If you read WUL regularly (what do you mean you don’t? Don’t you see that “subscribe” button to your right?!), you know that I love shoes.
Call it shallow, if you will, but we galz gotsta look good to feel good, do good and work good. And that means cool shoes.
The shoe fiend’s dream
In March 2010 (the 4th, to be precise), I signed up for a Groupon deal ($60 for a $120 value) for custom-designed shoes by Eidia Lush.
Once I got the official Groupon notification that the deal was on, I designed my shoes in April, after some hiccups with the deal code. The confirmation I received told me to expect my shoes around the middle of May. Yay!
So I waited.
June rolled around, and I still hadn’t received my shoes. I emailed Eidia Lush and was told that my shoes would ship in about three weeks.
I waited some more.
Cue the middle of July. You guessed it – no shoes.
This time, when I wrote in to Eidia Lush – to ask, quite sincerely, if I was ever going to get my shoes – I received an apologetic note, but one that got me steamed.
Because it was full of what I considered fluff.
Here’s part of it, with my mental responses in italics, and yes, they did begin with an apology – this is after that:
If you have visited the site to check on the status of your shoes, you may already know that we are currently backed up and running behind on orders. We are a new company that has recently experienced rapid growth, and are doing our very best to adapt to increased demand as quickly as possible without sacrificing the quality of craftsmanship we strive to maintain here at Eidia Lush.
Me: blah blah blah
When the company first started, two people were carrying the entire workload. After running a promotion, we received an unpredictable influx of orders over one weekend that we could not possibly have prepared for. We are, however, growing our staff, adding (and training) more designers and cobblers to our hardworking team as demand continues to increase.
Me: Don’t cry to me, Argentina. Where are my frakkin shoes?!
We have received some great initial feedback on the shoes from past customers and are continually working to improve the process, having in fact, already made some amazing improvements to our product line. Our goal is to ensure that every single customer is completely satisfied. For us, “It’s All About the Details.”
Me: Seriously? You’re going to get all cutesy when I’m already irritated?
As a small token of our gratitude for your support and patience, we will be giving you an extra 10% off coupon to use toward your next pair of Eidia Lush custom design shoes and the shipping on your current order will be upgraded to 2-day Priority.
Me: I don’t even know if I like the shoes – because I haven’t had a chance to test them – and you think I’m a slam dunk to buy my next pair?!
After about two weeks – because that’s how long it took for me to calm down – I emailed them back, asking when, if ever, I would receive my shoes. A couple of days later, I received an email telling me they would ship out in about a week.
More silence.
I was so irritated that I finally found Eidia Lush’s Twitter handle, and told them I was extremely disappointed with this entire experience.
Finally, some light
To its credit, I immediately got an email from the company’s founder, Nicole Tongson, apologizing – in plain English, no fluff – and offering me another coupon if I wanted to use it.
My shoes arrived a couple of weeks later (August 18), and I was. Blown. Away.
I love you, Eidia Lush!
I immediately wrote back to Nicole (which I had held off doing since I didn’t want to write a crazy-customer-letting-off-steam email), and told her how thrilled I was.
We started a very frank email conversation about the entire experience, thoughts I had on the shoes… and I was even more blown away when Nicole took them all in good spirit.
As a result, I ended up writing about her Groupon nightmare on my BNET blog… and here I am writing about Eidia Lush now.
And I hope to be writing more about how Eidia Lush has achieved an astounding level of success by bypassing “traditional” public relations altogether, instead depending on its community to power its outreach.
Lessons learned
Today, however, I’m sharing the process by which I was converted from an interested bystander, to a frustrated customer, to an ardent evangelist, as well as lessons learned along the way.
As she explained in the BNET post, Nicole saw only too clearly what a double-edged sword the success of her Groupon turned out to be.
And, frankly, had she not responded directly to my tweet, I may have never begun a real conversation with her.
