Friday, August 22, 2008

Shopping with my 15 year old daughter

I went to the mall the other night with my soon to be high school sophomore daughter. She needed a few things for school and it was a great opportunity to spend time with her. I had a really good time. We went to a half dozen stores (or more as they all kind of blend together after awhile). What I did notice is that every retailer (only one of which she had a gift card for) did NOT ask if she (or I) would like any contact from the store on promotions, sales or specials. I know my daughter would have taken them up on their offer as long as the store made it clear that she would A) get money off B) have first crack at the latest and greatest. If they were to offer to text to her cellphone she might have even said ok to that (email is not the preferred channel for reaching high schoolers as far as I can see). So in each case it was a missed opportunity. I don't understand it at all. It is really ok to ask and that is the crux of Customer Controlled Communications. This is not that hard folks.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

$3 million a year for a Mad Dog is a lot of kibble

Sirius/XM has signed Chris Russo to a 5 year deal for $ 15MM. I still have trouble with the idea of paying $ 12.99/month to listen to the radio. Satellite radio reminds me a little of the cable TV industry back in the 70's. The content is still not close to being what it needs to be to make people like me pony up more than $ 150/year. Mad Dog Russo is an entertaining guy and gets it when it comes to why people would listen to him ranting. But until Satellite radio comes down in price to something like $ 30/year it will probably not get the foothold it should. For instance I would want to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal on radio and have the choice of what I want to listen to - the Marketplace section and be able to voice command scroll through articles while I drive. Other publications could also adopt this model. Now there would be value in Communications that would be relevant engaging and Customer Controlled! (CCC!).

They already have some advertising on satellite radio so the commercial-free aspect is already blown up. Make it less expensive, more attractive and there will soon be complaints about a monopoly!

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Don't you hate calling popular restaurants to make reservations?

How many times do you call and then get into the automated attendant deal? Then you wait 2, 4, maybe 10 minutes if the place is really hot to speak to a 'reservationist' (who came up with that one?!). Then if you are lucky enough to get a table other than 5:30 or 9:30 you have to then read off your credit card # to hold the reservation and take the risk of being charged $ 25.00 if you don't show up. Finally you have to reconfirm the day before (even if you are calling 2 days before!)

I have started to more regularly use Opentable.com which allows you (at participating restaurants of course) to make a reservation completely on-line. True, the times they offer after you put in what you want are not always exactly what you want, (it seems to me if I want 7PM they offer 7:15 and if I want 7:15 they offer 7PM) but for the most part it works and I pretty much show up close to the time I want, but when it is convenient for me and not necessarily for them. You also get 100 Open Table points each time you use it (you must verify that when you check in at the restaurant). You can then use the points once you accumulate over 1,000 for awards and things.

The point is that Opentable and other services like it allow the customer to choose the method of communication and it does away with the maddening phone call deal and waste of time. I can literally make a reservation in under 30 seconds. They send a confirming email and it's all good. My friend who is an owner of 5 restaurants (Barcelona Wine Bars in CT and he does not subscribe) says it's good for the customer but not so good for the restaurant as it costs the restaurant to be a part of the system and if the patron does not get the time he wants he may just bail out whereas if you take a phone call reservation you more often can talk the patron into coming in even if it is not their preferred time.

Opentable is a pretty good example of Customer Controlled Communications (TM). You control the experience and get premiums for doing so. I like that.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Is car shopping getting a little better?

My wife and I went to look at a car to replace the SUV we are giving back at lease end. Of course Buick would not negotiate the contract lease to buy price we signed when we leased the car 3 years ago. The finance company takes over and dealer has nothing to do with it. So it is somehow less expensive to go out and buy the exact same car with the same mileage (if we were so inclined) from somebody else. This makes no sense to me at all.

So we went to Toyota and then to Nissan. The Toyota folks were nice but the dealer was crawling with prospective buyers. We could not even get a sales person for 15 minutes! But we were allowed to walk the lot and survey what they has which is what we really wanted to do anyway. But there was no problem there with potential customers! And it was a nice summer August Saturday. At Nissan they were also busy and did not have a sales person available (ok this was strange and 180 degrees from what we thought would happen - I was thinking ghost town and tumbleweeds and things like that on the lot with nobody there). Anyway they also allowed us to walk around and we found something we were mildly interested in and they popped right out with keys, and a non-pushy salesperson and we went for a quick test drive.

All in all it was not what we expected and maybe it was the sales people in particular but both experiences were pretty good and both allowed us to manage the situation to our liking. They did not ask for our contact information as at that point we were not serious buyers but they did give their information for us to call when WE wanted. And yes we will go back because of that!