SEO Werkt!

A guest post by Tea Silvestre of WordChef.com.

Chances are you’ve had at least one rotten experience while shopping at a brick and mortar store. We all have. And it’s such a shame.

Why?

Because interacting with someone face to face is your best opportunity to create a raving fan.

Yep. Even with all the social media and digital hype, real-life conversations work fastest to either cement or destroy a relationship with a potential customer.

I recently had one of the latter…

It was a Sunday morning, and I was shopping with my sister-in-law at a local mall. This was her first weekend outside the house in almost two months. (She had just finished up her last round of chemotherapy and received the green light from her doctor to spend time again in public. Woo-hoo!)

This should have been an awesome day for her. But it wasn’t.

Here’s the email that I sent to the store’s corporate office a few days afterward.

From: Tea Silvestre <tea@thewordchef.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 4:39 PM
Subject: Question about your policies
To: “shop@papayaclothing.com” <shop@papayaclothing.com>

Dear Papaya Corporate Folks,

Do you have a policy that says your employees may not remove an item from a mannequin to sell it?

I was shopping at your San Jose location (Blossom Hill) this past weekend and saw a scarf on the display, which drew me inside. I looked for it on the rack but there weren’t any left, so I asked the clerk about buying the one on display. I was informed that someone else already had it on hold.

Disappointed, but determined, I kept looking. On another display I saw a different scarf—this time there were three different mannequins wearing the same scarf yet none to be had on the rack. The clerk had a line of customers so I very carefully removed one of the scarves in order to bring it to the cashier. (Note: The scarf was simply resting loose around the mannequin’s neck, so it wasn’t difficult to remove).

No sooner did I have the scarf in hand than the clerk was there, reprimanding me (in front of other customers!). I apologized for touching the mannequin and then explained very nicely that I was only trying to help because I could see she was knee deep in customers. She took the scarf from me and said first that customers were not allowed to touch the mannequins. But then? SHE REFUSED TO SELL ME EVEN ONE OF THE 3 SCARVES. When I pressed her as to why, she said nobody was allowed to remove anything from the display. “Company policy.”

I’d really like to know if you have such a policy. I’m going to blog about this and would like to know your side and have an explanation as to how this policy works. My readers are other small-biz folks who love to hear about real life marketing and customer service stories.

Thanks in advance for your speedy response. If I don’t hear from you within 7 days, I will assume you have no comment.

Sincerely,
Tea Silvestre
TheWordChef.com

p.s. My sister-in-law and I ended up leaving your store empty-handed and pissed off. She is recovering from chemotherapy, and this was her first time out in public in a long time. Unfortunately for you, I’m sure she won’t forget this one…

I waited a few days for a reply, but never even got an automated “Thank you for your email” message.

So, I took my attempts to the Twittersphere:

@PapayaClothing Where should I send an email about a customer service issue? I’m not getting a response from the addy on your site…

— Tea Silvestre (@TeaSilvestre) June 17, 2012

Still no reply.

Then, I tried the Facebook route.

Still nothing!

Because I was getting nowhere fast, I went digging on their website. What exactly IS the Papaya promise?

Here’s what I found.

That’s right. That’s the home page. (You can see the whole site for yourself at PapayaClothing.com).

The only promise I found is one to save you a little money.

“Okay,” I thought. “Maybe it’s in their back story.” Unfortunately, their About Us page looks like it was written by the corporate lawyers.

ABOUT PAPAYA

Papaya Clothing is a wholly owned subsidiary of Cornerstone Apparel, Inc. Cornerstone’s experience in the retail fashion industry is derived from over twenty-five years in operating retail clothing businesses focusing primarily in the junior and petite apparel markets. Cornerstone is driven by the same ownership and management team responsible for prior successes in retailers Everblue Casuals and Career Image. In Papaya, we’ve created a more contemporary, upscale shopping environment for customers in the 16 to 25 age bracket…

There’s no link to the parent website nor could I find one by searching through Google. Hmmm.

As a last ditch effort, I decided to call them and see if I could get through to someone in charge. The number they list on their website is only for online transactions, but the woman on the other end was smart enough to get me the right number. Which I called. And was happily transferred to “Cassandra,” who works in the In-Store marketing and customer service department.

I explained the situation to her and she thanked me for bringing the situation to her attention (no apology, just a thank you), and after giving her my contact info, hung up the phone and went about my day.

Just a few hours later, I received this email:

Papaya Norcal norcalpapaya@yahoo.com (<–No corporate email addy?)
12:59 PM (56 minutes ago)
to me

Hello Ms. Tea Silvestre,

I do sincerely apologize for the unpleasant shopping experience that had occurred at my Oakridge Mall Papaya store (located at 925 Blossom Hill Rd). There was no excuse for my employee to have embarrassed you in front of other customers. If there was any problem, the employee should have quietly and privately spoken to you about the problem. Also, while it was true that display items were not for sale; this was an older policy of ours and has since been changed for some time. To put it simply, now we do take items down from our mannequins that are on our display windows, so, again, I regret that any problem had occurred during your shopping experience.

Next, I would like to ask you three simple questions; if you cannot answer them, it is perfectly fine:

1. As I would like to take disciplinary actions on the employee and her superiors, would you, by chance, happened to have read her name on her name tag?
2. Do you recall the date and time of the incident (estimated time will suffice)?
3. Can you describe the employee’s physical features to your best knowledge?

