WebPeel - Customer Loyalty and Online User Experience

Soap.com Backs a Good Web Site with Great People

So if you have been following my posts about my ordering experience on Soap.com, I am happy to say that my issue is finally resolved. My order was never received because it was damaged during shipping and then I only received a partial refund even though nothing was ever delivered.

With one email to their customer service address I received a wonderful reply from a “Marla” who apologized for the mix up and not only refunded the rest of my money but said they would resend my order free of charge. I received everything a few days ago and my wife and I are very happy.

We will be ordering from Soap.com again.

Lesson Learned

Even the best web sites using the best technology can have breakdowns in the system, especially when it comes to things like ordering and shipping logistics. It is a great reminder that no matter how good your front-end is, at the end of the day, we still need real people behind every web site. It’s people, not computers that make the decisions to do what is right for the customer.

And if you’re a business owner, it is critical that you empower your people to make the right decisions at the right time. This does not mean giving everyone the keys to the castle, but setting limits for when someone should be able to resolve an issue quickly. If I had ordered $1,000 worth of Tide and Palmolive, I don’t know if Soap.com would have sent me the order “on them” but there is a price point where it pays for the company to do what is right. Past experiences with McDonald’s have been like this. If your $4 Big Mac is a little cold or the bun not really fresh they would just give you a new one, no questions asked – I don’t know if they’re still this liberal.

In short, make sure someone is keeping tabs on the technology and the system; don’t assume that just because the support system doesn’t show a lot of complaints people are happy. I hate having to contact customer support, but this time I am glad I did. There are many cases where people are not happy, but they just forget or don’t want to bother following up.

Listen proactively to your customers (that means asking when they don’t).

How On Track is Soap.com and OnTrac?

So I recently jumped on the Soap.com bandwagon solely because I was enticed by their 20% off coupon for new customers and I am tired of lugging gallon jugs of Tide from the supermarket. The first time I ordered the process was perfect - Good user interface, easy checkout process and delivery showed up in exactly 2 days as promised. The second time around I wasn't so lucky. The ordering experience was again very good, but 2 days came and went and no package. If you're like me you always second guess when you ordered the package especially if you do a lot of midnight shopping like myself - do I count today as one day or the next day since it is already past midnight, etc... Nonetheless I went back to the email to verify the actual delivery date and sure enough it should have come yesterday. Soap.com uses a service called OnTrac which I am not familiar with - every ecommerce site that I have ever used has delivered through FedEx or UPS in the past, unless it is some special delivery. Logging onto the OnTrac site was simple as Soap.com provides a link to track your packages - there in plain site was the reason my order was not here. Apparently the delivery reached the distribution center damaged so it's on it's way back to the sender. I love the ability to track packages, but it begs the question if Soap.com and other ecommerce sites can be more proactive when a problem does arise. This would require tighter logistics with the shipper, but something I would think is quite possible. The shipper would have to have access to my email address or some mechanism that when the note was made to send back to sender, I would also get the notice saying my shipment was delayed rather than guessing what happened.  I am satisfied knowing what happened, but it is a good example of how companies can still do a little more to be proactive with their customers.

 

I am still a fan of Soap.com only after two tries simply because of the convenience. If you're interested in experiencing the service for yourself, use the code below to get a discount:

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Dove Chocolate Didn't Get The Memo About Playing Audio on Their Site

This morning I got the scare of my life as I went to the Dove Chocolate homepage after someone gave me one of those chocolates with the promise saying inside. While I love Dove chocolate, the homepage of their site immediately launched into a video - a mini commercial that was obviously not targeted for me since it was talking about shoes and leg waxing.

Having an audio track or video start when someones comes to your site is very 2005, yet someone forgot to tell Dove Chocolate. Here's why:

• It can be a bandwidth hog, especially for people on slow connections - yes those people still exist.
• It can scare users, especially if they're in a place where audio would be frowned upon (library, work, next to your wife when she is asleep, etc.)
• The audio or video message may be irrelevant

Many sites have gotten away from this practice for the better. Even video sites like Vevo and YouTube don't automatically start playing audio when you hit their homepage. My promise message for Dove is to lose the audio.

