In the past I’ve written about my esteem for Cook’s Illustrated. They make it easy to be a great cook.

Tonight, however, Cook’s has lowered their reputation with me considerably, by trying to scam me out of my money.

I got a telemarketing call from them.  They wanted to reward me for being a valued subscriber by sending me their “Summer Grilling” special, and another book.  The young man on the phone said it was free, but upon close questioning allowed as how the other book was a “free trial,” and if I decided I didn’t like the book I would only have to pay for it.  Is it okay, he asked, for them to go ahead and send it?

My reply:  Sure, send it… but understand that I have not ordered anything and if Cook’s decides to send me anything in the mail without my having ordered it, I’m keeping it and I’m not paying a dime for it.

The call ended quickly thereafter.  You see, Cook’s Illustrated wanted to sucker me in by sending me the book, hoping I’d keep it so they could bill me for it later… even if I simply forgot to send it back.

Every month, my subscription copy of Cook’s comes wrapped in extra pages detailing the latest book they’ve published, offering it to me at a low rate. In the fine print, one discovers that ordering the advertised book actually signs you up for a book-of-the-month club, where you’ll start getting volumes in the mail as a “free trial” unless you return them or cancel.  I thought that was a shady way to do business; the fact is I would have ordered several cookbooks direct from Cook’s if it weren’t for that bit of legerdemain.

This phone call, however, was a straight-up con job.

The sales rep went to great lengths in how his words were phrased, and in the speed and manner that they were presented, to gloss over the fact that this was an attempt to get me to “order” a book-of-the-month-club subscription.  If I weren’t already aware of this type of scam, I might have said “yes, send me the free stuff!” and then, when the bill arrived later, be told that I was on a recording having “placed the order.”

Even if Cook’s didn’t intend to pull this, it still comes off as incredibly shady.  The offers every month around my magazine tell  me that it isn’t just an overzealous telemarketer—it’s something Cook’s has decided to do to make money.

I don’t begrudge Cook’s finding ways to stay afloat.  But this is dishonest, and beneath them.

And it has me seriously considering dropping my subscription at the end of my term.

Few people are aware of Title 39, United States Code, Section 3009.  That’s the part of the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 that covers unsolicited merchandise.

In the United States, if you receive merchandise in the mail and you did not order it, you have no obligation to return it or pay for it. You may keep it.  You can mark it “Return to Sender” and the Postal Service will send it back at no charge.  Or you can throw it out.

This law was passed to prevent shady organizations from sending items to people via mail, and then billing them for things they hadn’t ordered.

Under this law, sending that bill is now a Federal crime.

Unless.

39 U.S.C. §3009(d):

(d) For the purposes of this section, “unordered merchandise” means merchandise mailed without the prior expressed request or consent of the recipient.

What Cook’s telemarketer was trying to secure was the “consent of the recipient” for the unordered merchandise (the cookbook).  That’s the out.

And it’s a damn shady end-run around the law.  I’d expect it from a fly-by-night encyclopedia company, not Cook’s Illustrated.

Shame on you, Christopher Kimball.

Cook’s Illustrated should immediately cease using this underhanded sales tactic. They should be up front about their “book of the month club,” and they should cease cold-calling subscribers to get them to sign up.

For that matter, if Cook’s is going to make sales calls, they should pay attention to the Do Not Call Registry. Although the law doesn’t prevent them from making calls where there’s an “existing business relationship,” a wise company will note that people who are listed on the Registry don’t like being interrupted by telephone sales pitches, and that calling them anyway will usually lead to a reputation hit.  Send mail instead—the Postal Service could use the cash.

Or perhaps give up the book-of-the-month stuff altogether, and just rely on a compelling product at a good price.

What can you do when you just can’t get satisfaction from a software company despite your best efforts? What if the company’s tech-support script monkeys have left your computer nonfunctional, worse than it was when you started, and they refuse to provide any more assistance?

Sue them in small claims court.

While visiting New Jersey this weekend, I stopped at the Williams-Sonoma store in the Short Hills Mall.  Williams-Sonoma is an upscale kitchen-accessories store.  The Short Hills Mall is an “ultra-premium” mall, the sort of place where the anchor stores are Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and Bloomingdale’s instead of JCPenney and Target. What should’ve been a premium shopping experience turned into a frustrating trip that makes me unlikely to visit that store again.

