Sep
24

“Social Media: A Revolving Ecocystem” Presentation

Today, I was invited to be on a panel discussion at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The attendees were Museum Trustee members who managed their own museums across the country. Most were not active on social media, so were looking to find out more about social media, how it is changing, and how to implement it.

This PowerPoint presentation is fairly generic so it can apply to businesses and brands across the board. Feel free to share/use this at your will (with due credit, of course!)

Social media marketing preso museum

Sep
22

Why I Wouldn’t Be Mad if I Lost My Computer

cloud computing

No, I’m not asking you to come steal my computer. I have become so cloud-based that even if my computer one day disappeared, I would not lose much of anything in terms of data.

I do most all of my work and communications on Google Apps. I use Gmail for all of my mail communications (work, personal and blogging), Docs for anything I need to write up, and Contacts to keep up-to-date with coworkers and colleagues. Since Google Apps is 100% on the cloud, I would never have to worry about losing a file if my computer was ever stolen or broken.

All of my local computer files are stored on Dropbox, a cloud-based backup service that allows you to virtually and locally backup your computer data. If I ever needed to access a file I created on one computer that I saved on Dropbox and was not at the computer with which it was created, I could easily log onto Dropbox via the web and access it. Dropbox also works great for me since I have both a personal and work computer. If I am not with one of the two computers at a given time and have been working on a document, I can easily access it on the second computer since you can store Dropbox on multiple computers.

For my online data, I use Backupify (disclosure: I work there). I currently back up my tweet stream, Facebook data,  Gmail, Google Docs, Google Contacts, Flickr and Picasa accounts on Backupify. If I ever accidentally deleted an email (which I have done on occasion), Twitter goes down, a friend leaves Facebook and takes their tagged pictures of me with them, etc., I will still have access to that data via Backupify. Backupify came into a great use case for me recently while I was importing files and applications to my new work computer. I had to install a few Gmail accounts in iMail on my new Mac but forgot the passwords. I panicked for about a half second, then realized if I went into my Gmail archives, I could easily find the email with the password and link. Simple as that.

Today, between being in my young twenty’s and always on the go, working for a small start up with high aspirations, and being an avid blogger not only for this site but for BostInnovation as well, I seek simplicity wherever and whenever I can. Dropbox and Backupify solve this for me. I can rest assured that whenever I am working on something online or offline, it will be saved.

I find total peace of mind that my data will always be available to me, no matter where I am or what device I am using. This is a HUGE relief, because if I was to ever lose a document or online file, my work would be significantly compromised.

In what ways do you ensure that your data is not lost? Have you ever tried Dropbox, Backupify, or another backup service provider? What gives you peace of mind, if any, with your data?

Sep
21

Observations from a Train Ride

boston transportation

I live in Boston, where the main means of transportation is via busses and trains intricately winding over and under the bustling city. To get to work, I have to take the bus to the train stop and then take the train three stops up. Today, I decided to put away my iPod, newspaper and book (one or two of which I usually occupy myself with every day during my commute) to truly observe what was going on around me.

Across from me was an older man holding, what seemed to be, his most valued possessions in a Trader Joe’s bag, warily looking around, seeming a bit nervous or on edge – he seemed to be the outcast during my trip to work, and soon you’ll read why. Diagonal from me was a hispanic mother with her daughter who was engulfed in her cell phone (she must not have been older than eight). At the back of the bus I saw a bunch of teenage boys, all with ear buds in one ear, blasting rap music, while talking about what happened the day before.

Once off the bus and now on the train underground, I noticed a huge influx in technology on everyone. I would estimate 9 out of 10 people on this very packed train had earphones in, listening to some sort of MP3 player. A few had Kindles or iPads, catching up on work emails, books, news, etc. A girl next to me was listening to music while playing some game on her phone (I only glanced quickly during my scan). Most had newspapers in their hands (a man hands out free newspapers by the entrance to the train every morning) but instead chose to read their tablets or listen to music. Hardly any were reading a book or any tangible source of writing.

