How to Delight Your Customers in Two Inches

Jay: Hey guys, it’s Jay. Hope you are doing great. Happy post-Memorial Day to you. So, been traveling a little bit, and now I’m actually home for a little while. And both on my travels and when I came back, I had two really interesting experiences that really surprised me. So simple, yet so powerful, and both of them are just a couple of inches. And really, you can delight your customers with just two inches. I think sometimes we kind of over-complicate all the things in marketing a customer experience, and here’s an example of not doing that.
So first, I was in Chicago last week at The Westin. And at The Westin Chicago, next to the phone in the room, was this business card. Right? It just said, “Need something? Text us. Text the word WCRN to 89029 to start a chat conversation.” This is actually the business card, the actual business card for The Westin. Now, it’s super smart because it shows me that they actually care about feedback, that they want to be accountable for my satisfaction at The Westin.
And what’s really smart about this, is what The Westin understands is that people don’t want a telephone. Like, they don’t want to call down to the front desk, they don’t want to talk to the manager, because that is uncomfortable. That is a conflict. The internet has made us all totally passive-aggressive, and so people are much more likely to want to complain or provide feedback via text than via telephone. This is very, very smart and, of course, cost them, like, nothing.
So then, a couple days later, I come back, and my wife and I purchased a mattress pad online ’cause I buy a lot of stuff online, for a bed to make it a little softer. I like a stiffer bed, she likes a softer bed, so we compromised with this mattress pad. And I bought it, found it online through a Google search, and the Google search brought me to this site, eLuxurySupply.com, which, no offense, is not a very good domain name or a very good site name. I said, like, “eLuxurySupply.com?”
But I got the mattress pad. Came on time, fantastic. In the box was this, on top of the mattress pad was this, the business card of Brett, who is their customer service manager. Wow! Okay, how simple is that? Just put a business card in the box with a real person’s name on it. So if you have any trouble with your mattress pad, and I don’t suspect there’s lots of mattress pad issues, but maybe there are, and here, you just, okay, now I’ve got a contact person.
The reason this makes so much sense, okay, is that we trust people so much more than we trust logos. I trust Brett, even though I don’t know who this is. I trust a human being named Brett way more than I trust eLuxurySupply.com, and so do you. We trust people, not logos. And so when you can bridge that gap between the company and the personal, you are really onto something. So simple to do that, just by putting a business card of a real person in the box. Man, I just love, love, love what they’re doing there. Cost them almost nothing. It’s two inches, in the box, boom!
Find a way to humanize your company and reduce friction in feedback collection, which is exactly what this does. This one reduces friction. This one humanizes. Best possible scenario, friends, would be a hybrid of these two. Okay? “Need something? Text us, and here’s the name of the person to text.” Right? So if this said, “Need something? Text us, from Brett, the customer service manager,” that would be the ultimate just sort of a synthesis of these two ideas, something that everybody can put together.
I’m gonna work on something like this as well, on some new website things that I am building. I’m really excited about it. Thanks for spending time with me here on Jay Today. As always, thanks to my friends at Emma for supporting the show. They can help you with your email marketing. Get better at email, won’t ya? Go to MyEmma.com. See you next time.