King Marketing

Ken King
President

Before founding KMA+C, Ken was the Director of Sales & Marketing for Hip Interactive.

Prior to that, Ken was Director of Advertising for retail franchisor Multimicro, whose brands include Compucentre, CompuSmart, MicroAge and The Telephone Booth.

Ken is an MBA graduate of the Queen's University School of Business.

Other KMA+C Blogs

AJ Kandy, Creative Director

Previously: How well does your info flow upstream?
Next: And when things go terribly, terribly wrong - Part I

November 8, 2004

When things go right

For the most part, customer service stories are the most engaging when they're about something going wrong. However, in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, here's a story about something going right.

Last week I sent an e-mail to Macworld's webmaster with feedback about their reviews RSS feed - it was sending out headlines, but no summary text.

I wasn't really expecting a reply so it was a little bit of a surprise when, the next day, I got a note from their Editorial Director, Jason Snell, saying that it would be put on their development list right away. Three days later, a new batch of reviews went out with summaries in place, making the RSS feed just that much more useful.

Pretty boring, huh?

But even though it's not as dramatic as when things go wrong, you can still find lessons in good customer service. I asked some questions about how their process worked, and a few things stood out for me:

  1. Quick sharing of information
    My e-mail was circulated to several staff members who had a stake in the quality of the RSS feed. Their internal discussion and reply to me took place within one business day.
  2. Having a process
    Even though deliberately loose, their decision-making process is still a process - if deemed necessary, changes are either made immediately (if small enough or important enough) or added to a development list for future site updates.
  3. Breaking the process
    Evidently, their technical staff decided to go ahead with the fix immediately, even though they were given leave to put it off to a later date as one of many development requests on their list.
It's also reinforced my belief that it's worthwhile to take a few minutes and send feedback to your suppliers and partners: it rarely hurts, and often helps. I suppose I could have chosen to ignore the problem or even drop the feed, both viable options that would have saved me a few minutes. However, I prefer to believe that people on both sides have a role in maintaining business relationships by providing useful feedback.

None of this is earth-shattering, which is exactly my point: good service is really easy when you're doing the little things right.

Posted by kenking at November 8, 2004 6:08 PM

© 2004 King Marketing, Advertising & Communications, Inc.