderstand. We love our customers and we absolutely want everybody to be delighted with their shopping experience. However, there are situations where a customer’s expectations are not met, but we have made every effort to build clear expectations for the customer before they buy.

I’ll give you an example. A customer buys a valve with low profit margin from PlumberSurplus.com without contacting our customer service team, thinking that the valve will work with their existing plumbing. The specifications for the valve are clearly stated on the product detail page. The customer must read and agree to our web site’s terms of use, including our returns policy, before they are able to create an account or place an order. The customer receives the valve that they ordered in good condition and their plumber tells them that this is not the right valve. The customer immediately contacts PlumberSurplus.com and tells us that they received the wrong product. In researching the issue, we discover that the product that the customer ordered was the product that was sent. The customer simply did not order the correct valve. No problem. We are able to accept the product in return. However, the customer feels that PlumberSurplus.com should make it more clear that the valve does not support all types of plumbing and does not want to pay to ship the product back to PlumberSurplus.com or pay a restocking fee. The customer has already read and agreed to the returns policy which makes both clear. PlumberSurplus.com has made every effort to stipulate what type of plumbing this valve will accommodate. So we say “No. Your order is subject to the policies that you agreed to upon buying”.

The customer then files a dispute with their credit card company. PlumberSurplus.com is charged a processing fee for the dispute that is greater than the profit margin of the valve. PlumberSurplus.com ultimately wins the dispute and we receive our money for the sale, but we still have to pay the processing fee for the dispute. You may ask yourself, “Why don’t you just change the returns policy?” We thought of that. The cost to pay to return the item to PlumberSurplus.com and the cost associated with processing the return is potentially even greater than the cost of the credit dispute processing fee! Either way, we lose.  On the flip side happy customers come back and we may be able to make up the costs then.

So, to recap, we set an expectation of what product the customer was buying and how the customer would have to return it, should they elect to do so. The customer agreed. The customer changed their mind when they discovered that they made a poor buying decision and asked PlumberSurplus.com to pay for the mistake. In this case, the customer was not “right”. At this point, PlumberSurplus.com has to evaluate whether or not it is valuable to lose money on this customer. For various reasons, it may be valuable to lose money on a given customer, but not “always”.

We all know it is easy to get along with people you know, like, work well with, and have things in common with, but when it comes customers, sooner or later, we all encounter that difficult patron. That difficult customer could be any of the following: a complainer, picky, frustrated, irate, or just plain angry.

Circumstances that Lead to Complaints

We get our fair share of angry customers. For the majority of cases, there has been some type of error on the customer’s side, such as ordering the wrong product or entering the wrong address; sometimes, it is our fault. At times, it seems impossible to please an angry customer; they expect us to do something that does not make sense for the company and goes against our policies. But to them it makes sense, because they are looking at it from an emotional perspective instead of from a business aspect.

If an error occurred on our part, we are always more than happy to help the customer and fix the error we made. When the customer is at fault, it can become a little more difficult. While we want to provide great service and help the customer, we have certain polices in place to ensure that the least amount of money is lost and that all processes are correctly documented.

Tactics for Dealing with Difficult Customers

What we have found in our customer service department is that the best way to approach the angry customer, is to treat the problem as an opportunity. Below are a few tactics we use when talking with our customers that may fall in to the category we are discussing.

Empathy - We try putting ourselves in the customer’s shoes, so that we can get a better understanding of their perspective. By letting them explain their situation, even more than one time, they know you care, understand, and are listening to them.  Which we are, but if the customer service representative is not genuine about it, the customer will know.

Respect - Any customer service rep that has been in the field long enough will know that it is difficult to respect an angry customer who is yelling at you. Most of the time, the anger is not towards the rep directly, but they are upset about their situation and we are the person they get to take their frustration out on. Staying calm sends a message to the customer you have respect for them.

Know how to Apologize - Sometimes customers just want to hear and know that you are apologetic about their situation, even if it isn’t your fault directly.  Offering an apology regardless of what you can do about the situation will often alleviate some of the stress the customer is feeling.

Take Responsibility - If the error is one made by the merchant; we always take full responsibility and assist the customer so that their problem is solved.