I’ll admit I’ve always had a mixed opinion of Williams-Sonoma.  They carry some nice items, but they also carry a lot of useless things.  True “gourmet cook” cookware is mixed with the culinary equivalent of the motorized tie racks you see in department stores around Christmastime—useless and tacky things that mostly appeal to frustrated gift-givers.  A savvy shopper can find better deals at local restaurant-supply and cooking stores (such as my local favorite, Warren Kitchen & Cutlery).

Anyway, I needed a new steamer.  Grandma’s old collapsable steamer insert had finally completed its utter collapse, and I’ve been steaming vegetables a lot more lately.  I very much like All-Clad cookware, and Williams-Sonoma carries a good range of All-Clad.  So, into Williams-Sonoma.

I found the All-Clad 3-quart steamer set. That’s pretty much what I was looking for.  They had two of them, apparently identical, on display.  Now all I need to do is buy them.

Williams-Sonoma, being upscale, doesn’t keep cookware stock on the display floor.  So the first thing was to get someone to help me.  There weren’t any employees near me, so I headed to the central checkout desk.

It took a little while to get help, because the checkout was a bit understaffed for the crowd that Sunday.  As I waited in line, I did notice employees milling about, occasionally helping other people.  I think they might’ve been more effective at the checkout.

I told the employee at the checkout that I wanted the All-Clad 3-quart stainless steel steamer set.  She wasn’t clear on what this was, and got on her walkie-talkie to ask for help. After a confused moment or two, she asked me to come over to the display and show her what it was that I wanted.

We finally wound up with three employees standing around the All-Clad display, looking at the floor sample and trying to explain over the walkie-talkie, in loud booming voices that carried throughout the store, what it is they were looking for to some mystery person in the back room.  ”It’s a steamer set, it’s like a pasta pentola but smaller,” one yelled into her neckline.  (The cord-mounted microphones of their walkie-talkie headsets made for some odd body language.)  After a few minutes of trying, and failing, to explain to each other which product they were trying to sell, another employee took the tag off the shelf and went back to the service desk.

At the desk, she looked up the SKU code on her computer. Directing the faceless back-room man to look harder, she told me “the computer says I have five of these in stock, so there should be at least one back there.”  Her tone of voice expressed doubt, and made it clear that she could very well have none.

It was then explained that it wasn’t in their stockroom on this floor, and their back-room man would have to check the other storeroom on the other floor of the mall.

I was then left to my own devices for about ten minutes as everyone left to help other customers.

After about eight minutes, I was strongly considering just walking out.  I’d already spent three times longer in this store than I’d expected, almost all of it waiting for the employees to get their act together.

As the fellow finally arrived with my pot, it was unceremoniously dropped on a sales counter, and no one made any acknowledgement to me.  All the staffed registers were busy, so I waited, mostly patiently, for one to free up.  The one that opened first was the one right next to the box with my steamer in it, the one the fellow had delivered it to.  The woman staffing it asked for the next customer, and someone who had approached the desk well after me darted in with her items.  The employee didn’t say a word and started ringing her up.

When the next register opened, I asserted myself with extra vigor and got rung up.  Good thing, too; the reaction to the box sitting on the counter was “oh, is this yours?”

One high point for Williams-Sonoma: Instead of putting the large, heavy, square-cornered cardboard box into a plastic or paper bag that would be sure to fail before I reached my car, they instead gave me an inexpensive but reusable shopping bag, similar to some cheap types of reusable supermarket shopping bag but larger.  While this must be an added expense for the store, it’s a good call given the nature of their merchandise and their premium brand positioning.