Which brings me to four lessons for businesses, public relations and customer service professionals.
1. Your customers do not care what your problem is.
They are concerned with their problem. It could be shoes that didn’t get delivered on time; or that the fine print wasn’t clear enough; or that they had to throw out a ton of food because of a weather event.
If you are going to make it about you, and not about them, welcome to your own personal – or business – hell.
So suck it up, and deal with their problem. Not yours. And for heavens’ sake don’t cry about it to them.
2. Ensure your efforts to make amends don’t come across as up-selling.
What irritated me most about the email response I shared above was not that it seemed to make excuses.
It was that, when I was trying to get a problem fixed, instead I received what felt like a lightly-veiled sales pitch.
At the time, I could care less about the additional coupons Eidia Lush was offering me. Goshdarnit, I didn’t even know if I liked the shoes!
But once I established communication with Nicole, she successfully neutralized me, and I saw how great the shoes were, I was more than willing to accept them.
This is one of the cardinal sins of business snafus that public relations professionals are often expected to fix.
Customer has a problem? Throw more money/deals/fluff their way.
The trouble is that customers usually see through that. And PR pros, unfortunately, are often left to clean up the mess.
Note to business owners/CEOs/management: do not expect your PRs to mop up spilled milk until you have determined the source of the leak… and come clean with it.
3. No matter how skilled they are, all writers do not PR professionals make.
That email response I shared didn’t come from Eidia Lush’s PR department or representation. It came from someone who bore the title of the company’s “senior fashion writer.”
A lovely writer, but hopeless at adapting that writing to address customer issues.
How are PR professionals more qualified to do this? you might ask. And rightly so.
They’re not, always. But a good PR pro is finely-tuned to the emotions of the organization’s target audience, and responds accordingly.
So unless you have been able to train your thinly-spread team to adapt company-approved messaging to the needs of each individual situation, it is far better to leave “public” relations to the pros.
Because that’s what we do. Hint: it’s in our job description. “Public” relations.
4. Never underestimate the power of the CEO.
While I exchanged emails ad nauseam with the “senior fashion writer” and then with a terse “quality specialist,” it took the honesty and personal communication from Eidia Lush’s CEO to turn me around… to the point where now, far from being a vehement critic, I am an avid fan of the company.
I get that there are many CEOs who are uncomfortable dealing with the public. Heaven knows I’ve had to deal with my fair share of them.
But when push comes to shove, nothing satisfies your end-audience as much as hearing directly from the person at the top.
If you’re a good PR pro, you’ll be able to convince your CEO to respond directly when you think necessary. And when s/he demurs, you should stick to your guns. Because that simple act could mean the difference between bringing a customer back from the brink, and losing a customer forever (and, possibly, many more).
Customer service and public relations are more closely-aligned than most of us realize.
Never mind that they might sit in different departments, their goals are usually similar; to grow customer (PR-speak: audience) satisfaction, reduce customer (PR-speak: audience) malcontent, and develop beneficial relationships with customers (PR-speak: audience) for the benefit of the organization.
All of us: business owners, PR pros and customer service pros, need to start understanding that.
Good reads on the nexus of public relations, social media and customer service:
- Ann Bevans writes on making customers happy
- John Paul Tiltow on how small businesses can make the most of Yelp, at ReadWriteWeb
- Howie Goldfarb‘s inaugural guest here at WUL, where he says, “Embrace hate, desire dissent, for social media success“
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I’ve been reading your blog for a few months now and have been really enjoying your insights and tips; I now think about some of your recommendations in my day-to-day life. Thanks for sharing. This post and your most recent ones about reaching out to customers via email or Twitter (or what ever social media platform) were particularly helpful and relevant. Thanks for sharing!
@Collectual That is one of the nicest things I’ve heard – about using some of my recs in your day-to-day life – thank you!