I would like for you to know that corrective and preventive measures will be taken to ensure there are no repeated incidents:

• Within the next month, I will hold employee meetings and management meetings at all my stores to help educate and re-emphasize the store policies
• I will send in more secret shoppers to this particular store to verify that no act of rudeness occurs again

As a token of my gratitude for informing me of problematic situations at my store, and your sister-in-law’s successful chemotherapy recovery, I would like to send you and her a gift card. If you can kindly provide me with a mailing address, I will send it right away. If you feel uncomfortable providing me with personal information, please come into any of our stores in the Northern California region to claim your gift card. If you do enter our store, please have our associates call one of the following three people: Krishia Sevilla (district coordinator), Chris Kim (assistant district manager—this is myself), or Michelle An (general district manager).

I hope you and your sister-in-law will not let one misshapen action of one of our employees affect your future shopping experience, and we would love for you and your sister-in-law to come back so we may amend our mistakes.

Thank you for your time Ms. Tea Silvestre, and feel free to contact me anytime with any further questions.

Sincerely,

Chris Kim
Assistant District Manager
Papaya
Cell: (714) 337-7896

P.S. I also want to apologize for the time it took for us to reply to your email, but, as you can see the forwarded emails, when one complaint comes in, 4 departments are informed prior to us receiving the message. Thank you, and I hope you had a wonderful father’s day and hope you enjoy the upcoming 4th of July.

I replied to Chris, letting her know that I did not remember the name of the clerk. I also shared my social media experience and said she might like to let corporate know that the folks on the front lines aren’t responding—either because they don’t know how, or because they haven’t been empowered to—and that non-responses tend to be taken by folks that you’re ignoring them.

The thought crossed my mind that they might all do well to read my book (especially Chapter 6), but in the end, I decided against it. They’re probably not all that interested in building relationships with folks (let alone fans!).

The Big Moral of the Story: Train and Empower Your Employees

Encourage your employees to communicate with the customers (especially if they’re running your social media channels). It shouldn’t take an entire week to respond to one email, a tweet, a Facebook post, and a phone call.

Your customers should NEVER have to inquire about the validity of a policy—or be made to feel like a total afterthought. Not only will it lose you sales, it’ll ultimately kill your business.

Your customers want (and need) to see that you’re serious about sticking around for the long haul. Yahoo email accounts for your staff = a yahoo operation. Do you mean business? Then act like it. Even if you’re just a one-man-band, you should have a branded email account, an About page that tells us why you do you what you do, and a commitment to have two-way conversations on social media that build your brand.

Here are some additional tips about what you do to help your customers’ experiences with you.

• Regularly train your employees. Make sure they’re up to date on your policies and procedures—especially where interactions with customers are involved.
• Know your customer touch points and put a communication plan in place for each of them. If you’ve got a contact form on your website, know who’s getting those emails. Make sure that person understands how to respond and where to route inquiries. The same goes for your social media channels. Whoever is in charge of posting items, should be empowered and encouraged to respond here as well.
• Make sure your branding is consistent across all media channels: email, website, social media channels. Ensure that all staff who communicate with the public have a corporate (branded) email address. Use an email signature. And most of all, use your website to tell your story.

***

What about you? Are you guilty of any of these faux pas? How often do you see other businesses operating this way? Let’s talk about it in the comments!

(Photo courtesy of Bigstock: Talk to the Hand)

NAB, an Australian bank, launched a new campaign last year centered around honesty. To drive the point home they set up shop at a local mall’s lost and found desk to congratulate honest people who turned in lost items in a really unique and fun way.

What’s so cool about this concept is a lot of brands would’ve ditched the idea because the execution is pretty fast and likely challenging to pull off, but BBDO Melbourne made it happen. Nice work!

Our very own Tim Buesing has created an interesting concept application for the use of NFC (near field communication) in food courts. Yes, food courts – like those found at your local mall. The project, dubbed “BrandTable,” involves circular stickers containing NFC tags secured to the tabletop that, when tapped with an NFC phone, launch a menu and ordering page for a particular restaurant.

Using the mobile site, customers can place their order and even pay, without having to visit the counter or wait in line. When the order is ready, the phone buzzes so you can go pick it up.

I gotta admit, I don’t think about Benetton too much. It was kind of a big deal in my local mall in the mid 80′s. But that’s about it.

So there’s nothing like an ad campaign featuring world leaders kissing to get a little buzz. And promote the brand’s Unhate Foundation, for whatever that’s worth.

USA Today has more:

“The campaign shows that we need to have courage to not hate others,” says Alessandro Benetton, executive deputy chairman of Benetton, and son of the Italian-based company’s founder, Luciano.

So, is it working on you? Because lots of people hate this campaign already.

Australian design firm S-Digital has created an interesting concept application for the use of NFC (near field communication) in food courts. Yes, food courts – like those found at your local mall. The project, dubbed “BrandTable,” involves circular stickers containing NFC tags secured to the tabletop that, when tapped with an NFC phone, launch a menu and ordering page for a particular restaurant.

Using the mobile site, customers can place their order and even pay, without having to visit the counter or wait in line. When the order is ready, the phone buzzes so you can go pick it up.

BrandTable uses NFC in combination with Java and the Android SDK to pull up menu ordering system, and is demonstrated (see below) using Google’s Samsung Nexus S.

S-Digital built and designed the concept in conjunction with the University of Sydney, Mojo and Amnesia Razorfish.

Although NFC’s widespread adoption is still several years out, it’s concepts like this that help us to envision what the world may be like when the technology is more ubiquitous and accessible than it is today. And, admit it – doesn’t that look like a fun way to order food?

Webado, a Top Contributor from the Google Webmaster help forums posted a thread at the Google Webmaster Help forums about a “disturbing incident” they had while visiting Google.

They were at a local mall in San Francisco and noticed a “man stumbled out of a mall” where he was “under kicks and punches from security guards, and was thrown to the ground.”

They even captured a video and images:

Of course, we have no idea why the security guards took such action. We do not know if he tried to steal something, if he harassed someone or if it was just all a big mistake.

But for some of these non-US residents it was a bit disturbing to see.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.