So, now Amazon.com wants in on some of that online shoes and handbags business — enter Endless.com. I’ve been wanting to try Endless for a awhile now, but I just don’t buy shoes that often. The other day I decided to give them a whirl… and I’ll admit, I was pretty impressed. Fast shipping. Nice user interface. Good customer experience all the way through.

It’s great when you can have one company that just blows everyone out of the water in terms of price and customer satisfaction. But then when you have two companies both competing at that same level… the consumer wins big time.

This year I checked out FTD.com since I’d seen them advertised in a few different places. Browsing their website it seemed like they’d be just as safe a bet as 1-800 Flowers. They had a nice arrangement of Tulips for Valentine’s Day so I thought I’d go ahead and give em’ a try. After placing the order I received a quick confirmation that contained the following phrase “SATISFACTION GUARANTEED Shop with confidence. Your flowers and gifts will be delivered on time, every time.” Wow, that’s pretty bold to put on the order confirmation emails — I like it.

So, come Valentine’s Day… I get home from work, my girlfriend who comes home before me has went out of her way to cook a beautiful meal for me. She’s bought some candies and written a nice card for me. I ask her:

“Hey, how’d you like the flowers?”.
No answer.
Uh, shit.
“You DIDN’T get the flowers?”
“No”
D’oh!!!

So, basically, the flowers never made it to work. Now, of course, I’m slightly livid. Maybe because 1-800 Flowers has ALWAYS delivered flowers on time I have these high expectations. So, I call FTD’s customer support. I get some message about due to the high volume of calls I’ll have to hang up and try again. Nice.

The next day I find out that my flowers make it there… IN A BOX. WTF? In a box delivered by a DHL man. Nice. Romantic. Sweet. Lovely. It’s like an Ikea-style Valentine’s day minus the allen wrench.

So I call FTD again. Even more livid this time. Same message, high call volumes, blah blah, call later. I send them an email and get an auto-response that says their “goal is to respond within 24 hours”.

Two more days pass and their goal is obviously unrealistic. I call customer support AGAIN . I wait for 15 minutes before I speak with a rep that clearly hates what he’s doing in life. I tell him that I was not aware that my romantic gift would show up in a box. And two, my flowers were late. And I’ve called twice and left an email and still heard no response within 3 days. What do I get in return for my wonderful experience?

The rep then starts to get defensive about the fact that the flowers showed up in a box. He states that it CLEARLY states that on the product page.

“Oh REALLY? I don’t remember anything on the product page about my flowers showing up in a brown box.”

He fires up his web browser and seeks to prove me wrong… a minute passes… “Sorry my computer’s acting slow”… (I wonder if he’s connecting from India. You’re AT the company, WHY is it slow?)

A couple more minutes pass and he claims “You’re right, there isn’t anything that says it will arrive in a box. Do you want me to speak with my supervisor?”

My initial response is “Do you have to?” Seriously. If you can’t correct this problem here… then why do they pay you? Just to answer a phone? Are you just slightly above a receptionist? I _thought_ you were a customer service representative… so f’n make this right?!?!

“Yeah, sure.”

5 minutes on hold passes. He then tells me the supervisor would like to offer me 10% off my next purchase. “No thanks. I’ll just do my business elsewhere.”

So, my questions from all of this are:

* How do you compensate someone for an error like this?
* If the item you’re sending (like flowers) are to show up in a brown box, shouldn’t there be some sort of warning on the product page? I mean, I’m not ordering books from Amazon or something. I’m ordering flowers!
* If your front line customer service rep can’t make decisions to improve the customer experience — then why bother?
* Why promise things you can’t deliver on. Multiple promises are made: on time delivery (guaranteed), customer service response time, and 100% customer satisfaction. NONE of these were met or there really was no attempt to even make good on it (10% off my next purchase? seriously guys. That’s like telling me “go ahead and buy something from us again and we’ll pay the shipping.”)

Note: I originally wrote this last year and intended to publish it at the time. It’s been sitting here as a draft copy every since. I figured with Valentine’s day 2 days away why not publish it. And yes, I still remembered my experience with FTD and promptly placed another $100 order for flowers just the other night.

Nice to see USAA getting some love here. There’s a very small number of companies out there that impress me with all aspects of their business; USAA is one of them. I’ve never before experienced such consistently great customer service with a company that handles so many different areas. I’d even go so far as to say USAA membership is probably one of the nicest perks for your family being in the military.

For more examples of USAA testimonials, see the comments for this article at Signals vs Noise: Frustration is Exponential.

From: Guy Kawasaki: Is a Business Plan Necessary?

There’s just one catch. I for one loathe Blockbuster simply for the fact that I had to put up with their ’suck every penny from your customer’ type approach they’ve used in the past. Talking with others’ briefly about it seems to reveal similiar distaste for the company as well.

Undoubtedly being influenced by too many Seth Godin talks I’m beginning to wonder if Blockbuster’s new plan will fail simply because of their prior failures in the ‘customer experience’ area. From the surface it seems Blockbuster is doing everything right: heavy commercial air-time, competitive pricing, and the convenience of having stores in nearly every major town in the US. However, is their history of poor customer service going to be a major factor in Total Access’ acceptence with the movie renting populace? I’d love to see some numbers for how effective Total Access has been for Blockbuster.

Another thing I’m not sure Blockbuster underestimates is the important for some sort of instant access to movies via a Tivo-like/Apple TV type device. Amongst talking with friends and coworkers the biggest want seems to be an instant, easy to use device that would allow downloading of movies right to your living room TV. I’ve seen stories here and there for the past two years about Netflix’s investment in just this sort-of thing — and the latest release of its PC movie downloading service seems to confirm these rumors. Blockbuster would be wise to put just as much effort into this as their Total Access effort.