[…] Remember when I told you about my experience with Eidia Lush? […]
[…] you’ve done a big promotion like a Groupon deal, make sure everyone from manufacturing to customer service is prepared to meet the increased […]
I’m glad you got your shoes and jealous!… I never received mine, nor a response to multiple emails and had to call Groupon to get a refund and no shoes. Unfortunately it also ruined a what would have been a nice grad gift and I will look for another business to get custom shoes from. They look pretty though!
@MeghannMarieMartinez Hi Meghann. I’m sorry to hear about your experience with us because of the Groupon deal. Please email me directly with your order number at ntongson@eidialush.com because I’d love to see if we can do something to win you back as a customer :)
@MeghannMarieMartinez That’s a bummer, Meghann. :( But I see that @NicoleT is going to try to fix this, so I very much hope that it works out.
Shonali- Thanks for sharing these lessons. As a fellow small business owner in custom products space (we do jewelry), I feel a lot of empathy for Nicole and her experiences. When you’re making products to order, not picking them off a pallet and whisking them to UPS, it can be even harder to react to a sudden spike in demand. Similar problems have hit other custom product startups when they received a big press hit – This NY Times article details a couple of examples: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/03proto.html
As you say, the customer shouldn’t have to care about our problems. So one of the things we’ve been trying to do to better manage our spikes is lining up several local backup vendors who can help us in a pinch.
Nicole – I would love to hear your thoughts. Have changes have been made to your customer service procedures/systems since?
@ArwaJ Thanks for your question! A lot of the explaining done in our emails during that time was our effort to be overly transparent as to what was really going on behind the scenes that was making their shoes late. It is important to me that no matter how stressful the situation we’re dealing with, our customer service team always deals with people in the most friendlly and open way possible. It’s a constant challange to keep the right balance!
Like you, we have been working on ways to streamline our production process with the cobblers while also lining up a backup team so if another huge spike in demand occurs, we will be prepared. We now know how many orders we can handle in one month and will not sell more than this without stepping up our production plan. This type of planning is not possible to do when running a Groupon promotion, but we sure learned our lesson!
The Groupon experience has also definitely forced us to become more organized as to how the customer service team is handling issues and because of this we are able to react, respond, and resolve things in a much quicker and simpler fashion.
@NicoleT What I love about you is how open and honest you are. I mean seriously. Just think of where you and I started and where you and I are today. And I imagine you bring that to all your relationships, business and personal. Quite wonderful. @ArwaJ
@NicoleT That’s awesome – and so smart. That balance is so hard to strike and it looks like you found thd sweet spot!
If you’d ever like to chat, bounce ideas etc. I’d happy to share our experiences in the custom space etc. arwa.at.gemkitty.com.
P.S. Hi Shonali, looks like we just missed each other here. :)
@Shonali @ArwaJ Thanks ladies! As you both know, owning your own business is a constant work in progress…always changing, growing, evolving :) ArwaJ, I’d love to bounce ideas off each other and will be emailing you very soon to try and set up a time!
@ArwaJ I’m so glad that you and @NicoleT are in touch… as for you & me, we’ll keep chatting offline!
Shonali, That’s a great story about small business and Groupon, @HowieSPM is right about fixing the process. I think they should have done that before signing up for that deal, made sure they’re ready to market, ready to handle that business. One thing about your story: your CEO seemed to be genuinely social, which went a long way. Another thing that helped, it’s a smaller business; bigger businesses can’t always unless they have staff to respond like BestBuy.
One of my things, hard to convice small business clients sometimes that is worth paying for the training, is that every employee works in PR. Delivery, janitorial, finance, everyone. So if one person is rude to a vendor, if a mid-level director sends misspelled, poorly written emails, if the person on the phone seems apathetic to the customer’s plight.. it ALL reflects on the business. FWIW.
@3HatsComm @HowieSPM Well, to be fair to Eidia Lush, I think they prepared as best they could for Groupon. One of the reasons they were so ill-prepared was that they were not told by Groupon when their deal would run (I wrote about the EL/Groupon experience with more specific details on that in my BNET post).