Summary: How Williams-Sonoma Short Hills Failed

1. Employees in a specialty store that don’t know their product. When I go to a premium store like Williams-Sonoma, I expect that the sales help will at least know all the products they sell that require assistance to purchase.  If I ask for a three-quart stainless-steel All-Clad steamer, they should know what I’m talking about, or know what to ask to clarify it.  A blank stare and a request to point at it is not a premium experience, it’s a Wal-Mart experience.
2. Let’s say that again: Employees in a specialty store that don’t know their product. If you have to tell another employee “It’s like a pasta pentola, but smaller,” you really have a training issue with your staff.
3. Inefficient stock-keeping. At worst, the floor employee should’ve been able to read off the SKU to the back-room guy and get the item out front quickly.  Places like Sears have had stock-keeping systems that quickly direct the warehouse folks to the right shelf to fulfill a customer order for decades.  Williams-Sonoma has no excuse for needing to hunt through two storerooms to find one pot.
4. Inaccurate computer records. If the computer says there are five pots in stock, there should be five pots in stock.  There should be no reason for the staff to be unsure of their inventory, especially when the inventory is kept solely in a back storeroom.  Do they have that much employee theft going on?
5. Yelling is not a premium experience. Using walkie-talkies can enhance customer satisfaction by making employees more efficient.  However, if you’re a premium store, you need to buy premium walkie-talkies so that your employees can communicate clearly and calmly.  You need to train employees on communications etiquette.  Having three people surrounding you yelling into their lapels like over-caffienated Secret Service agents does not make you feel like you’re being pampered for the money you’re about to spend.
6. Long waits are not a premium experience. If you’re a high-end store in a high-end mall, you need to have smooth procedures and sufficient staffing to be efficient and quick at customer service.  Customers with disposable income are often impatient.  Sometimes, if you have a high-demand item like an iPad, you can get away with lines.  However, there’s plenty of places to buy pots.  Cookware purchasers are not a captive audience.
7. Waiting customers get precedence over walk-ups. If you have someone who is waiting for you to get your act together and find an item so they can give you money for it, that person is always the next in line.  They have already made it through the queue to ask for the opportunity to pay you.  Now you owe them the courtesy of expediting the rest of the transaction.  The moment the item reaches the checkout stand, acknowledge it, acknowledge them, and make it clear to the line that this person is next.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t a customer service issue at a mass-merchandiser like Target or Wal-Mart, where many of these inconveniences are to be expected because you’re getting a low price due to lower overhead.  This is a premium store at an ultra-premium mall.  People go here because they are willing to pay more, and they expect better service as a result.

If stores take the route that this Williams-Sonoma did, they’ll find themselves losing business.  If you can get better customer service by ordering from Amazon or another online vendor, why would you bother wasting your time waiting for the guy in the back room?

While egosurfing the other day, I came across an interesting entry at Chris Keane’s blog that links to my Art of Turboing article.

In “8 tips for improved turboing: customer service workarounds,” Chris details a few tips that can help you take turboing to the next level.

The only tip that I’d take issue with is incrementing the phone extension; that will work in a small or medium sized company, but it’s not likely to work with a large corporation—especially the type of large corporation that drives customers to turbo anyway.

When I worked at Xerox in the late 1990s, there was a special phone number distributed to all employees that connected you to a centralized “find help” desk.  If you had a customer that needed help you couldn’t provide, you’d call that number and the folks that answered would help you connect the customer to the right group.  Say you worked in desktop printer support, and you had a customer that also had a problem with the billing for their leased photocopier. Instead of just saying “Sorry, that’s not my department, you’ll have to contact the other folks,” Xerox made it easy to be helpful.  You could say “Well, that’s not my department, but if you can hold a minute, I can get you to someone who can help you.”  

This is a brilliant and simple idea, and I’m amazed at how few companies have anything like it.  I have yet to work for another company that does.

If you dial a random person at, say, a multinational bank, the chances are very good that they not only won’t be able to help you, they won’t have any idea how to connect you to someone that can.  That’s why turboing starts at the top of the food chain: The CEO is ultimately responsible for everything, and the CEO’s office can start the ball rolling downhill until it hits someone in the right position to help.

Oh, and as for the commenter on Chris’s blog who wondered

by posting them online aren’t you just encouraging more people to use them, which in turn forces companies to restrict customers’ ability to turbo?

Look, if you’re in a position where you should turbo, because you have a legitimate problem with a company that they are not properly addressing, then you should turbo.  It’s as simple as that.