Having to talk and respond to angry customers can at times be stressful. When those customers are over demanding and unreasonable, it can be very hard to deliver great customer service. If you equip your customer service reps with the right tools necessary to handle the upset customers, they are more than likely going to arrive at positive solutions and the customer may return in the future because of the way the problem was handled.

Here’s the scenario…

Customer places an order for a DeWalt DG2900 Heavy-Duty 2900 Watt Gas Generator. The size and weight of the generator require that the order ship LTL or “Less Than Truckload”; LTL is commonly referred to as freight. At the time the order was placed this particular model was out of physical stock. In an attempt to go that extra mile for the customer we shipped the order direct from the manufacturer and third party billed to our LTL account (carrier to remain unnamed).

The order processed and shipped from the manufacturer as expected. However, going that extra mile proved a long walk.

What we didn’t know at the time the order shipped was that the customer’s ship to address was a construction site. You might ask “why not?” Good question! Ask your carrier to present you with their additional fees schedule and they’ll present you with something called “Accessorial Service Charges.” It can be pages long: corrected Bill of Lading, detention of vehicle with power, lift-gate service, and residential delivery just to name a few. Several of these charges are dynamic charges, like “fuel charges”, which are calculated in real time and change regularly. If you attempted to identify every possible scenario at the shopping cart for checkout, shopping cart abandonment would go through the roof, due to excessive over estimates for shipping.  This creates a hole in the system that will continue to siphon funds if not corrected.

One of these Accessorial Service Charges is what’s referred to as “Limited Access Pickup or Delivery.” The additional note is “churches, construction sites, schools, etc.” Who knows what etc. refers to, possibly the driver’s whim? Did you catch construction sites? The long walk begins. At the time of delivery, the driver tacks on a limited access pickup or delivery fee as well as a corrected Bill of Lading fee to be paid at the time of delivery by the consignee or customer. As you might guess the personnel at the delivery site generally have no authority or means for paying these additional fees. The delivery attempt is abandoned by the driver and we are quickly contacted by our customer. I assure you this is NOT the customer experience PlumberSurplus.com is shooting for.

You see, the Bill of Lading that is generated at the time of pickup is the contract between shipper and carrier. Once in transit, all additional responsibility, not identified prior to shipment, is the burden of the consignee or customer. And by the way there is now a “redelivery” fee assessed, because the initial delivery attempt was abandoned. In this case, as the shipper, the only way to remove these charges as a customer burden was to refund the customer’s credit card for those fees. The customer still had to make the extra effort of ensuring funds were physically available at the time of redelivery.

The moral of the story is when you plan to go that extra mile for the customer, make sure you complete the journey. We’ve since done the extra work to amend our LTL contract to include all accessorial services as the burden of the shipper, removing any responsibility of the consignee. There is more work to be done to insure we are covering actual shipping costs at the shopping cart, but the customer experience is now intact.
By the way, by amending your LTL contract to include all accessorial services as the burden of the shipper, you’ll also then save yourself the “corrected Bill of Lading” and “redelivery fees”. Hole PLUGGED!

PlumberSurplus.com’s humble beginnings had us perched around a kitchen table, waiting for the two-line cordless Uniden to ring through our telephone’s Vonage connection.  Yes, we adopted VOIP very early.  As we grew, we found that Vonage was unreliable as a hosted solution and was not scalable. We had grown well beyond our two line capacity.  Consequently, we added several standard Plain Old Telephone System (POTS) lines with basic hunting capabilities to our arsenal and dropped Vonage.  We grew quickly and added a few new POTS lines and customer service personnel as they were needed.  But, we kept growing.

We were faced with a number of issues for a rapidly growing call center.  We had too few lines available for the customers who wanted to call us and our voicemail filled too rapidly.  Also, customers demanded a more sophisticated phone system solution.  The line used to ring in and the first person to pick up the call was your guy or gal; or if all lines were busy, the call went to voicemail, likely resulting in lost revenues and upset customers.  We had an increasing need for more robust routing of calls to qualified reps.  We also needed to allow customers who were willing to hold for a rep, the option to stay in queue, or to leave a message.  We also needed something inexpensive.  So the hunt began.

