Linda asks: Get rid of your customers?? What message are you giving your customers; you need them.
To thank our friends and clients for their support throughout the past year, we'd like to share our insights on what we've learned from the past year, and trends that we think may impact your business in 2012.
Please join us as our guest for the Be Poised to Takeoff in '12: Top of the Year Teleseminar on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 1 pm PST.
This teleseminar will cover:
As a special holiday thank you to our clients and community, we are offering this teleseminar ($49 value) at no charge. Use coupon code TOPYEAR2012 for complimentary registration.
This teleseminar is designed for businesses, consultants, professional services firms, and anyone who wants to use marketing to break away from the pack in the coming year.
Join us on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 1 pm PDT. Use coupon code TOPYEAR2012 to attend at no charge.
Last year's Top of the Year Teleseminar was quite popular. Because space is limited, and seats are available on a first come, first serve basis, please reserve your space in advance to ensure you are included.
Register now.
By now, you may have already seen the video of the over efficient Fedex driver who pulls up to an address, takes a computer monitor, and throws it over the fence to the recipient's driveway--all captured by a perfectly placed security camera.
Fedex promptly apologized and said the driver in question was "no longer working with customers."
That would be fine if it was only one driver. However, unless he's been working on my route for the last few months or he has a clone, this is NOT an isolated incident.
Don't get me wrong: I *love* Fedex--packages get where they should be when they're supposed to be there, they're easy to track, and most times things show up in one piece. However, over the last several months I've had Fedex delivery people dump packages in the *middle* of my long driveway, where I just managed to avoid running them over at the last minute or ask people coming down the driveway to carry the package for them.
I've tried to alert Fedex about this, but when I call I get a call center agent in some distant place who apologizes profusely and says she will make a note in my file. There's no way to talk to the people at the local distribution center who would know exactly who has been on my route, dumping packages out of the side of the truck. I don't feel confident that this won't happen again--especially after looking at this video.
There are 2 customer service problems here, Fedex. The first is obvious--your delivery people need to be trained to treat the packages they carry as if they were their own and not like hot potatoes to be dumped as quickly as possible.
The second is more subtle. It's not easy to communicate with you about the delivery experience. Make it easier for us to get to the right person and file a complaint when something goes wrong. The best recourse should NOT be to post a video to the Web (with over 5 million hits so far!).
We've told you what's wrong. Let's absolutely, positively see some improvement, Fedex.
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A few thoughts from my travels throughout Australia and New Zealand during the last couple of weeks...
While Republican presidential primaries are underway in the US, New Zealand just completed their national election yesterday.
In many ways, the two countries are quite similar: Both are democracies, born of British heritage originally. Both are facing recessions and the aftermath of big government spending. Watching the post-election interviews last night, it was obvious that politicians pretty much look and sound the same the world over. (One interesting note: All the party leaders interviewed sounded as if they'd won the election. It wasn't until the commentators noted how poorly that party had fared, that it became obvious this was mainly a lot of spin.)
The differences, however, are interesting. While the US is a direct democracy, New Zealand is parliamentary. Citizens vote for parties rather than individuals; the parties then from coalitions to form a ruling majority.
That means that all the signage and ads plastered around the country the last couple of weeks focused on parties, not candidates, and each party had a clearly staked out position. Labour appears to be totally out of favor at the present and ACT, the party that seems closest to the US tea party in sentiment, didn't do well at all. Even though John Key appears to be a popular leader, he was not the focus of the National party messaging. In fact, his name and face never appeared.
[Presidential elections in the US are in actuality a two-part system, since voters choose electors who in turn cast votes for the actual candidate. However, the electors are pledged to a candidate not to a party and voters focus on the individual candidate.]
National elections here are held on a Saturday, not a weekday, probably to make it easier for people to vote without impacting work scheduled.
While there are issues with this approach to elections, It was a refreshing change from the ongoing set of primary debates we see in the US from the party out of power. Since the differences between many Republicans aren't that distinct or very different at all, we focus on Michelle Bachmann's lack of preparedness, Herman Cain's 9-9-9 and Rick Perry's inability to keep more than 2 thoughts in his head at any given time. We don't even have a good forum for additional pary candidates like ACT or Greens.
Is there a right or wrong way to do this? No, but it's a relief not to be subjected to the two year long beauty contest we've chosen to elect a key leader of the free world.
New Zealand is still celebrating its World Cup rugby championship last month. It's impossible to go anywhere in this country without seeing some AllBlacks flag, banner or momento. Players are featured in print and broadcast ads and even as part of the safety videos for Air New Zealand.
It's good to be All Black if you're a rugby player, but not necessarily so if you're an animal. Nassim Taleb wrote a book called The Black Swan about how we don't believe in the existence of the highly improbable (like the black swan) until it appears and we are confronted with evidence to that effect. In New Zealand today, in spite of a country devoted to animal and land conservation, it's still legal to hunt black swans (which were brought over from Australia), but not the more ordinary white kind.
In many cultures, the "black sheep" is the one that stands out--it doesn't belong with the rest of the flock, it's seen as being worth less. New Zealand is known for having 10x the number of sheep as people.
What I've learned here is that changing the diet of the black sheep to a richer feed makes their wool much lighter--to the point where they look just slightly darker than the rest of the group. It's a better fate than that of the black swan. Still one wonders why it's so important to lighten up the wool when most of it is dyed for clothing anyway. Merino wool is highly prized and not inexpensive to purchase and it comes in just about all the colors of the rainbow.
Then there's the possum. Depending on whom you talk to, it was brought to New Zealand for its fur or to help try and control the rabbit population. Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences set in. There are twice as many possums as sheep and the number keeps rising. They eat up the natural vegetation and destoy habits for local animals, which may be why it's said many New Zealanders feel the best thing they can do with a possum is run over it with their car.
Although it's Friday afternoon in New Zealand as I write this, it's still Thanksgiving Day in the US. A few thoughts on what I'm thankful for this year:
Happy Thanksgiving to one and all.
As I travel through Australia and New Zealand, I'm learning about the history of the area.
For example, the aboriginal people in New Zealand arrived here only about 800 or so years ago. We're in Dunedin, NZ right now, named for Edinburgh, Scotland (Dunedin was an old name for Edinburgh), and the old city of Edinbugh is older than that.
Europeans arrived in New Zealand less than 300 years ago, bringing with them all kinds of things, including disease and the ubiquitous sheep you see everywhere in this country.
This area was first "discovered" by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who left Indonesia and discovered Fiji, New Zealand and the southern Australian island that now bears his name (Tasmania). However, in spite of all of this, he never found the continent of Australia--though it was right in front of him.
Capt. Cook sailed around New Zealand and looked right at Milford Sound, yet never came inland because from what is now known as the Tasman Sea, the Sound was not visible--it appeared like just more ragged coastline--yet it was right in front of him.
Lest we blame explorers in this part of the world, remember that Christopher Columbus reached what we now call the West Indies, thinking he'd found India, yet totally missed the continent of North America. Had he gone a little further north and west, perhaps Ohio would now be located in Columbus, instead of the other way around.
All of these explorers missed the big prize of what was right in front of them because they couldn't see the bigger picture. They had a set of working assumptions based on what was known at the time. Had they been able to break free of these, they might have made discoveries beyond their greatest imaginations.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. How many times do we miss what's right in front of our face because we don't think it's supposed to be there?