If the company decides that they don’t want to listen to customer complaints, then it’s not likely that turboing would ever work with them, anyway.  In my experience, most companies will see turboing as an indication that their customer-service department has problems—and those problems are causing lost customers and lost revenue.  For every person that cares enough to complain loudly, there are dozens that just quietly stop doing business with the company.

Customers that turbo, and do it properly, are doing a company a big favor! Those customers are alerting senior management to potentially serious problems that could hurt the company’s reputation and its bottom line.  They care enough to complain and give the company a chance to make it right.  Smart companies value this kind of complaint.

That’s also why it’s so important to turbo correctly: Be polite, be reasonable, ask for a reasonable resolution, and don’t abuse the technique.

In 2003, I wrote the following blog entry:

I’ve recently inherited a house. The air conditioner, a jumbo window model from Carrier, is operable, but the mode selector knob is broken. Although it can still be used with judicious use of a pair of pliers, I wanted to get a replacement knob.

It turns out that Carrier understands a key tenet in customer service: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Even though this air conditioner was made over a decade ago, it won’t be a problem for me to get the knob. In fact, Carrier will send one to me at no charge. They make replacement knobs for all their room air conditioners available for free, just for the asking. Their web site offers instructions for requesting new knobs online.

This is how you make customers happy. A small, inexpensive part that would be hard for service centers to stock, creating a logistics nightmare… is instead centralized and turned into something that makes customers feel “taken care of.” This kind of small gesture is what leads to repeat customers.

Sadly, since the original blog entry was written, Carrier has taken down the web page that allowed you to order replacement knobs for their air conditioners. I suspect that the short-sighted bean-counters won out over those who understand that the little things—like knobs—are what help you retain customers when you offer a premium product during hard economic times.

A commenter, dm, added the following:

You know, I had a very similar experience with Bose … I have a pair of Bose 201 Series II bookshelf speakers circa 1987 or so. About a year and a half ago, I blew out the fuses inside the speakers themselves (uhm, oops. Pearl Jam’s “Ten” warrants Excessively Loud Volumes!) Anyway, the fuses are a custom job — hardwired & encased in glass. So I called up Bose, explained the situation to the customer service rep, and all he could say was “Wow, I’m really sorry that happened. This shouldn’t happen. I’m going to overnight FedEx you a pair of fuses, and a few extra too, just in case. Is that OK?”

I asked “How much are the fuses” and he laughed and said “Oh, no charge at all. We’re just sorry you had this problem with our speakers! If you have any problems at all after replacing the fuses, please, give me a call back and we’ll see what we can do from there. (He gave me his name, which I’ve forgotten by now)”

Now *THAT* is customer service!

I wish more companies would take that lead!

(Not that I can personally recommend Bose. In my opinion, most of their products are overhyped and overpriced.  Have you ever noticed that Bose displays in stores are usually set well apart from the competition’s products?)

Since that blog was published, I can add another example of a company that understands customer service.

A few years ago, I purchased a set of Klipsch Synergy speakers for my home theater. I found that they were a good balance of sound quality and price, and they are readily available at the neighborhood big-box electronics retailer. I was very happy with them…

Until I realized, after just a few months over two years of enjoyment, that the bass seemed awfully weak.  In fact, the Sub-10 subwoofer had stopped functioning almost entirely.  With the volume cranked, I could barely perceive any vibration of the woofer cone with my fingers.  Checking my receipt, I found that the subwoofer’s amplifier had a two-year warranty.  It had expired a few months before I realized the problem existed.

Checking Klipsch’s customer-support forums online, I found that many other Sub-10 owners had experienced a failure of the sub’s built-in amplifier. It seems that there was a run of Sub-10s, shipped to big-box retailers on or near a Black Friday sale, that were turning out to be faulty.

I e-mailed Klipsch support, expecting that I would have to pay to have the unit repaired, and hoping that there would be a local repair depot—shipping a big, heavy subwoofer module back for repair would obviously be costly!

Steve Phillips from Klipsch replied:

Hi Rob,
If you can provide use with a receipt and you are handy with a screw driver, we should be able to help.

I got Steve the information he requested, and he shipped me a new amplifier module at no charge.  They provided instructions for replacing the module—not “easy,” but within the grasp of a do-it-yourselfer. Klipsch didn’t even want the old module back.

