Author: Fabrizio

Customer disservice

Fabrizio1 Comment

We are all lazy as customers, and somehow we forget this basic fact when we change our dress and become business people.

Hi Generic User

Thank you for contacting Support.

We appreciate your time and effort invested in contacting us.

It is unfortunate that you are facing issue with your product. Need not to worry we will surely try our best to resolve this issue.

Please provide us with the below information so that we could help you more appropriately regarding your issue:

  1. Was there any liquid/physical damage to the product?
  2. Have you ever dropped your product?
  3. Are facing issue from the day 1 of purchasing the product?

We really apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused. Please perform a factory reset on your product, please see below on how to perform it.

Please provide us clear pictures of your product and the video of the issue.

Please feel free to reach out to us if still issue persists.

Best Regards,

I have three problems with this way of making a connection with a customer.

Number 1, you have my name, you can use it. I have purchased from you, I am getting in touch about a specific order, you have all the details about my life as a customer (and perhaps some more). It’s quite pointless that the next time I scroll through my Facebook timeline I will see an offer from you “JUST FOR ME!!!”, if you are not personal when you can be.

Number 2, can I ask how many people tell you they have spilled liquid on their product, damaged it, or dropped it? And if they are honest and they do, what is your answer? Are you telling them that it is their fault the product does not work (and fail their honesty, losing them for good), or are you going to pretend nothing happened and still replace the product (and then why the question in the first place)?

Number 3, please do not make it feel as if by having an issue with your product I am being hired for a second job. Be sure that the tasks you ask me to perform are related to my request (I am not sure how useful taking a video can be for sound not coming from earphones) and are few.

I got this answer after only 14 minutes from my request of assistance. I imagine first response time has been dealt with. What about the rest?

A couple of alternatives.

Hi Fabrizio, thanks for reaching out.

I am sorry you can’t hear music coming from your headphones, when did this start? Also, can I ask you to perform a factory reset on them? We found this is helpful in some cases. To do this, follow the instructions at the end of this message.

If this does not help, we’ll arrange a replacement, as I see it’s been just two months from your purchase. We are proud of the quality of our products, but sometimes things do not go as planned. I apologise for this.

Be in touch soon!

Or

Hi Fabrizio, thanks for being in touch.

I am sorry you can’t hear music coming from your headphones. You bought them two months ago, and this should not happen.

I am not in a position to offer a replacement, unfortunately. We are striving to keep the cost of our products the lowest on the market, and this is why we are able to offer only 40 days of guarantee on earphones. We have found that customers, sometimes, are not as careful as you shared you’ve been, and by increasing the guarantee period, we might actually end up losing money. I am genuinely sorry for that.

What I can do, if you agree, is transfer a €10 credit on your account to use with your next purchase. No strings attached, it is valid forever, use it when you want it, and on whichever product you might be interested into.

I understand this is not the solution you were seeking, and I will appreciate if you would get back to me with an answer, so that I can proceed with crediting the money on your account.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

The worst thing that could happen

Fabrizio7 Comments

What is the worst thing that could happen?

I used to ask myself this question when I was younger, thinking of myself as a pessimist. Later on in life, I understood that it is actually a very stoic question to ask, and I have started sharing it also with people who seek my advice or are just kind enough to share their experience with me.

Fear should not stop us making the World a better place.

Most often, the difference between what we fear and what really is dangerous is immense. And so, what is the worst thing that could happen? is a great question to ask yourself when you start feeling some unrest in your body because you are in a situation that is not familiar to you. Or when you anticipate some crisis that might, or might not, come.

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. I am not speaking with you in the Stoic strain but in my milder style. For it is our Stoic fashion to speak of all those things, which provoke cries and groans, as unimportant and beneath notice; but you and I must drop such great-sounding words, although, heaven knows, they are true enough. What I advise you to do is, not to be unhappy before the crisis comes; since it may be that the dangers before which you paled as if they were threatening you, will never come upon you; they certainly have not yet come.

Seneca, On Groundless Fear

Before the fear to speak up at the next meeting with senior managers stops you from sharing your idea or your concern, ask yourself what the worst thing that could happen is.

Before you avoid going to that place that you like, fearing to meet that unpleasant person, or to find yourself in an unpleasant situation, ask yourself what the worst thing that could happen is.

Before you surrender giving that speech, or sending that email, or making that call, or showing up, because sure, things could go wrong, ask yourself what the worst thing that could happen is.