While I use these same technologies and have many of the same habits, it’s incredible to see the influx in technology that is pervasive in every part of our lives, from a morning commute to a stroll in the park, trip to the mall, and commute home from work. The age gap in technological adoption, from my observations, seems to be lessened. Kids as young as eight and adults upwards in their 50′s were all using the same technologies.

children using technology

Just a few years ago, children were accustomed to using their imaginations by playing games with friends to pass time. Now, they absorb themselves with technology, digital games and music. Many adults were not akin to using high tech products yet; they still preferred their books and newspapers for sources of information, and friendly conversations with others in person. Now, it seems that they too have fallen victim to using technology in all facets of their lives to connect with others and learn about the world around them.

As a forward thinking person, I stopped scanning the crowd on the bus and train and wondered what this same scene would look like even just two years from now. Would every person on the train have a few devices going on at once? Everyone stands in silence as they tune into their digital accomplices?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge proponent of technology. However, what does scare me is the pervasive effect it has had on our society and the thought of how this will progress in the near future. People talk about implanting chips in our heads to receive the same technology without the need for a physical device. Really?! No thank you! (Well, I say this now).

While I don’t have a definitive answer as to what will become of humans and technology in the future (and no one can make an accurate statement on this either), it definitely makes you think.

This week, take some time to put down your devices and observe those around you and what they are doing. What do you notice? How has this changed in the past few years? What do you fear will happen to us in the future with our ever growing dependance on technology to run our daily lives.

This sure is some food for thought….

Sep
20

Never Underestimate the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing with Performable 2.0

performable logo

Did you know that every day, 98% of the people who visit your website make a near-instantaneous decision NOT to do business with you? If you’re experiencing high website bounce rates, low conversion rates, and raised eyebrows about your business idea, you may be a part of this statistic.

Performable, based in Amesbury, Mass has found a platform to help companies discover and overcome this barrier. Performable is a do-it-yourself tool to help any company improve their website and convert online visitors into customers easily. With Performable, you can test your message, improve website design, optimize landing pages, conduct A/B testing and more.

We had the chance to chat with Justin Rachwalski, the director of Performable’s marketing, to find out how users are interacting with their tools and how they are reaching prospective customers themselves.

If you are on the marketing team at your company, you are probably faced with the task of finding new sales opportunities, connecting and engaging with new customers and developing ways to streamline marketing activities. With Performable’s integrated tool, you can find this all out in one spot.

The tool allows you to dig deeper into each channel where customer interactions are occurring. For example, if you are using Twitter as a marketing channel, you can now discover customers who are connected with you on Twitter and start a conversation with them.

With Performable, marketers are also discovering ways to find out how customers are using their site. You can delve into each user’s activity, including pages visited, time of website visit, where they are located, and how many times they have been to your site. As a marketing professional myself, this is crucial information to know since I am involved with inbound marketing at my own job.

If you have been on Twitter for any amount of time and are into marketing and entrepreneurship, you have probably heard

david cancel

of David Cancel. Cancel is the CEO and founder of Performable. He is also a serial entrepreneur with a twelve-year record of building successful companies. One thing Cancel believes in is customer relations and feedback. This is emulated in Performable’s every day activities that allows them to improve their service.

Rachwalski told us, “We provide exceptional customer support in which we gather customer feedback on the problems they face. In addition we love to meet face to face with our customers as well as survey them.” Recently, they have worked with some of the best online marketers to learn what problems they face today and work with them to find solutions to those problems. “All of that has gone into the new Performable 2.0 which is launching soon.” Rachwalski explained.

Performable 2.0 is the brainchild of all the research and development the team has done with top marketers. This enhanced platform will help you understand more about your best customers and ways to acquire more customers like them.