We requested quotes for several different PBX system solutions (VOIP and nonVOIP), but came up with quotes well beyond our price range.  One quote resulted in a per user deployment cost of $2100 per user!  So, we examined hosted VOIP solutions.  Although the price was better for many services, we could not find a service that satisfied our need for queuing, easily customizable and highly extensible Interactive Voice Response (IVR)/Automated Attendant (AA), and inexpensive scalability.

Finally, we landed on open source VOIP.  We examined two options, Asterisk and SIPX.  Both satisfied our need for queuing, IVR/AA, and both were extremely inexpensive.  What we found as we examined both solutions was that the initial set up was going to be a challenge, since only one person at PlumberSurplus.com had limited experience building, deploying, or supporting a VOIP telephone system.  In the end we decided on an Asterisk-based deployment using Trixbox, mainly due to wide open source community support.

What was the cost of the system?  The Trixbox software, which is open source under the GPL, cost $0.  The host computer on which we run the system, a Dell workstation, was $1200.  The VOIP phones, Grandstream GXP-2000, were $90 each (Note: we have since implemented several softphones, $0, with USB headsets, $40: Note, LivePerson gave us several USB headsets for free).  The analog to IP gateway for the phone lines, $676.  The final cost came from dozens of hours of implementation research on Asterisk and Trixbox forums.

Once we had an operational test environment, deployment was relatively easy.  The system worked exactly as expected, with one major exception: Quality was terrible.  During our research, we learned that analog to IP implementations would experience some call quality issues.  In our testing of the system, we had great results; the call quality was approximately equivalent to a cell phone connection.  However, once we went live, we experienced a host of issues.

The biggest issues were echo and static.  Users complained incessantly about “the phones that talk back at them.”  Our particular type of implementation was not widely discussed among the open source community and this made optimization a nightmare.  The quandary was that we were already live with the new solution and did not have a great way to test system changes during optimization for fear that we may cause intolerable system disturbances or, at worst, take the system down completely.  After months of tweaking, we have finally found a reasonable plateau of quality.

The next issue was our VOIP phone selection.  We opted to go with inexpensive VOIP phones to keep costs down.  In hindsight, it may have been better to spend the extra money to get better phones.  The speakerphone did not work well, phones would randomly reboot, and, worst of all, the phones would intermittently drop calls.  Manufacturer support for the phones was positive in that firmware updates are frequent and they appear to attempt to address issues discussed in the community.  However, many of the firmware updates we used created new issues.  We have, however, found a stable version that works well for us.  Also, two of the phones we used locked up and died.  Our supplier, 888VoipStore.com, was great in getting them replaced quickly.

That brings us to today.  Again, we’re faced with an increasing number of users with telephone needs and we still need better call quality.  We’re likely going to transition our digital-to-analog-to-digital lines over to full digital and vastly expand the number of lines available.  That will be Part 2 of “Challenges of an Internet Retailer’s VOIP Implementation”.  In the end, I feel like we did well with our implementation, relative to our goals.  We kept costs to a bare minimum and implemented a system that is fully customizable and scalable.  If we could do it over, I would have probably paid someone to do the initial setup and optimization, then customized our own preferences.  Also, I would not have opted for the cheapest IP Phones possible.

One to grow on…

At the end of my senior year of high school I was awarded "Scholar Athlete", which came with a certificate published on an ink jet printer and something like $500 bucks.  Now, even though this was pre-steroid scandal, the award is pretty deceiving.  I'm way more scholar than I am athlete.  All the real jocks were, how do I put this lightly, academically challenged.  I think the athletics department just picked the student with the highest GPA, as long as he or she played any sport.  I played on the golf and tennis teams.  Well, actually, I "used" the golf team.  If you joined the golf team, you got to play at all the great local courses, for free, as often as you liked and use the driving range, for free, until they shut off the lights.  I didn't care as much about our team, which wasn't that great anyway, as I did about free golf.

Hang with me, eCommerce-ville just ahead.

The scholar athlete award is so deceiving that heading to college, I couldn't have cared less about sports.  However, once I stepped foot on USC's campus and started mainlining the Koolaid, my metamorphosis into a college football feen went full throttle.  Long story short, now I'm a massive USC football fan.  This addiction has led me to become a huge college football fan.  Being a college football fan means I hang out with people who like pro football; which means I end up watching the Super Bowl.  Inevitably, I annually find myself inhaling a carb-infused feast known as pizza.  It's a natural downward spiral.

