Halloween isn’t too far off to mention something scary. I was half the day at ChipTech and found a magazine called “CRM”, Customer Relations Management. This is a euphemism for “Institutionalized Bullshit” by everyone except those who do it. The size of your customer service department is inversely proportional to how good a business you are running. Can you seriously imagine somebody thinking to themselves, “I don’t want this stupid chain saw fixed, I would like to speak instead to a customer service rep. Preferably one who will spend the first twenty minutes trying to trick me into thinking the problem is all in my head.”
Some may ask if this is any different that sizing up your worth by noticing the size of your wife’s diamond ring. It most surely is, the very intention of a fat diamond ring is to flaunt it. Examining the exterior of your luggage for clues to wealth is another matter. Not objecting to it is shortsighted because technology is not any kind of solution to the “misdirected advertising” problem. Already too many taxes are based on the [perceived] ability to pay. No reasonable person wants that sordid philosophy applied to other areas of life. Maybe you don’t mind the Army sizing up your son for his ability to die, but I do. This is technology abused to a most insidious degree.
Why was I hanging around ChipTech? Customer service, I think. They have instituted a new return and exchange policy clearly designed to take far too long for busy people. Before, you walked up to the counter with your receipt and they did the right thing. Now, they put the gears to you. It seems plain they had problems, but in a typical bout of American business cowardice, they won’t clamp down on the rotten apples, they do something that punishes everybody equally. Then along comes stage two.
That is where they realize a certain percentage of good customers just say to hell with and take a loss where they would otherwise have made a return. Only the extremely greedy see nothing wrong with this. There is another even slimier tactic rearing up. The package as advertising. The package is no longer used to protect the product in transit, but is part of the product. Thus, they won’t take anything back unless the box is in pristine condition. It rarely is after it has been opened. The usual excuse is some nonsense that there is a serial number on the box. Some people must fall for that. No me, I didn’t buy the box, just what was inside. Whether or not you can sell it without the box is your problem, not mine, or I shop elsewhere.
So what happens now? They have to design a box to fit around the box? Again, they won’t because they are too stupid to realize it is not their new return policy that is cutting expenses but that they have shifted the cost normally associated with returns to another area of their company that has not realized it yet. When it comes to returned merchandise, the cost of customer service is identical to doing it the right way.
It took four hours, including the fact that the part they eventually (and wisely) decided to replace was on a delivery truck an hour late. Where I got the part, it is certain very few business owners could have afforded the wait. The phone company are past masters at this brand of baloney.
NOON
On that happy note, the PHP programmer was in this morning. We had a quick chat, and I’m glad he screwed up early. The agreement was that he generates 65 or so lines of code in return for 30% of the profit. He tried the old trick of pretending he was now part of the management team and tried to make like it was his business how the business was to be run. Sorry, Gomer, no dice. I found myself repeatedly asking him why he was sticking his nose into other areas when he hadn’t written any code yet. The fool tried to say that he needed to be sure the entire business was “being run right” to maximize his 30%! I showed him the door.
Not before we talked nearly an hour first. This guy was a total archetypical 90-day wonder with every screwball idea that business management schools ever cooked up. He even tried to fool me about the programming and implied that I had no idea what was involved. (No, he does not know about my degrees.) He even fancied himself clever that he was siphoning information off me, but I carefully did not tell him anything about the super-difficult problems solved so far, like how to acquire 40,000 business cards.
He did keep going on about how he had bills to pay. Like we don’t? What he did get for free was an exposure to the correct way to do business on a computer. I’ve done it correctly for others all my life and now I’m going to try doing it right for myself. I swear, he has never heard anyone talk about customers the way I do.
He actually thinks a good businessman makes all his customers happy and tried to engage me in one of those no-win conversations about my plans to do so. I have no such plans. [I feel at 51% I’ve done the job.] It is was not so much that I was right but rather the stunned look on his face that I had the confidence to question what he had always accepted as fact. If he had said the customer was always right, I would have thrown him out the door.
NIGHT
Okay, you talked me into one example. During the explanation, I told him that I had targeted thirteen cities or major metropolitan areas in the state. Therefore, he was to program a drop list of thirteen cities. He stopped me and wanted to know which cities.. Right there, I knew he was useless so I decided to see how far he would pursue the matter.
Sure enough, he wanted to know why Boca Raton was not on the list. (Um, maybe because I said it wasn’t, you dork?) I actually sat still while he went on about how I must have overlooked the importance of Boca Raton. He wasn’t cluing in when I said things like if you could not find Boca on a map, why would you be looking for a plumber there. Maybe people are significantly more stupid where he comes from, I don’t know.
The reason for the drop list is most of my customers will be in a city. Most will know what a big city is, and which big cities exist in the state where they live. Not all of them will be able to spell Tallahassee the same way. The point is, he was being a prick about it and questioning me on kindergarten topics. He was probably too dumb to notice we were talking in a city and not some hick town, but who knows?
My policy with difficult customers is to give them a free ride over to the competition and let them put them out of business. I am only interested in the customers who already want my product as it is. Ruth called later in the day. She had a student in there y’day and me to clean up today. I just wish she was not so far away, it takes almost an hour to drive there sometimes. She often quotes back to me what I said about it costing more to hire somebody cheaper than me. It appears the factory in Indonesia is missing a shipment. Time to start tracking shipments.
Afterward, it was already dark so I stopped at Border’s to buy a book. I gave up after waiting almost five minutes in line. The Canadians are back in town by the carload and the clerks have been instructed to sign them up. The clerk in question was so stupid she could not grasp the spelling of Sympatico (a Canadian ISP). After her fifth try or so, I just walked out saying I would come back when she “had more time”. Of course, the stupid Canadian who didn’t have the guts to refuse to be signed up was equally to blame.
So here I am sixteen hours later with no sense of accomplishment for the day. That is unfair, but that is the feeling I’ve got at 11:58 PM. I talked to Marion earlier, who says the four pound daily fluctuation in my weight is normal. I cannot see it, I know my system. Today might even be called depressing, so let’s end happy. Fred will be pleased to learn that I have an extra $305 for him tomorrow. Less the $40 for gas, I’ve made $610 in the last ten days on service calls.
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