After moving to New York, I couldn’t help but think relationships made and relationships lost shape who you become.  It’s difficult to think about being close to someone and ultimately lose them to a business dispute or conflict.  But despite that, I’ve realized how some of these people are a drain on oneself and frankly I’m glad to see them go.

Creativity Vampires I call them.  I pinged Hugh Mcleod (my favorite entrepreneurial artist) on a recent day who’s the artist and founder of GapingVoid.com. I was expressing myself on Twitter about how removing these individuals from one’s life is progress.  It ultimately led to Hugh designing a cartoon about the Creativity Vampire.

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The best part?  Several of those Creativity Vampires read my blog.  You know who you are.  Good riddance.

And when that print comes out Hugh?  You can be sure I’ll be your first customer.

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So I’ve been a customer with a particular bank for over 5 years.  They don’t know me.  They have no record of any conversation with me ever in the last 5 years.  They don’t know if I’m a homeowner, if I drive a car, or ride a bike.   This company has no CRM (Client Relationship Management).   No SalesForce, no HighRise, no Sugar, no in house CRM.  They have a banking computer system but there is no way at all for them to note a customer’s account.  This may sound like a fantasy but it’s true.   You can go into one branch and tell them a long story about a problem, then go into another branch and it is if they have short term memory loss.   This bank will remain anonymous until I’m able to get rid of all my business there (I’ve been trying for some time).  Over 90% of my banking business is elsewhere.

Even better; the phone will ring 15 times everytime I’m in the branch.  No one is interested in answering.

Does your organization mis-behave this way?   Better question:  How did this bank get a $7billion market cap and fool so many people?

If you are a small or micro business you can get a license on something as simple as 37Signal’s HighRise for a couple bucks a month.

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So there I was at the Germantown Court arriving at 6pm for the 6:30 appointed court time.   See I really wasn’t in trouble.  I was standing in for a good friend of mine, Manish.  But he wasn’t in trouble either.  He simply came to Memphis on a business trip to do his taxes a couple months ago.  I loaned him my VW Jetta which is garaged more often than not as it is a car that is worth more to me then the couple thousand I’d ge selling it.   It’s a spare.  However a year back when I purchased a new vehicle I simply forgot to renew the tags on the VW.

Fast forward to 2 months back.   Manish drives the car to an appointment and gets pulled over for expired tags.  They give Manish a ticket of which he passes to me to stand in for him at court.   I arrived at 6pm.  I was home at 10pm.   Thankfully I had my new Kindle with me.  The excruciating pain of waiting in line had been turned into a wonderful journey with Chris Anderson’s  ”Free”.   So I was able to crunch an incredible amount of info and not let the city of Germantown’s inefficiencies waste the precious minutes of my life.

I could have just had the book you might add…true, but only sort of.  About once an hour I’d take a short break and read blogs that I had subscribed to or bounce over to a PDF market study that I’ve been reading on the Manhattan rental market.   This would have taken many more atoms than my arms could have held.

I won’t bore you with the details of the outcome of the court issues but let’s just say that they wasted a lot of people’s time…but not mine.  Cheers Amazon!  Everything about the Kindle is right.

Kindle: Amazon’s 6″ Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

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I’m trying to contact your company’s service department via chat because I really don’t like waiting on hold, and guess what, “Julie” comes to my rescue.  The only problem is that “Julie” really isn’t Julie and “Julie” does not have a solid command of the English language.  That’s a problem.

This is a real situation that happened to me yesterday while trying to contact Sony’s help desk.  See I had just purchased the new Amazon Kindle and sold my Sony Reader on eBay.   I found out you had to “de-register” it and the only way to do so was contact Sony’s customer service.    So Julie would say things at the inappropriate time like when I said, “I have a question about my Sony Reader”.  Julie would respond with, “Let me check into that for you.”  Then a long pause.   Also there were way too many, “I can help you with that.”  When I’m saying, “Are you understanding my question?”

If you are trying to go cheap on the customer service, at least do it here in the US.   In fact, don’t do it cheap at all.  You are trying to keep the costs of servicing your clients down, I get it.  But your online help forum area didn’t turn up any of the terms I tried.   Sony needs to get it right.   You get tons of mileage out of customer service, why?  Because they are also a marketing department.  That’s right, you get 2 for 1!   Pay your service people well and when they service, they are marketing your small business too.

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I’m enjoying my new Kindle on vacation.  There’s one problem which is also its greatest benefit.  By having a Kindle you are connected to Amazon’s Whispernet constantly meaning you can quickly download new content; books, blogs, and ebooks.   So after crunching a lot of content on the beach (I had just read Michael Port’s “Contrarian Effect”), I found an ebook about getting visibility on Twitter for your real estate blog.   I downloaded this at a cost o $5.95.  It ended up being a huge waste of money.  A ten minute read and it was poorly written.

I guffawed at the idea that such cheap content was getting so expensive.  This after I downloaded the huge new ebook “Free” by Wired editor Chris Anderson.  This ebook is massive, well-written, and full of case studies.  It talks precisely why it is imperative that your company be giving away as much as possible and how companies are making a lot of money off of free.   Based on the value I got for spending zero, it should have been priced at $5000 according to the real estate blog ebook.

I think it is unfortunate that this is happening.  I was certainly tricked and will never return to them to buy any additional products.  However they did make the sale.  Unfortunately it will be their last from me.

