Driving home in the sweltering heat of last week I found myself behind a white van.  White van man had his elbow leaning out of the driver’s window in a rather languid pose.  On the back of the van was a small  panel advert – ‘Air-conditioning service from £35′ and a mobile number. Not only had the air conditioning unit in my car packed up, but my garage normally charged £80 for the service. I rang the number and a few seconds later the elbow shot in ”Hello – hang on a minute, I can’t hear you. Let me just  pull over into this lay-by‘.  His van pulled over and I followed him ‘Where are you calling from?’ ‘I’m right behind you’ ‘Oh my god that is spooky – are you the blue car?’ ‘Yes’ I replied ‘And anyway why is it spooky? I simply called the number you advertised on the back of your van’. He roared with laughter – and I was able to book a service on the spot. And an excellent service it was to – the car feels like a fridge now.  If you want to attract an impulse purchase put your mobile phone number on the back of your van and not just your email address.

There was a wonderful hardware store in Glastonbury that was a fountain of esoteric ironmongery knowledge.  You’d wander in with a widget that needed replacing and they would turn it over slowly and say ‘right, you’re going to need a need a 3/8th inch spigot with a 3/8th inch British Standard Whitworth male screw thread on each end‘. And they’d turn round to a shelf packed with small cardboard boxes and find a replacement within seconds.  ‘That’ll be 75p please‘.  Alas, the store has long gone and with it a lifetime of widget knowledge.  In those pre-internet days, I took in what had broken and they rapidly identified it and were, more often than not, able to replace it.

The other day I needed to buy an electronic component.  I couldn’t find the right website via Google, as my search enquiry sent me to endless directory websites. And then I thought why not just search for the image instead? The web equivalent of handing my widget over the counter to a man in brown overalls. I found it on the first page of Google images.  I was so grateful to have found the lead, that I purchased it on the spot.  I didn’t cross reference it in price comparison websites to find the cheapest price. Because the shop had added alt tags to their images, I was able to find it visually rather than on a traditional text based search – and the ease of that search turned me into an impulse buyer. Moral of story – make it easy for your customers to find your products and add .alt tags to your pictures!

choo choo

The other day I brought a return ticket from St.Pancras to Canterbury from the First Great Western website. When I arrived at St. Pancras to collect my ticket, the machine refused to print it out. I missed my connection, had to reschedule my meeting at the University, purchase a replacement ticket and wait an hour and a half for the next train. Feeling rather aggrieved at having spent £60 instead of £30 I rang First Great Western Customer Services only to be told that they would refund my original ticket price less a £10 administration fee. “But it wasn’t my fault!” I explained. “Sorry” they said, “you purchased your ticket from a machine owned by another Train Operating Company (how was I to know?) and you will have to direct your complaint to them”.

I then received a tediously jobsworthy email explaining, in the most granular detail, what a complex operation it was to process my humble refund. I was told how many accounts payable ledger clerks were involved, the number of inkwells and quills used, what security verification and external audit systems had to be deployed and finally I was given a postal address in Plymouth to reclaim the £10 administration fee. At the end of the email there was a P.S. *** Your feedback is really important to First Great Western so we would be very grateful for a couple of moments of your time to complete our customer satisfaction survey. *** I resisted the temptation. You see, at the end of the day it wasn’t about £10. It was about a missed opportunity to make one of their passengers feel happy. And happy customers are the best free marketing resource any business can have.

Engraved on the doors of the Amazon warehouse entrance is Jeff Bezos’s motivational phrase to all his employees ‘Work hard, have fun, make history‘.  Just below this notice (and written in invisible ink), is the following addendum  ‘and thanks for making me a multi-billionaire in the process‘. The growth of Amazon has been truly phenomenal.  From a two-bedroom house in Seattle in 1994, with extension leads running into the garage to power the servers, to a global business now serving 45 million customers.

When I’ve run e-commerce seminars, one of the questions I regularly ask delegates is ‘What do you think is the secret of Amazon’s success?’  Almost everyone says – ‘ the low prices’ or ‘the range of stock they carry’.  I then bring up the quote from Jeff Bezos himself, which underpins the Amazon philosophy – ‘Amazon.com is obsessively focussed on great customer service‘. It is a sentence that should be enshrined in the heart of every e-commerce entrepreneur.

It is hard to believe that when Amazon started receiving its first online orders, the programmers coded a small electronic beep to sound in the office every time an order arrived.  Every beep was greeted with a loud cheer in the Amazon office. It wasn’t long before they had to switch it off. Permanently.