The new amplifier has a very different design, making it obvious that Klipsch believes in continuous improvement.  This is reassuring—I’m not so worried that this amp will have the same failure two years down the road.

I had a good opinion of Klipsch based on their product. After this, I have an excellent opinion of them based on their customer service. I know that if I buy or recommend a Klipsch product, they will stand behind it—even if it’s one of their inexpensive mass-market lines, instead of the high-end audiophile stuff.

Policy vs. “Policy”

In the case of Klipsch, we see an enlightened attitude toward customer-service policies.  Many companies would stop at the “Warranty Policy:” “We warrant this speaker for two years from the date of purchase as indicated on the original sales receipt.”  If you had a speaker fail after two years and one month, you’d be out of luck with such a company.

Of course, then you’d need to go buy a new speaker… and it almost certainly wouldn’t be another one from that company!

Too many companies stick to “policy” even when the result is losing a customer, and all their potential future purchases. Companies that hold to “policy” in every circumstance wind up being perceived as heartless, uncaring, and out to rip off the consumer.

Enlightened companies, like Klipsch, have a higher form of policy. They have a policy that customer satisfaction can be more important than the “warranty policy.” 

Klipsch isn’t required by warranty to replace an expensive faulty amplifier at no charge—not even shipping costs!—when it dies after 27 months, but they understand that it just isn’t right to do that to a customer.  Better to implicitly acknowledge that the amplifier was a bit flakey, eat the cost of the replacement, and keep the customer.  Then, when the customer decides they need a bigger, better system, they’ll look first at Klipsch’s bigger, better, more expensive lines… instead of the competition.

This blog entry was originally published on November 10, 2002.

Some people have written to me suggesting that my experience with CompUSA was due to me being unreasonable. I recently received an email that suggests differently… from someone who works at CompUSA.

Read on to find out what “X” thought about my article…

I don’t want to cause “X” to lose their job, so I’m selectively quoting the email, and I have made edits which don’t affect the meaning of the letter to avoid revealing personal information about their identity.

Rob,

I’ve read most of your site. I like it and that might be shocking to some people because I work [at a CompUSA store]. It’s hard work because I really care about the people, so if I ever have to apologize for another person’s mistake (often), I feel like I’m the one letting the customer down.

From everything I’ve read, I have to admit that you’re right. I’m stuck in a hard place, because I work for a company that doesn’t care to know or use my skills and abilities. It seems they want to make all employees act as robots with no training or communication on how to do their job. … Your site is great, because it makes use of a mass communication tool, thereby helping prevent a company from sweeping things under the rug. I wish more people would stand up and voice their concerns.

X also described how the manager at the CompUSA where X is employed reassigned X’s duties. Instead of doing the job that X had excelled at for years, X is now in a position where their skills are mostly wasted.

This illustrates the point that often, when a company provides bad customer service, they do it despite the best efforts of their employees. I believe that most people want to be helpful. However, if they’re put in a situation where being helpful is not just ignored but actually punished… Could you blame X if they were crabby toward CompUSA customers?

It’s important to remember: when customer service becomes systemically poor, it’s not because of the front-line customer service staff. It’s because of corporate policies–policies which are probably draconian, demoralizing, and rigidly enforced. It’s because of poor management. Yelling at a customer service representative won’t solve these things… but a complaint to a manager, or a well-reasoned letter to senior management, might start the ball rolling.

In the past, I think companies got away with shoddy customer service because “word of mouth” about their tactics would only spread locally. Occasionally, they might become the focus of a “consumer reporter” and need to mend their ways, but the odds were in the companies’ favor. The Internet has changed the equation: now, one shabbily-treated customer can spread word-of-mouth across the world. The lesson is: it’s a lot riskier to say “who needs that one customer?” nowadays.

January 2009 Update: Since this blog entry was originally published, CompUSA went bankrupt and ceased operations. The company was unable to compete with other big-box retailers such as Circuit City and Best Buy as well as Internet retailers, invested in a misguided attempt to sell cut-rate consumer electronics like big-screen TVs, and offered a consumer-hostile shopping environment—CompUSA was infamous for having uniformed security guards harassing shoppers at the exit. A new company with the same name is operating in a few states, providing deep-discount electronics.