When you give a shape, a smell, a contour, a name to what you fear, you will find you are unstoppable.

Ads wars

FabrizioLeave a comment

If you create something that has a controversial reception, you have two choices.

You can try to explain what your aim was, that you were coming from a good place, that actually what you meant is not what the public understood, that it’s not your fault and that your original idea was actually to support the feelings of the very same people that are now involved in the controversy.

Or you can apologise.

Take this Dove ad from last year.

It does not matter that Dove wanted to represent female beauty in all its shades, nor that the bit under scrutiny was only a short part of a longer ad in which (among other things) a westerner-looking woman was turning asian. It does not matter what the female Nigerian actress thought she was achieving while recording the ad, and honestly after the controversy sparked, the ad itself and its aesthetic stopped mattering as well.

Dove did not fall into the trap, it understood that all that matters in these circumstances is the public and its sensitivities. As marketers (and as creators), we need to be aware that what we do today can reach a much bigger audience than in the past, but at the same time it gets subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.

There are two things that can help stay clear from this kind of publicity.

First, make sure what you do is in line with a consistent brand that you are continuosly building. This gives credibility in the eyes of the audience, and it raises the odds that what you mean is what will be understood (take the recent Gillette ad as an example).

Then, surround yourself with people that are the most diverse possible, in every achievable way. And carefully weigh in every one of the concern they might raise on your job.

 

Learning beats failure

FabrizioLeave a comment

Of all the buzzwords that permeate today’s business environment, “failure” is perhaps one of the most misunderstood.

“If you are not failing, you are not trying hard enough.”
“There is no success without failure.”
“We allow our people to fail, failure is the most beautiful thing that could happen.”

You’ve probably heard one version of those sentences, and while they all make sense, they put the emphasis on the wrong aspect of the process.

One of the things about failure is that it’s asymmetrical with respect to time. When you look back and see failure, you say, “it made me what I am!” But looking forward, you think, “I don’t know what is going to happen and I don’t want to fail.” The difficulty is that when you’re running an experiment, it’s forward looking.

Ed Catmull

Nobody wants to or can start a project thinking about failure. It goes against how our mind thinks, and it would be the end of the project itself.

A different approach is to shift the focus on the learnings. What about starting a project saying “I want to learn how this works”, or “I want to find out if A is better than B”, or “I’d be happy if by the deadline we would know something important that we do not know today”.

Organisations should leave space to reflect on what is happening (both failures and wins), to share the results of the reflection, and to give others the possibility to absorb relevant learnings from what somebody else has done (again, good or bad).

“If you are not learning, you are not trying hard enough.”
“There is no success without learning.”
“We allow our people to learn, learning is the most beautiful thing that could happen.”

Much better.

 

The theory of empathy

Fabrizio2 Comments

To most people, empathy does not come natural. It certainly does not come natural to me. For many years, I have had the tendency to put myself at the centre of the World. Everything that happened was, to some extent, because of me.

People were certainly acting in a certain way because they wanted to signal something to me. My friend had stopped calling because for sure they did not want to hang out with me any more. My boss was being cranky because she did not like my job and was about to fire me. My girlfriend was being cold because clearly she was not interested in me anymore. And so on.

This slowly built up a worldview according to which it was very difficult for me to be empathic. On one side, the others were mostly being negative. On the other, they were being negative because of me, and so I was also unworthy of their interest, friendship, trust, love.

Raise you hand if this situation sounds familiar.

I had to train myself in empathy. Here is what Wikipedia says about empathy.

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position.

Sounds intimidating just by reading it.

The first step I took was to start asking people about their motives. What I found floored me. In 99.9% of the cases, I was not the reason why they were acting in a certain way. I found, actually, that most people had feelings that I was very familiar with, or were living through situations that I had also lived through in the past.

After I started approaching meditation, and to some extent a more Buddhist take on life, one theme resonated with me. We are all going through the same distress. Even though our lives are different, even if some have more and some have less, even if some are alone and some are not, even if some live in some place and some in another. We are all challenged by the attempt to make sense of a World that is senseless.

When you understand that what you feel, what you think, what you live is an experience you have in common with other human beings, that is the moment empathy unlocks.

I am still learning, and it is easy to fall back to certain patterns, easier than one would care to admit. Real empathy is one of the most needed characteristics in today’s World, and what is incredible about it, is that it expands in a sense of belonging like no other I ever experienced before.

Good luck on your path.