IHOP Likes Gmail

Many of my posts have a small business slant, because I empathize with these companies that have to stretch every marketing dollar they can spare. They usually don't have the big budgets to do a huge branding and awareness campaign and projecting a certain level of professionalism is key to instilling confidence in potential clients. When the Web first took off, many small businesses signed up with these massive ASPs to get a free web page to promote their business. Companies like GeoCities  would give businesses a domain name like (http://www.geocities.com/bakery/mycupcakeshop/) to host their homepage. As people got more sophisticated, the rules of branding said that you must have your own top level domain name (http://www.mybusiness.com) and your email address had to have the same domain name (service@mybusiness.com). This branding needed to extend to your business cards, letterhead and the list went on and on. These ideas were sound then and still make sense today. I cringe when I see a business with a homepage hosted under someone else's domain. Web hosting and purchasing a domain name is so cheap there is almost no excuse.  And for big companies, there is absolutely no excuse. 

So I was a little surprised when I took my son to IHOP for their Kids Eat Free promotion to get a receipt with a "Gmail" email address. I applaud them for providing an email address to let them know how they did, but why the "IHOPSERVICE@GMAIL.COM" address. IHOP already owns the domain name IHOP.com, so why not have a dedicated IHOP.com address for feedback. I cannot verify if this is just the restaurant near my location or nationwide. IHOP is a franchise so it could be this franchisee is just being proactive about collecting feedback and is not able to get an email account on the IHOP.com domain. If that is the case, then I can cut the franchisee some slack, but maybe IHOP should develop a company wide strategy to ensure all franchisees can have a dedicated email address for feedback on their restaurant. A common form where all submitters had to select their restaurant would also work too. 

But what do I know, this is a minor inconvenience if my son gets to eat FREE! 

When Is The Customer Not Always Right?

Luckily, in the digital world most businesses will not have to suffer physical abuse, but this offline example goes to show you that while the customer is not always right, they are still the customer; however, certain customers are just not worth your time, money or personal safety. There is a limit and businesses should feel comfortable setting that limit and training employees to know when the limit has been crossed. This is an important message especially for small business owners who will sometimes go overboard to please the customer just to keep the business. There are customers and then there are idiots and amazingly this line gets blurred on a daily basis.

 

 

Qdoba, Building Trust is More Than Just HTTPS

If you have ever bought anything online from a major ecommerce site like Amazon.com you will probably have noticed the https:// at the beginning of the URL when you either first entered the site or when you were about to enter your credit card number. This protocol, better known as SSL allows your machine and the receiving web site to receive your data in an encrypted form so that "people with bad intentions" do not grab your personal information as it travels the web. While this is a first good step in building trust with customers, it is only the beginning when it comes to a business establishing itself as an entity that truly cares about privacy and the protection of their customers' data.

A business will never build customer loyalty without first building trust, and as the old saying goes, you can spend a lifetime building trust to only have it evaporate by doing one wrong act. In the ecommerce world, the chain of trust must extend from a company's privacy policy, through their web site login all the way to the emails that customers receive from the company in their inbox.

Last week my wife convinced me to order Qdoba for the family. Being that she is from Houston, Mexican is always at the top of her list. While Qdoba is certainly not the best we have ever tasted, considering the area of the country we live in, it will make do, when she is really having a taste for the southwest. It had been years since I had been in a Qdoba so the first thing I investigated was seeing if they had a menu online. To my glee, they not only had a menu online, but they also offered online ordering.

I am a huge fan of online ordering, because it gives customers yet another vehicle to interact with a company. For control freaks like me, online ordering means being able to control exactly what you want and not hoping a person on the other end of the phone, wrote your order down correctly; or even worse, going through the drive-thru and making bets with your family on whether they'll get the order right. Online ordering gives you a written record of exactly what you entered and while not foolproof, it takes the auditory mishaps out of the equation giving the business a better chance at fulfilling customers' needs.

In order to place my scrumptious Qdoba order I first had to register for an account and wait for an email so that I could log back in to place my order - okay, no problem, pretty standard stuff. Unfortunately, to my great dismay, when I received my Qdoba registration confirmation email, it not only had my login email address in plain text, but also the password. Sure, my credentials for Qdoba is not the same as sending my banking info via email in plain text, but I was highly disappointed in Qdoba for not truncating or hiding my password completely like most sites now do. When it comes to small businesses that I consult, I can always give them a little more slack - they didn't know, they don't have a professional web developer, they don't have the budget, etc. There are hundreds of excuses I could use to let it go for the small guys. But when I see a national player that makes this type of amateur mistake, it really makes me lose confidence in wanting to give them my credit card. While they did use SSL throughout the ordering and checkout process, the fact that anyone who intercepted my email could see my password was frustrating, even more so, because it was a password that I use for other sites I visit on the net. This is a perfect example on the vulnerability many consumers have on the web, because one site does not take the simple task of obscuring your password on your registration email.

