Doesn’t anybody do customer research any more? Wouldn’t it be a better idea to find out how your customers are going to react before you implement a toxic new policy? B of A and Verizon wanted to charge customers for using a debit card and paying a bill online; since those policies subsequently were reversed they’re fiscally in the same place as before but with bad press and a lot of pissed-off customers. Netflix soldiered on with its plan to separate its DVD delivery and streaming content, but paid a terrible price in subscribers and market value. How is any of this a benefit to the shareholders?

I guess it’s good news that the cycle of mea culpa is getting shorter, as noted above. But meanwhile I’ve noticed a couple of new assaults on my wallet from smaller companies and wonder if it’s part of a larger trend to put short term revenues ahead of longer term customer loyalty and common sense.

I previously wrote about Boingo and their “good news” that I could now download an updated version of their wireless roaming app that allowed me to use just two devices in my account rather than have unlimited access. I cancelled, but then I recently found myself in the BWI airport needing wireless access and was tempted by an offer to get a $25 American Express gift card after 2 months of service. So I re-upped, after discovering out something interesting: of the three different devices I was carrying, each received a different offer when I went to boingo.com. My laptop (where I’d received the email) told me I could join for $9.95 a month and made no mention of the gift card. My tablet offered the gift card and $9.95 a month. My Android had the gift card for the rate of $7.95 a month so that’s how I joined. But I don’t need a wireless service on my cell phone since it has an unlimited data plan so I went through the process of registering my laptop and tablet and was told oops, I’ve reached my 2 device limit.

Turns out the very act of signing up had registered the cell as one of my two devices and now my only option is to cancel it, effective at the end of the billing period one month hence. So I’m down to one device during this period and then can register my second device. Just way too much clunkiness for customer satisfaction and what makes it all more irritating is that Boingo has this breezy website where a message “oops… something has gone wrong” that pops up way too often and only serves to increase my irritation with that man behind the curtain.

A more disturbing revenue tactic was applied by Bill Me Later after I tried to take advantage of an offer for $15 off when I paid for an eBay transaction through their service. I was told online that, for unspecified reasons, they were unable to process my payment so fine, I paid through Paypal. I then started to get daily voicemails from somebody who left a message saying “This is the fraud department at ramamafoqw calling about a recent transaction…” They didn’t exactly say ramamafoqw but they did mumble the company name. After several calls I realized they were saying “Bill Me Later.” I called the number and got a message “we’re sorry, no one is available.” Finally their representative reached me live and it turned out the purpose of this “fraud alert” was to set up an account, but not offer me the $15 credit since that one had expired.

So that’s downright deceptive… using the fraud alert concept, which has struck terror into the heart of every consumer at one time or another, to make the customer pay attention so you can sell them a service. (And how did they get my number? Well, turns out Bill Me Later is owned by Paypal…) What this has in common with Boingo, and also the three giant companies mentioned above, is that nobody applied the sniff test. As in, “this will hopefully make us some money but is it going to make our customers more loyal and satisfied, or less?” If that question is no longer relevant, then it’s going to be a long year.

P.S. Reading over this post, my experiences do sound a bit down in the weeds and yes I do have better things to do than chasing after $25 gift cards. But these are the hooks marketers use to get customers and prospects involved, and if they don’t provide a satisfactory customer experience or are perceived as deceptive then sales will suffer and more than likely we in the marketing department will get the blame.

But why would a company even want to banter with the customer in the first place? This is not a marriage or personal relationship where you are trying to gain the upper hand. There’s a customer service policy in place to handle whatever concern the customer is contacting you about. Just deal with it, as efficiently is possible. Don’t embellish the dialog in a way that can turn a neutral situation into a negative.

At the other end of the spectrum, if the customer has a complaint or request and your policy is to honor it, there is nothing wrong with an additional coating of obsequiousness. An example is this response from amazon.com when I downloaded a Kindle book thinking it was free through the Prime lending library and discovered I was charged for it.

First, let me apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue. I do understand how frustrating this must have been to you. We value our customers’ trust above all else–it is the foundation upon which Amazon.com was built. Please know that this situation was the result of a combination of technical and human errors, and that in no way did we intend for this to happen.