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I’m a little disappointed.   Amanda and I went to Pearl’s Oyster House in Downtown Memphis on Friday night before going to the summer movie series at the Orpheum Theater in Memphis.   I really like the food at Pearl’s and overall we’ve never had a service issue although it’s never been memorable.

We arrived around 7:20 and were seated immediately.  Following that we sat for what seemed like an eternity with no service.  We tried to get a server’s attention multiple times to no avail.   The actual elapsed time was around 20 minutes.  Finally we got up and left.   The host saw us leave and didn’t say a word.  WOW…I’m amazed.

The first thing I did was send a Tweet out and told several people about the experience.   Frustrating.  Blue Fin got our after movie dinner business as of course since Pearl’s wasted 20 minutes of my life, we had to wait until after the movie to eat.  Thanks.

Hope this doesn’t happen in your business.  Odds are it probably DOES at some point.  I know it’s happened at mine.  The problem is, customers like me don’t always come forward and explain.  They just leave.   You don’t know when this is happening so assume it does happen from time to time.

When you train your people, have your meetings, etc, be sure and cover these situations whether real or ficticious, you simply can’t have slip ups like that.  Especially Friday night at 7:30 in the restaurant business.

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I’ve recently had a couple experiences where it could have been very easy to escalate a few situations.   One was a client who was looking to improve search rank, but I ended up becoming the help desk.    Not fun.  Fixing various problems constantly that had nothing to do with marketing,  then it didn’t sit well when the client had eaten up his marketing time with help desk time.  Both myeslf and the client were dissatisfied with the result.   I knew long term this wouldn’t be a project of any benefit to either of us because of lack of understanding of each other’s expectations.  Also he had multiple projects that were beyond my current workload and I could see the demands exceeding the supply of my time.  Not a good thing for either of us in the long run.   I killed the contract but as we were having communication issues, I terminanted over email.  (NOT GOOD!)  He was upset and rightfully so about the method of termination.

While both of us bear responsibility for the situation, me for poor communication, and him for unreasonable expectations, he gave me a bad review to someone who of course told me about it.

The possible choices of what I could do were easy:

1. Escalate it – by calling him out and heating things up
2. Address it – by professionally having a conversation
3. Do nothing – blow it off
4. Blog about it – doing that now

I’m actually choosing options 2-4 on this one.  Everything BUT escalation is the solution.   This is applicable in many situations.  While mistakes were made on both parts, this person is a good business person and I like to think that I am as well.

As a business owner you’ll have many situations like this.  ”Learning experiences like this”.  Often the only way you learn how to handle them is by mis-handling them.  Looking back my communication should have been better however he still would have been upset either way upon ending it but it might have gone a bit smoother.

Had I chosen to escalate it, and get upset, it would have been ugly.  Little good besides regret can come out of these things.  Let’s face it. Regret and escalation tax your time seriously.  They produce no rewards but are great at tearing down relationships that were built up over serious amounts of time.   Avoid them.

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For some people, the excersize of badgering someone at a traffic light is.  Or chasing down a prior competitor making it your mission to “steal their clients”.  Or really anything that is spiteful.  Being spiteful and being an Ass takes time and energy.  Valuable time and energy.  As an entrepreneur you’ve no doubt run into many of these situations.  I had one the other day.

A tenant of mine basically said he was leaving (middle of his lease), and was not going to pay for the month of June, then would jet out around the 10th.  He even was hostile with my property manager.   It would have very simple to escalate this.   Maybe some yelling, shouting, and in the end the house loses.  I’m sure he would have kicked a few holes in the walls on the way out.

With the value of your time, you need to choose your battles carefully.  Truly trouncing your competitors is done over time.  With a serious time investment focused not on them but on executing your business plan, and carrying out the growth of your company.   NOT trying squash theirs.   Many of them will focus on you, while you focus on your business.   This is how they lose.

If you don’t have competitors you probably are in the wrong business.  If you do, remember to use your time wisely.

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Sorry Jiffy Lube you were the unfortunate conversation of our meeting to today and how to not serve customers.  I saw that with a smile on my face because even though I greet each day with love in my heart, the unfortunate calamity of your flawed culture led to each person down the line squashing the complaint.

The good news for you is that you have an opportunity to do something about it.   I received several RT’s ReTweets yesterday from other people who shared my story to their followers.   Although the story only reached 10,000 people yesterday I’m sure it reached a few that might matter to you.

Additionally we were able to share your story and some that countered it.  A story was told about Gaylord Entertainment and Hotels where a client was waiting in line a long time to check into his hotel.  He Tweeted the line issue and they instantly dispatched 3 people to the reception area.   They have people that are consciously searching and addressing complaints.

We now know that Jiffy Lube prefers the opposite.   I was able to tell my story to the sales team.   Amanda went to the pharmacy and told everyone there.  So whether it goes viral or not is irrelevent.  People close to us have been told.  People that work within 3 miles of the Jiffy Lube.   One thing I’m certain is that the cost of not handling the complain will be far greater than that of handling the complaint.  Similar to my horrible Circuit City experience of which I was sure to tell anyone in the market for anything electronic over the last 5 years.   Now their bankrupt and we’ll never know if my story spread enough, but I told it personally to 100+ people (the whole 20 minute version).

If Jiffy Lube does react in a more positively way, I’m committed to blogging about that too.

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