Hooray, entering eCommerce-ville!  Population: Many hungry sports fans.

Integrating Offline Advertising with Search Engine Marketing

Following the Super Bowl earlier this month, there's been some interesting chit chat in the blogoshphere discussing how well companies integrated their Super Bowl television commercials with their online presence.  With cost estimates for 30 second spots swirling up to $3 million, it seems critical for advertisers to take full advantage of their commercial exposure by intimately assimilating their online arenas.  After the game, Reprise Media published their 4th annual Search Marketing Scorecard (SMS) which ranks companies who buy Super Bowl commercials by their ability to integrate those commercials with their online presence in order to metric how prepared each company is to capitalize on online interest.  A healthy portion of the conversation has been centered around how the Super Bowl advertisers fared from a website visibility perspective.  More specifically, this conversation has analyzed URL visibility in the commercials, mentioning the URL, displaying or calling out the URL prominently, showing website screenshots and the advertiser's ability to drive traffic to their website.  Another notable portion of the conversation has centered around a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective.  The SEO conversation has analyzed whether advertiser's sites appear in search engine results for branded and non branded phrases associated with the campaign.  For anyone that did not catch the Super Bowl advertisements, Fox created a MySpace page housing all of the advertisements.  Although Fox and MySpace are siblings, both parented by News Corp., the general consensus seems to be that a more strategic SEO move would have been for Fox to host the commercial content on their own domain.  MySpace seems to be doing just fine on the traffic front.

Wait, isn't this post supposed to be about Pizza Hut and email advertising?  Why are we still talking about the Super Bowl?  Hold your horses!  eCommerce-ville has needs.  You can't just rush in.  Where's the foreplay?

Order Online: A Call to Action

All this "Which Super Bowl advertisers ruled and which ones sucked?" conversation reminded me why I'm glad that I'm a college football fan.  Not only do I think college football is superior (trigger flood of hate mail), but, in general, many of the sponsors' advertising campaigns are better as well.  Case in point: Papa John's.  Papa John's sponsored the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) game between the Cincinnati Bearcats and the Southern Miss Golden Eagles, aptly titled the 2007 PapaJohns.com Bowl.  Not only did Papa John's plaster their URL (not just their name) on just about every single piece of marketing that made reference to the game, from the BCS' website to the banner across the televised broadcast, but plenty of the marketing included the call-to-action "Order Online" underneath the Bowl's title.  Even the giant Papa John's logos all over the field were stamped with the instruction to "Order Online".

Now, it doesn't take a marketing research guru to figure out that Papa John's may have had a spike in sales during the Papa John's Bowl due to their sponsorship.  However, the higher level long term branding initiatives are a much more interesting discussion.  It's well known that using a strong call-to-action in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns is an optimization strategy that, in general, improves the quality and performance of advertising campaigns, without raising costs.  Not only is Papa John's use of a call-to-action capitalizing on this strategy, their implementation in an offline channel generates online traffic while lowering overhead conversion costs.  The costs associated with executing an online transaction are likely markedly less than transactions performed over the phone.  Moreover, every order placed online provides an opportunity for Papa John's to build their email marketing list, up sell and cross sell in an automated fashion, and generate increased loyalty with those who have a positive customer experience.  As such, the "Order Online" mantra may be less about customer acquisition and more about customer retention and market share growth.

Their SEO efforts seem to be in tune as well.  For the searches order pizza online and pizza order online, Papa John's ranks first.  Along with the bowl game sponsorship,  Papa John's created an entire site, papajohnsbowl.com, dedicated to the game and chock full of content.

Eureka!  Our destination!  A conversation about Pizza Hut!  The title of this post does apply!!!

No Opt-In, No Pizza For You

Don't you hate it when you're creating an account on a website so that you can place an order and right before you check "I Agree" to the Terms of Use, you have to UNCHECK, "I Agree" for you to send me a bunch of crap.  Well, Pizza Hut took that annoyance to a whole new level.