Over the top? You bet. Did it cost Amazon any more than a simple notice that my charge had been reversed? Not a penny. Will this make me more likely to give more money to Amazon? Absolutely.

When I got home there was an email, as opposed to the more urgent phone call you might expect. There was a number for me to call. I did… and was put on hold. WTF! I then had a conversation with an overseas CSR. I am not one of the “keep it in America” folks by kneejerk reaction, but in this case the language barrier might have kept her from realizing some of the script she was reading from was of a toxic nature.

I see you are calling from a number in your profile, you had a charge that was rejected because of our fraud prevention alerts. I asked why, since Cost Plus is a recognized national retailer. First surprise in her scripted answer: the larger the organization, the greater for the potential for fraud. Oh, says I, are you saying I should only shop at small stores from now on? Her response: I can see you were embarrassed sir, when your card was rejected. (WTF! I never said that!) I can understand that because of the prestige attached to the American Express card. (Yes, I’m a desperate striver who was accidentally approved for this card. Now my dirty laundry is out in public.)

I could have been reassured by this conversation, but instead I’m in doubt about my choice of shopping destinations and my worthiness to carry the card… which you can’t bet I won’t be doing much longer. Well, that’s not actually true because I have points to redeem. But you can bet this puppy is going to stay in my pocket the balance of this holiday shopping season. Don’t have time for this shit.

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

The quote is attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. Ludicrous. Or is it? A search turns up both corroboration and skepticism. My money is with the denier who reports the quote actually came from Zig Ziglar, who says Gandhi said it.

Gotta love the internets.

We want to pay attention to how we craft these calls to action (CTAs for short) because they affect our paychecks as copywriters. If we can prove that our efforts produced more calls or dollars or customers, we will get more work and bigger fees. Here are a few tips:

Combine the call to action with a benefit statement. Are classes limited to 20 students to ensure personal attention? Then say that in the call to action, followed by a request to respond now to avoid being left out. Is the product going to taste great, improve health or make them money? Then add urgency to the CTA: To enjoy the health-giving benefits of royal jelly bon-bons just as soon as we can ship them, call our hotline right now.

Tell the reader early and often what you want them to do. If it’s a direct mail letter you want to cut to the chase no later than the third or fourth paragraph. You’ve created desire or concern through your windup, now tell the reader specifically how they can scratch the itch. If it’s a long letter, repeat the call to action at least once per page. CTAs in web pages and emails are more compact since they are clickable links, so they can be used more frequently, as often as once every couple of paragraphs.

The reason for the multiple CTAs is simply that you never know exactly when your reader will be ready to take action, and you don’t want to take a chance on losing them because they get distracted and wander off the page.

Make the call to action consistent throughout your communication. Don’t invite them to request more information in one CTA, then tell them you want an order right now further down the page. If you have a freebie or a giveaway contest for them, mention it in each CTA or they will wonder, “hey, where is that prize I was going to win?” The reason is that readers are donkeys. They will follow willingly as long as you give them no reason not to, but if you throw in a distracting or confusing element they will dig in their heels and do everything except what you want.

Deliver a complete CTA at the end of a sales letter, or the sidebar of an email invite. This includes everything the reader needs to know about the offer—and all possible response options including mail, phone, email, web link, fax and maybe something else. If you are asking for money or a serious commitment of their time, this CTA should also include a guarantee of some sort for reassurance.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

We marketers have only ourselves to thank for this phenomenon: we’ve trained our readers to know that the end of the letter will have a recap of the offer and a direct call to action. If they don’t feel like reading, they can cut to the chase by going to the P.S. That’s why you should use the P.S. appropriately to give people what they are looking for.

The classic use of the P.S. is to recap the entire marketing proposition in a paragraph. St. Jude Hospital did that by adding this P.S. which, according to Herschell Gordon Lewis, produced a 19% increase in response with absolutely no other changes in the letter:

P.S. I hope that your own family never suffers the tragedy of losing a child to an incurable disease. At St. Jude, we’re fighting to conquer these killers, and one day someone in your own family may live because we succeeded.