This blog entry was originally published on November 9, 2002.

While The Art of Turboing is all about how to complain with extreme prejudice, sometimes the same technique is useful when you have compliments or constructive criticism. Sometimes, it’s even profitable.

Read on to find out what happened when I shared some thoughts with the CEO of BJ’s Wholesale Club.

The background: I shop at BJ’s Wholesale a lot. They’re nearby, and their prices are quite good. Recently they installed self-checkout machines. After using them, I decided to share some feedback with BJ’s, not as a complaint per se, but as constructive criticism. I want them to succeed. Otherwise, I won’t be able to get so many cheap DVDs!

Here’s the letter I sent to Michael Wedge, the President and CEO of BJ’s:

Dear Mr. Wedge,

My family has had a charter membership to BJ’s Wholesale Club since it first came to Connecticut. As a long-time enthusiastic customer, I wanted to give you some feedback about the club. I’m writing directly to you because your web site doesn’t seem to have any way for customers to send feedback to your company.

Overall, I enjoy BJ’s and I think it’s a good value for the money. As with any warehouse club, the shopper needs to be aware of market prices and accept a relatively limited selection. That’s expected, and BJ’s meets or exceeds my expectations there.

The main reason I’m writing is to tell you about my recent experience with your new self-checkout system.

I’ve recently decided to stop shopping at KMart altogether, in large part due to their increasing reliance on self-checkout. While I like the concept of self-checkout, KMart’s implementation seems designed to enrage the customer. Not only have I never completed a “smooth” transaction at KMart’s self-checkout, but KMart seems to have cut back on its human checkout staff. This means that I either have to accept their poor self-checkout, or wait in very long lines for the few remaining cashiers.

On my trip to BJs today, I saw your self-checkout was now in operation. I was glad to see that you still had a reasonable number of human cashiers. There are definitely times that I would want to use a human cashier, even though I’m a technophile.

The user interface is a bit confusing. I noticed that there are large signs next to each self checkout to direct the customer. I majored in cognitive psychology in college, with a concentration on human-computer interaction. One of the design dictums I remember clearly is that systems which need extra instruction manuals are not well designed. The need for a sign shows that the system isn’t obvious to use.

In general, the checkout process went smoothly. You’ve mostly overcome one of the fatal flaws in the KMart design, which is the weight-check system. At KMart, if you fail to put each item into a bag, the system locks up until you can hunt down a human to help you. This makes purchasing large items very difficult. Your system seems to have a better design in this regard… except that it apparently cannot deal with whole chickens. The system refused to accept a two-pack of whole chickens as a valid purchase.

The process for accepting coupons is much better than KMart’s system. Your system had no difficulty accepting my coupons. KMart’s system used a coupon scanner similar to a dollar-bill acceptor, which had great difficulty accepting coupons. However, the receipt printout for the coupons is a bit confusing.

The credit-card acceptance procedure needs some work. There is a period of time where the credit-card swipe terminal appears to have been reset to the “swipe your card” state without any change on the main display. This is confusing, and made me wonder if the credit card transaction had timed out. The display implied that I might need to swipe my card again. I did not, because I know that other similar systems can do a double-debit of an account in such situations. A few seconds later, the system confirmed the credit card transaction.

The final flaw in the system is that the signature pad is awkwardly placed, very small, and the signature pen is attached with an absurdly short cord. This makes the signature procedure something of a hassle.

I also noticed a much longer than usual wait to leave the store, as the door checker was being far more thorough than usual. I hope that wait won’t be a new trend.

My experience with self-checkout systems in general has been that companies make them too paranoid to function effectively. As a result, they wind up angering customers because they make the checkout process longer and more difficult than it has to be. I hope that BJs will refine its self-checkout systems to prevent this syndrome. I also hope that the self-checkouts will be used to supplement human checkers rather than to replace them.

Thanks for your attention.

I sent this off with no expectations other than the hope that it would prove useful to the company… and that they might take some of my suggestions to heart.