It’s really tough to prepare for all eventualities if you don’t know when the hammer’s coming down, so to speak, and then all of a sudden you get a call saying your deal’s running in two or three days. Though one of Nicole’s tips was to prepare a business plan for the max. you can sell, and I think she’s definitely learned from the experience.
Yes, I agree the PR-esque training is CRUCIAL… but even more than writing decent emails, I think what staff – ALL staff – need training in is putting themselves in the customer’s shoes {sic]. That’s what I think we PR people – who are good, at least – are able to do. We’re able to empathize, so even if we have talking points, etc., we know how to adapt them and best use them.
@Shonali @HowieSPM Exactly. I want to say @ShannonPaul did a good post on empathy, relating to the customers. It is important to really listen to their complaints, get a feel for the problem, go off the script and be genuinely helpful. Thinking of all the painful tech “support” I’ve had, all the times I’ve had to say “I’ve already said I did…” Empowering employees to adapt, to be flexible is key.
@3HatsComm @HowieSPM Oh, shannonpaul is a COMPLETE smartiepants! One of the best things about going to PRSA’s International Conference in Detroit a couple of years ago was meeting her. She rocks.
Thank you for sharing. Indeed quite a few lessons to be learned here.
@guerrillacomm You’re most welcome. Thanks for stopping by!
@guerrillacomm we need to work on your livefyre points!
@HowieSPM Will that get me an advantage of sorts? :-)
@guerrillacomm I think they are redeemable for something some place. I will find out. Possibly extra croutons if you order a salad at Huolihans or Fridays.
I love your story Shonali. It has so many lessons. 1] BE CAREFUL WITH GROUPON! Seriously seems they did not expect the volume. 2] If you have such great quality mabye you don’t need Groupon!? Shoes look amazing! 3] There is a happy customer with a band aid. Band aids wash off. Fix the process.
This is something I dealt with from my last corp sales gig. I learned so many lessons good and bad. I almost tossed a Senior VP over a two story railing for being a dumbass. It goes to the customer doesn’t want to hear about your problems (most anyway).
I won an order from Honda for a special valve for a Hydrogen Fueling Station. They didn’t trust my sister company. They made me send an email update once a week signed off by 3 VP’s to ensure ontime delivery since they had people and machinery coming from Japan. It was a 16 week leadtime. The week of shipping I get told sorry going to be 6 more weeks. Honda people drove 90 minutes from LAX to meet with the Sr VP. After pacifying them he asked do you want to take a tour of the plant. So up on this balcony he was showing off all these great things they were do to mprove the operations….which technically were part of the cause of the problem with this order!
If your new friends need help with operations or how to run customer service better send them my way. I am pretty reasonably priced and have years of experience!
@HowieSPM LOL! You know, the Groupon success was a double-edged sword for Nicole and, I’ve read, many other small businesses. It definitely helped open them up to a much wider audience, but some of the problems they faced were not a lot of notice as to when their deals would run, etc. It’s tough to ramp up very quickly if you’re that small of a business. Nicole did acknowledge (this part is in my BNET post) that it did bring them a lot of awareness, but it can be really dangerous for companies who don’t have the funds to stay afloat.
Re: the Honda story… all I can say is – WOW. Talk about an ostrich with its head in the sand.
I will check in with Nicole re: operations; she’s really a fabulous person and hey, with your smartass brain on her side, how could it do anything but help? :p
@Shonali seriously. I have extensive experience in Project Management, Quality Assurance (ISO9001, Kaizen, Lean), Procurement/Inventory Management/Planning, Customer Service, and some Manufacturing Processes! Takes a bow.
@HowieSPM @Shonali Howie, I would love to chat with you…especially if Shonali herself says you have a smartass brain ;) Can you shoot me an email with your contact info and a good time to call next week? ntongson@eidialush.com
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