No excuse for bad service – Zak from Prezzybox had a great rant on his blog last week after he experienced awful customer service when trying to buy a new car. There’s no excuse whatsoever for this – your sales team are the face of your company, and as we look to exit recession, building up customer loyalty is more important than ever. Whilst no-where near the scale of Zak’s purchase, I did experice the same when trying to buy a new laptop last week.

Having spent 20 minutes being ignored by the scruffy, bored-looking “assistants” at PC World (all of whom actually avoided making eye contact with me in case they might have to do their job of selling me an item of computer equipment, I stormed out in a huff and went to the Comet store around the corner. 2 minutes later a friendly sales rep asked if I had any questions or wanted any advice. We chatted for a few minutes about my requirements, he recommended 3 different models, and 5 minutes later I was walking out of the store with my new laptop under my arm. The two experiences couldn’t have been more contrasting – as a result not only did PC World miss out on a £500 sale that went to their competitors instead, but I’ve moaned about them to anyone who will listen, blogged about them now, and will avoid shopping there in future for the printers, monitors, etc that I seem to go through on a regular basis.

So remember people like me and Zak next time you’re dealing with a customer – keep em happy at all costs, or suffer the consequences!

Edit: When finalising this post, I came across this article from last summer where PC World was voted the worst place to buy a computer.. good to see their plans to improve their customer service is working.. not! (actually if they avoid serving any customers, then no-one can complain about the customer service I suppose..)

Easy Content Units without the “content units” – We know that loads of people use ECU to find products really easily, but not everyone wants to actually make content units out of them.. sometimes you just want a straightforward text link or image for a product. Well now you can get that with a new feature for ECU Pro members – just search for the products you want, and we’ll make the deeplink for you – all you have to do is paste it wherever you want!

Cookies taste 12.9% better with POR – Paid on Results recently unveiled their shiny new interface, which is much easier on the eye than the previous version (even if many people will mourn the loss of “POR Man”), and one of the many new bells and whistles is a neat little pie chart that shows you how many sales POR tracked without the aid of a cookie that put simply, otherwise would not have been tracked.

Customers delete cookies all the time (remember when every newspaper told them that HAD to, else evil corporations would be spying on them and they’d get viruses every 10 minutes that would kill their offspring?), and so it’s reassuring to see that POR have taken steps to ensure that this doesn’t mean affiliates lose out on sales they have driven. In my case, 12.9% of the sales tracked by POR came via cookieless tracking – If only every network offered this.. I could do with a 12.9% payrise!

Policies, not Politics – Apologies for mentioning politics for the second blog post in a row, but I stumbled across this neat little site the other day.. Basically, it gives you the main parties policy/stance on a range of issues such as Crime, Education, the Economy etc, without telling you which party the policy belongs to (though it’s not too difficult to spot the BNP policies!) – You then choose the polocies you agree with, and at the end they tell you who the policies belong to, and therefore who you should vote for.

If only the election worked this way, we might actually get the people running the country who can do the best job with the best ideas. Unfortunately it’s a two-horse popularity contest, and a majority of the electorate will vote the same as they did last time because “they’ve always voted labour/tory” without the slightest clue about how their chosen party intends to govern them for the next 5 years – When the prospective chancellors (and Vince Cable) take part in a TV debate about how they will prevent the country being bankrupted in the next five years, and four times as many people choose to watch Eastenders on the other channel, you know you’re in trouble..

This week I have been mostly hating: The football league table.
This week I have been mostly loving: Eating far too much chocolate, and spending time with the family

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