by Ryan Holmes
I love the environment, have a compost, walk/bike to work, have clf bulbs, try to eat a lot of veggies, and grew up on an organic farm. Is it me, or is this a little bit over the top? I think Leclerc is going to have to get a new cell after this. See down for full story.
Greenpeace boreal text campaign
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On a recent trip to San Francisco I though I would try out Zipcar for some meetings in Menlo Park. The comical story of what happened is below. What do you think the lifetime value of a customer is to Zipcar? The old adage is that one unhappy customer tells 10. What is the new paradigm given social media?
I am using http://ow.ly analytics to track dissemination and velocity of this post. Ultimately what does bad customer service/policy cost an organization in the new paradigm? Please retweet here
Thanks for helping with my experiment.
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I arrived to zipcar to try it out for my first time. I had always rented when I went to SF, and had heard good things, so I was excited to try it ou. I had allocated ample drive time plus an additional 1/2 hour to deal with this. When I arrived my key didn’t work. The phone # to call for customer service didn’t work with Canadian phones, the car was damaged. I borrowed a phone from a generous person and waited on hold for 15 minutes. The agent was able to open the back door of the car and told me there should be spare keys under the tire… there were no space keys for cars in SF. At that point agent told me there was NOTHING she could do. Please pull the call log, you’ll hear it quite distinctively. My 1/2 hour of extra time to get to the location is gone and I have an important meeting. With no other option I have to take a cab.
What is the lifetime value of a customer to you? Effectively you are telling me that you are willing to forgo my business, and my companies business for $200. My company has 25 employees. I also own two other companies that have 10 and 6 employees. All need to travel and this was a test of how this would work with your service. As a policy I think you should be groveling to make customers happy, as a corporate customer I should think you do even more so. $50/trip x 4 trips per year x 10 employees x 10 years = $20,000.
Traditionally, customer service specialists say that every unsatisfied customers tells 10 friends. With the advent of blogging, twitter and social media I am personally able to reach hundreds of thousands. Therefore let’s say I blog, twitter and facebook this and it’s seen by 100,000 people:
100,000 x .10% who agree my bad experience(conservatively) = 1000 people
1000 x 10% who would consider using zipcar =100
100 people x lifetime value of customer (let’s say $2000) = -$200,000 in potential lost business.
I forwarded the above account to Zipcar a week before my next trip to SF and asked them to remedy this situation. They said sorry, but no refund was possible. What do you think? Please retweet here. Results to follow.
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Had a coffee with @sophiasian yesterday from @braunallison. She had a really good idea for a twitter tag using the ! character.
Like the #, d, @ characters the ! would have special functionality that would really help twitter users. Right now there are occasions when you want to flood your twitter stream, but you know 99% of your followers don’t really care about the content. Think about livetweeting a Star Trek convention keynote. Might be good for your Trekkie followers, but not so much for your business contacts, (or Star Wars friends).
Proposed Addition
The goal with the ! would be that any post starting with ! would not appear in your twitter stream, but would appear in search. Think about this as hidden public.
This functionality will
1) Allow considerate people to not flood all of their friends
2) Allow people who are getting flooded to let people know there is a way they can stop flooding (think of telling a N00b that they probably shouldn’t use all-caps all the time)
3) Ultimately make twitter a better place
What do you think? Is this something that you would find useful? If so, let’s start a petition at twitter! Simply hit the retweet button above and eventually they will hear.
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Great mountain biking, hiking, tennis, beach vacation planner. Hope you find something you like.
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A little reminder to social media peeps to keep a lil humble…
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An interesting analysis re global climate change.
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