The week before the super bowl, my wife mentioned that we had a couple unused Pizza Hut gift cards that had been magneted to our refrigerator for over a year.  She was under the impression that the card's value begins to depreciate one year after purchase (If true, don't even get me started on this issue!).  Perfect!  We had a super bowl party to attend, so we decided to donate to the cause.  Since Super Bowl Sunday is like the biggest pizza ordering day, I dropped the gift cards off at my friends house the night before the game so we could get our order in before the frenzy.  We grab the mac book, find the codes on the gift cards, and head to pizzahut.com.  After spending time starring at the coupons, figuring out the promotions, figuring out how many bodies we need to feed and filling up our shopping cart, we end up at that account creation page.  After filling out a bunch of data, we get to the bottom of the form and see this:

WHAT?!?!  Are you serious?  Really Pizza Hut?  Really?  You can't be.  This can't be right.  I really can't buy your product online unless I agree to receive your junk mail?  There's no check to opt-in, LET ALONE AN UNCHECK TO OPT-OUT?

Let me get this right.  In order to order pizza online from pizzahut.com I MUST "agree to receive information about Pizza Hut®/WingStreet® coupons, promotions, announcements, events and specials".  Are you freaking kidding me?  Refresh!  This must be a mistake.  No, even better, they must have been hacked by a competitor.  Dominoes... you sneaky, sneaky, guys (KIDDING, no calls from lawyers).  I was absolutely floored.  Now, I have no idea how easy it is to opt-out of the "information", once the "coupons, promotions, announcements, events and specials" start flooding in since my buddy refused to create an account.  I'm imagining the subject of an email right now: "WingStreet Wings: So Damn Good, You'll Never Unsubscribe, So Why Give You the Option?".

In scanning the policies, I couldn't quite figure out how they were going to advertise to me.  Is it email, snail mail, text, pizza delivery boy stopping by, blimp, tattoo?  Also, I don't know why there is a "Pizza Hut Terms of Use and Privacy Policy" and a "WingStreet® Terms of Use and Privacy Policy".  Both of the Terms of Use links land on the same page (http://www.pizzahut.com/TermsOfUse.aspx) and both of the Privacy Policy links land on the same page (http://www.pizzahut.com/PrivacyPolicy.aspx).  Neither of the documents make it clear whether they are the "Pizza Hut" docs or the "WingStreet" docs.  The account creation form requires several pieces of information, including: email address, street address and phone number.  Other types of information are optional, like a cell phone number.  While I was wondering what channels and mediums this "information" would come via, I came across some great content in the Privacy Policy.  My favorite part of the policy is reproduced below:

Hilarious!  I love it.  They say "For those who initially opted-in to receive future offers or promotional materials or to allow the sharing of Personal Information with third parties may subsequently opt-out as follows".  Ummm, by "For those who" do you mean "everyone who bought online" since it's impossible to not "initially" opt-in?  Underneath that, the policy provides instructions on how to opt-out of email and text message communications, which implies they advertise via both of these mediums assuming you cough up your cell phone number.  I'm guessing they advertise to the street address as well.  For perspective, it looks like Papa John's let's you opt-out of both email advertising (by unchecking) and text message advertising (by not checking).

Since we thought this was a terrible policy, didn't want to end up on their advertising lists, didn't want to have to figure out opting out later and didn't want to deal with a bunch of junk mail until we could get off their lists, we closed our browser and called our order in over the phone.  We would have gone to a competitor if we didn't already have the gift cards.


This experience raises at least two serious concerns.  First, it completely eliminated all of the value mentioned above that could have been created by an online order.  Since we called in, conversion costs increased, Pizza Hut will never have the opportunity to add our email address to their marketing lists (via a check or a non-uncheck), they will never have the chance to up sell or cross sell to us in an automated fashion, they have completely obliterated any loyalty we had and they provided an utterly terrible customer experience.  Moreover, their customer retention and market share numbers just dwindled by a body count of two (my friend and I).  Second, the strategy that Pizza Hut is utilizing makes me wonder if most users don't notice what they're getting themselves into and if this is what Pizza Hut is shooting for.  Well known practice in eCommerce is to force a customer to agree to a sites general terms of use in order to transact on that site.  Sometimes, at the same time a user is agreeing to the Terms of Use, a second, optional, opportunity is provided that allows the the customer to opt-in to advertising.  If only one option is given, it is by and large a Terms of Use agreement.  Therefore, if a customer only sees one option, and doesn't read the details, they assume that they are agreeing to a sites Terms of Use, and that no option to opt-in to advertising exists, let alone that they are opting in if they agree to the Terms of Use.