I was very pleasantly surprised when I received the following letter today, a few short days after I sent my letter:

Dear Mr. Levandowski,

Thank you for taking the time to give excellent feedback on self-checkout. Your comments have been passed on to the appropriate Operations and Information Systems folks.

Enclosed please find a $50 BJ’s Gift Card for your time.

Sincerely,
/s/
Mike Wedge
President and CEO

This shows that Mr. Wedge “gets it,” as compared to the many ways that CompUSA did not. The response exceeded my expectations in many ways:

• The letter was personal, on Mr. Wedge’s stationary, and hand-signed by Mr. Wedge, indicating that he personally took the time to review the letter and draft a response.
• The gift card showed that not only was the feedback appreciated, but that it had a tangible value to the company.
• The quick response shows that letters from customers get prompt attention, and prompt replies. That’s a basic part of “customer focused” that most companies fail to understand.

I was already a happy customer of BJ’s Wholesale Club. Mr. Wedge’s excellent response to my letter made me a willing evangelist for the company. An exercise for any corporate bean-counters reading this: Will BJ’s Wholesale Club get $50 worth of word-of-mouth advertising out of this?

Let me be clear: I’m not advocating that everyone go out and start writing letters to companies in hopes of getting gifts. You shouldn’t expect this sort of thing to happen. It’s a wonderful surprise when it does, and I think companies would be well-served in adopting this strategy.

When should you write a letter like this? When you have something constructive to say. You should have a strong opinion that you can express clearly in a brief letter. It should be something that the company ought to be concerned about, but which may not be evident to their focus groups and polling and spot-checks. (If you are fishing for a reward, you’re more likely to get one if the letter is actually useful.)

Something to keep in mind: When a company rolls out a new initiative (like installing self-checkouts), the executives making the decisions may not have all the facts about how consumers like it. It’s the nature of any organization: as comments go from consumers to staff to managers to directors to vice-presidents and so on, they get summarized and prioritized. You may see some little problem that annoys you… and it may be something that would annoy the CEO, too, if it happened to him. If it’s a little problem, though, it might not be in the summaries he gets from management meetings.

Most of all, you should send a helpful letter when you’ve had service that’s just slightly off, and you care about the company. If you’d rather see them fix a glitch than just go elsewhere, it’s worth your time to write a letter. Even if you don’t get a gift out of it, you may still help the company discover the glitch and fix it before it becomes a problem that you, the consumer, won’t live with.

Where to send it? Well, as I stated, I went direct to the CEO because BJ’s didn’t have a customer feedback address. Just as you would escalate with a complaint, escalate constructive criticism: if the company has a feedback address, send it there. If nothing happens… it can’t hurt to send a letter to the CEO. Sometimes you can make a difference for just the cost of a first-class stamp.

The Self-Check Out machines do accept the Gift Cards now. The reason they did not accept them at first was the fact that BJ’s had just introduced the new plastic gift cards (as opposed to old-stlye paper gift cards) a couple months before the Self-Checkouts were put in stores. So the Tech people (where ever they may be) just need a little time to combine the two together.
Now if only they’d get the gift cards to work at the gas pumps. (They are working on this too supposedly)

-A BJ’s employee (who hates dumb customers, but likes the guy who wrote that letter to Mike Wedge)

Oh ya, btw, it doesn’t suprise me he sent you that Gift Card (although 50 is a suprising amount) the company has been trying to promote them like crazy! They even waived the non-member surcharge for non-members who used a gift card up until the end of Jan ’03

Posted by Rob @ 11/10/2002 12:32 PM ET

A followup:

I went to use the gift card today to buy groceries. (When you’re unemployed, $50 can buy a lot of meat for dinners!)

The self-checkouts cannot accept the gift cards directly. How ironic! There’s a small sticker on the credit-card swipe terminal indicating that, in order to pay by gift card, one must hit the button to get an attendant.

The attendant was on the ball, and quickly came to my aid. (She also saw a problem that the system was having when a plastic bag got stuck in the rollers, confusing the equipment, and came over to override it before I asked for her… very proactive!) I had to hit a button to pay at her central terminal, where she called up the order and processed the gift card.

Overall, it was a good experience… but somehow, I don’t think that Mr. Wedge intended his “thank you” gift to expose a new shortcoming in the self-checkout!