You can also use the P.S. to:

• Tease the reader back into the letter, with a phrase that harkens back to something you said previously that of course they didn’t read: “Remember that limited time offer I told you about earlier? Well, here’s one more reason you shouldn’t let this opportunity get away…” Works well if you have a very rich, multi-part offer that you want to reveal in stages.

• Bring in one fresh benefit which is so powerful that it deserves its own showcase. Richard Potter did this in a way I love for a letter for AAA. It says something like: “I almost forgot! Respond now and you’ll get a FREE United States Map Book in addition to the member savings I mentioned earlier.”

• Fire your twin guns of “act now before it’s too late” and “with our no-risk guarantee there’s no reason not to say yes”.  Putting these strong closing statements in the P.S. serves a double purpose: they seal the deal with somebody who has stayed with you throughout the letter, and they make a compelling argument to someone who has just started reading.

Are there letters that shouldn’t have a P.S.? Perhaps. “Real” business letters don’t have them, of course, and if verisimilitude is important then maybe you want to close with the signature. Also, a very short letter has less reason for a P.S. But the P.S. is powerful. Don’t give it up without serious consideration.

Excerpted from my new book, Copywriting that Gets RESULTS! Get your copy here.

My own Borders was one of the first scheduled for closing, and they’ve been gone for maybe four months. Like a zombie or a hand from the grave, my Borders Rewards membership kept reminding me of new offers which were no longer relevant until finally I clicked the CAN-SPAM link and killed it.

But today the corpse is risen anew. Some special set of rules allows the liquidators to send my email address a message that says:

Your WOWPoints will be honored. They will be moved to OO.com over the next 30 days. Once there, you can use them just as you do now.

Um, no. I had a relationship with Borders, but I am not interested in you new guys whoever you are. Why is it so difficult to take a national brand with huge loyalty and do something for the customers which is also profitable when things go bad?

Just askin….

This increase is not for traditional Netflix subscribers who get a disk in the mail; it’s for the potentially far greater universe of prospects who came in via streaming. I signed up for streaming Netflix after my family got a Roku last holiday season. We quickly discovered that the “20,000 streaming movies” was actually not that big a number when looking for a specific title so we added the option of getting a disk when we can’t get instant satisfaction for $2 more a month. Nothing about our behavior, therefore, suggests we will be good candidates for conversion to a standard $7.99 a month disk in the mail plan (that’s the basis of the cost increase) and we are indeed cancelling our non-streaming subscription.

But meanwhile, Netflix is paring its streaming offerings presumably so it can get more disk orders. I know this because my teenager wanted to watch Zombieland for the umpteenth time last night and it’s gone! Not fair, Netflix! This is the company that always contacts me to ask about the video quality of the streaming show I watched or the delivery date of my DVD and a back door change in our agreement definitely doesn’t cut it. It feels like Netflix has made a corporate decision to move away from streaming and toward DVD delivery when everything we read about broadband consumption patterns should point them in the opposite direction.

Maybe, with negotiations going on behind the scenes with entertainment content providers, the streaming model isn’t making sense financially with unlimited viewings for one price. I would be willing to pay a small upcharge (NOT the full cost of renting a single DVD in the mall) for streaming access to new releases. I would also consider a “premium” level (let’s say $12.99 a month which is $5 more than the current streaming plan) for unlimited access for many more titles. But please, Netflix, don’t ask me to change my viewing habits to accommodate your new business model… even if it’s the old business model for many of your customers. I don’t think I’m alone in this. When I want to see it, I want it now… waiting for a disk in the mail seems forever.

Good software user design includes an escape hatch as well. A good example is the TurboTax desktop product, which gives you an always-accessible choice of “Forms” or “EasyStep” so you can look at your current information in the way that makes most sense for you.

But I’m using TurboTax Online for the first time, and they don’t do that. The ONLY way to navigate is to follow the prompts on the screen, and if the prompts don’t work and you ask for help then Intuit twists itself into contortions trying to answer your question. (I’m talking about the in-program help, not the too-broad User Community sidebar.)

