Brand Updates: Constant Contact Comments While Home Depot Stumbles

Last week, I took Constant Contact, the leading enewsletter company, to task for not communicating well to their existing customers. After all, their raison etre is to make it easy for small and medium size businesses to do just that — to communicate effectively with people they already do business with.

I was, shall we say, underwhelmed, by the response from John Arnold, CC’s Director of Constant Contact University. He was “sorry for my frustration,” even though he admitted in the very next sentence that it was “an oversight on our part” not to include a telephone number anywhere in the direct mail piece about a new offering.

If you are in the business of customer service, as I would argue CC is, then you should know that:

1. Telling a customer that they are ‘frustrated’ sounds patronizing, and that you just want them to go away.

2.  The first sentence out of the gate should have been “you’re right–we goofed,” or something to that effect.

3. If it were me (and I have been on the other side, too) I would have spent time thinking about what I could do to go above and beyond to win back my client’s trust. Not just because I drive business to CC, but because I am a customer of theirs, too. Free registration in the program I was writing about? That would have made sense. Not only would it have been a  nice gesture, but I might just have become a CC University evangelist. The program cost a measly $99. Worth the risk, don’t you think?

The take-away here? Look at it from your customers’ point of view–NOT JUST YOUR OWN! How can you go above and beyond to correct a mistake ? Because in the long run, it’s not the mistakes that we remember, but the lengths to which people go to show you why they’re worthy of being trusted again.

Tomorrow: Home Depot –If their new tag line is “More Saving. More Doing” why are they making it so hard to DO?