Building trust is more than just using https and I hope Qdoba quickly changes this practice. For the record, I went back and started looking at web sites I had registered at over the past 6 months to see if I could find other violators. The video chat site ooVoo.com was another culprit. My advice to businesses - always obscure the passwords to user accounts when sending information via email; especially when it's not a password recovery situation and the person is truly locked out. My advice to consumers - when you receive an email with your username and password, don't be shy about complaining to the company and then change your password immediately; hopefully they won't send the new one via email too :-)

First Impression on AmazonFresh.com

So, I finally got around to placing my first order with AmazonFresh.com and the initial impression is very good – a solid A. I would actually give them an A+, but the only negative factor I could find with the entire service was probably price. While some may say that is a very big factor, if not the most important one (especially these days), the prices weren’t so high that it would prevent me from buying again. Like most things when it comes to shopping if you want to get the lowest price on everything you buy, you would literally need to go to 5 different stores AND be using coupons. Since times haven’t got that bad for my family, the very small increase in price on average per item is worth the convenience factor. As I added items to my cart last night around 9pm PT, every price was either the same or slightly higher than the local grocery stores in my area, but never lower. During checkout I could pick a pre-dawn delivery (before 6am) or a delivery time where I needed to be home. Since I was ordering perishables, I didn’t want to have stuff just dropped at my doorstep. So what did I like most about the service compared to Safeway:

• Every item added to my cart and listed “in stock” on the site actually showed up at my door.

• The AmazonFresh.com UI allows you to search by aisle or even brand. I also like the fact that I can see all my cart items on the right rail no matter what page I’m on.

• Groceries were delivered in paper bags (frozens in plastic). I am not a big environmental guy, but paper is just better than plastic. Your groceries don’t topple over and fall out like they do with plastic.

• My wife got free flowers. I don’t know if they do this for every delivery, but it was a nice touch.

• Amazon’s delivery windows are in increments of an hour – no waiting around for 2-3 hours trying to guess if you hear a truck outside your door.

My wife says if I want something to go away I just have to start liking it. For some reason my interests don’t match the typical demographic. I really hope other people in my zip code use the service just as much as I plan to; otherwise, like so many other cool services it may come to an end. Good luck Amazon. I am going to do my part.

Is AmazonFresh Better Than Safeway?

For anyone who uses my hoWIWeb.com service, it is no secret that I am a huge fan of Amazon. Buying books at first was great, but I became really sold on the company after purchasing everything from Christmas gifts to now downloadable MP3s without that damn DRM crap - which doesn’t allow me to easily transfer to the three MP3 players and four computers in my house (note to self: save DRM rant for another blog entry).

But now my dreams have come true. My family has been steady users of Safeway.com for awhile. Buying groceries with the click of a mouse and saving me the hassle of chasing my 3-year old down the cereal aisle when he sees the colored boxes was entirely worth it. However, Safeway’s program has not always been the best in terms of food availability and delivery price. We always were a little perturbed that they would be out of say a certain brand of apple juice, but the Safeway brick-and-mortar store less than 5 miles away would have bottles on their shelf. This is a distribution problem between how they fulfill online orders versus going to the physical store, but I digress. The point of this article is really about competition.

As of March 2009, if you used Safeway, you would need to buy $150 in groceries to get free delivery. Today I received an email in my box saying that AmazonFresh.com now delivers in my area, with free delivery for only $75 in groceries. And I can order as late as midnight!!

So if I am already a fan of Amazon, can reach their minimum order for free delivery much easier, what’s the probability of me ever going back to Safeway. Yeah, zero!! In fact, Amazon would probably have to screw up several times before I would give Safeway another try – stay tuned to hear how it goes. So what’s the lesson learned?

If you have demonstrated strong customer service in the past, have a loyal following, and can be just as competitive or better on price when selling a new product or service, you have a great chance at taking share from your competitors. Unfortunately, groceries are a commodity; I don’t care who delivers my Frosted Flakes if the price between retailers is within a few cents of each other. But when you throw in free delivery and more flexibility on order and delivery times, the decision gets real easy. Home delivery of groceries is not a cheap business model by any means; many companies have tried, but I’m rooting for Amazon.