So, I want to import the return created with TurboTax Desktop 2009. I find a help screen with instructions which I’ll paste below (and cut out some info that is not pertinent):

Transfer Last Year’s Tax Info from Desktop to Online
Updated: 11/29/2010 Article ID: GEN12156
Below is the procedure for transferring (or uploading) a tax return created in 2009 TurboTax Desktop software to TurboTax Online 2010.
Follow these steps to transfer:
1. Sign in to TurboTax Online (or click the Create an Account or Try It First buttons).
2. Once you’re in TurboTax Online, click the Home tab and then select the first link in the lower half of the screen, titled Transfer last year’s TurboTax return from your computer.*
3. On the Transfer Last Year’s TurboTax Return screen, click Browse, and then select your 2009 tax data file. (Find last year’s tax file on Windows or Macintosh)
4. Click Transfer Return.
5. Once you see the message Transfer Complete, click Continue to start your 2010 return.

I assume you didn’t read all that, but I had to. I started from the top and followed the instructions to clear my 2010 return that I had started by accident. I looked for the link which they told me very clearly would be “Transfer last year’s return from your computer” but I saw no such link; instead I saw “we can help you transfer last year’s computer return from your computer”. Clicking that just resets the page I just reset, taking me nowhere.

Finally I notice the asterisk, and track down to the footnote at the bottom. It tells me:

* If you don’t see the Transfer last year’s TurboTax return link, it’s because you:
• Previously entered information in your 2010 TurboTax Online return; or
• Already transferred your 2009 data, either by uploading last year’s tax data file or by signing in with your 2009 TurboTax Online login.
Unless you signed in using your 2009 TurboTax Online login, you can click the Clear your 2010 return and start over link on the Home tab, and then resume at Step 2 above. Clearing your return removes all tax data from your return, so make sure you really want to do this.
However, if you signed in using your 2009 login, clearing your return automatically re-transfers your 2009 online data, making it impossible to transfer your desktop tax file. The only solution in this case is to create a new account in TurboTax Online 2010 so you can start with a clear return. [underlining mine.]

Again, I assume you didn’t read that so here is what is going on. IF you created a login last year, THEN you can’t transfer in a desktop return because TurboTax assumes you already have a return online. But I don’t because I created the return with their desktop product, then created a login for e-filing. It’s a Catch-22 which Intuit recognizes, hence their outrageous solution that I have to forget my old username and password and start anew.

This should never have seen the light of day. Whereas most companies urge you to set up an account and save your user name for a better experience, Intuit tells me the only option to get out of this problem is to forget I have a user name and start over with a brand new account. Boo, hiss. That’s what the lack of an escape hatch will do to you.

Maybe it’s not as poetic as the creative seizings up of J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller and other legendarily blocked writers. But copywriter’s block is a very real problem with freelancer hacks and scribes because if you aren’t writing, you aren’t getting paid.

I had a couple of real serious blockages early in my freelance career and will share what I learned from them. The cause of most of my episodes was that I hadn’t done enough preparation before sitting down to write. I was trying to think, and nothing was coming out. A far better strategy is to do so much prep work—in terms of research and rough, non-wordsmithed notes—that giving yourself permission to actually write the thing comes as a blessed relief.

Sometimes we stumble over something in the actual process of writing…. very often, the first paragraph in a letter or article. (And yes, editors will tell you your work can almost always be improved by simply removing that first warm-up paragraph after you write it.)

I still have a multi-page printout of my tortured attempts to write the first paragraph of a letter for a TPA—that’s a particular kind of consultant that handles a company’s health plan. What on earth could I have needed to say about TPA’ing that was so difficult? I can’t remember but I know I felt like a dog chewing on itself until I had the good sense to finally step away from it. I took a walk in the sun, then came back and worked on something completely different. The next day, the TPA letter was completed without incident.

This recent writer’s block had a new set of circumstances. It was for a good client, but I found it somehow very uninteresting, yet I knew I had to do it because of our relationship. The concept of “you must” is toxic to the independent and supposedly carefree freelancer, who has signed on to the concept that you can set your own schedule and work any 24 hours in the day that you like.  But finally, writing it became more appealing than not writing it, and the deed was done. Now I’m going to celebrate by going to the library.