By the way, in the past, I've been a big fan of Pizza Hut's crust.  This time, we went for the Pizza Mia's.  I have to say, I was definitely disappointed.  Icing on the cake...

Well, so long for today eCommerce-ville.  The sun is setting on you once again.  It's been a good visit.  A long one, but a good one.  Next fall during football season (college or pro) when I order pizza online, it's Papa John's all the way.

1. Product Training
It cannot be overstated how critical it is that your customer service reps, at a minimum, know your product offering.  A basic understanding of the features and benefits of your major categories is essential.  PlumberSurplus.com has had great success with the creation of training content that is available to customer service reps and customers via our online learning center.  We’ve included How-To Guides, Buying Guides, and Videos.  In addition, we record video for all internal product training sessions and post it to our company intranet.

2. Sales Training
Beyond basic telephone skills and scripts, it is important that your customer service reps are given appropriate, ongoing sales training.  This includes cross-selling and upselling techniques, current and upcoming marketing and merchandising efforts, and tips for handling angry or difficult customers.

3. A Fast Internet Connection
Any e-commerce employee will tell you how frustrating it is to be faced with unnecessary internet slowing. This is especially true as more and more applications transition from desktop to web apps and more businesses utilize hosted solutions.

4. Two or More Available Phone Lines
Your reps will inevitably be faced with the need to call UPS or FedEx while the customer is on hold. Your customers will demand information in real time that requires a phone call.  Your reps will too.

5. Decision-making Guidelines
If you don’t give your customer service reps at least a little bit of decision making latitude, they will not feel empowered to do their job.

6. Roboform
Any e-commerce employee with 43 distinct login names and passwords will tell you what a pain it is to keep track of all of them.  Roboform is a password manager, form filler, and password generator.  This little gem is a huge time saver and comes in a few different flavors.  There is a free version that allows for up to 10 passcards, or a Pro version that retails for $39.90 with two licenses.

7. Dual Monitors
This may seem like a superfluous luxury, but having the extra real estate can really make a difference.  A typical e-commerce customer service rep doesn’t work with a single application.  Usually they’ll have multiple web browsers, some backend or CRM application, email, and maybe instant messaging open at any give time. Give your reps another monitor.  It’s cheap, it will save them time and they will love you for it.  Keep in mind, though, that you will need a secondary graphics card; these are also very cheap.

8. Your Time
As a customer service manager or supervisor your time is extremely valuable.  However, it is imperative that you make yourself available to your reps.  Often a customer service role can be unforgiving with spurts of angry or upset customers.  Your department’s morale will benefit greatly from your accessibility.

9. Collaboration Tools
Your customer service reps need to be able to share information with one another easily.  Give them access to tools that make it easy for them to communicate and work together.  Google Docs & Spreadsheets has helped us a great deal, and it doesn’t cost you anything.

10. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
CRM is the process by which a company stores, tracks, and analyzes customer experience data.  You don’t have to go out and buy a unified SAP solution to give your reps CRM tools.  Even a small e-commerce business can take advantage of inexpensive, but highly useful tools like SugarCRM or LivePerson.  SugarCRM is an open source CRM platform that is available for free; although there will be costs associated with development, deployment, and training. SugarCRM also offers paid solutions, depending on needs. LivePerson, widely known as a chat solution, is also a useful tool for communicating with customers via email and phone.  LivePerson, at a minimum, will allow your customer service reps to chat with customers and track email history with your customers via an email ticketing system.  LivePerson’s small business package is licensed per seat, but it is well worth the cost.

*Bonus

11. Instant Messaging (IM)
Many companies have debated internally about the implementation of IM because of privacy and productivity.  In e-commerce, it is almost a necessity.  Try to communicate a URL to a fellow customer service rep over the phone.  Waiting for an email to come across can be frustrating.  IM makes it easier and faster to communicate some things.  Your reps will frequently need quick information from other reps for help, the warehouse for an update, your marketing team for promotional clarification, etc.