Performable 2.0 will allow marketers to find new sales opportunities, contact points, interactions across social channels, reviews of marketing plans every day (aka milestones), view how people are engaging with your marketing campaigns, and find which ads are working for which pages and market segments. Essentially, Performable 2.0 makes it easy to discover, engage and optimize; this is a marketer’s dream!

While Performable helps other companies succeed in their marketing efforts, we wanted to dig deeper into how Performable itself is marketing to customers and engaging with them.

Rachwalski told us, “Our top priority is providing an amazing user experience with unrivaled customer service. This naturally results in a large amount of word-of-mouth organic marketing. This has been our most successful channel by far.” You will find that many companies today with new and brilliant products are relying almost 100% on word-of-mouth since it is so powerful on the social web.

“We supplement that with a wide range of marketing including PPC, SEO, Display, affiliate/partner programs, social media (Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn), and community building. Finally our CEO is very active in the startup space.” Rachawalski found that each concurrent marketing channel helped tie the loop back to their word-of-mouth marketing quite well.

If you are following David Cancel on Twitter, you are probably familiar with his immense knowledge base and influence. If you are not following him, do so and you will see why he is such a successful entrepreneur, especially with this particular venture. Personally, I first found out about Performable by stumbling upon Cancel’s Twitter page and following him. I started to read a few blogs that discussed their work and became very interested in what they had coming next.

The main marketing take away I received from my chat with Rachwalski was to “never underestimate the power of word of mouth marketing.” Then, when it comes down to adding other paid forms of marketing, “it is important to focus on all stages of the customer life-cycle.” In other words you want to look at the “first click”, supporting clicks, as well as the “last click” when it comes to your funnel.”

Performable is definitely a company to keep your eye on and try out for your own company if you can. Performable 2.0 is not currently available yet but will be in a few weeks! Stay tuned for more details.

To keep up to date with their new developments, make sure to check out their site, read their blog, become a fan onFacebook and follow them on Twitter.

I originally wrote this post for BostInnovation as my weekly new marketing article.

Sep
15

New Co-Creation Concept Drives Business Model for Blank Label

Guys, lets face it – you don’t like to shop. When it comes time to buying a new outfit for an interview, wedding, or night out on the town, you are forced to choose from the same old available shirts on the store rack.

What if [I] changed up this scenario for a minute? Imagine sitting on your couch and browsing through a website to customize the shirt you are looking for and having it delivered right to you.

blank label

Imagine no more; a company called Blank Label has solved this age-long shopping dilemma for men. Blank Label is an online clothing store just for men’s dress shirts, allowing men to customize a shirt to their liking.

Danny Wong, co-founder of Blank Label, took the time to explain this concept to us. “We are providers of co-created men’s dress shirts and have a dress shirt design application that empowers men to design their next favorite dress shirts online. We’re pushing the concept of co-creation – making consumers their own designers and bridging the gap between consumer and manufacturer.”

Blank Label’s goal is to “change the way men shop by empowering them to become their own designers,” Wong told [me]. He first became excited about co-creation when he realized that it would empower consumers to become their own designers. This allows customers to tell Blank Label what they want and how they want it; Blank Label is the platform for them to do this.

The response to their business model has been outstanding. While I am certainly not in their target market, it is evident that they have the perfect outlets to reach their key customers. Wong reported that during their six months of being in business, they have revenues in the six figures with no advertising spending whatsoever.

It seems that advertising wasn’t needed since they were getting so much press coverage. Blank Label has been featured in top publications including Fast Company, BusinessWeek, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, Forbes and more.

Customers rave left and right about the idea that they can create their own custom shirt, and are impressed that a clothing company really cares about them and their needs. Wong told [me], “Since co-creation gives them full say in the final product they are purchasing, they get super excited and feel a sense of loyalty to us as a business and to their product which they designed themselves.”

While many do rave, others are still scratching their heads about this idea. “Some find co-creation something hard to grasp at first because it’s so different from the conventional way of purchasing goods” he explained.

Blank Label is not alone in the push to drive consumer goods to co-creation. Companies including Chocri, a custom chocolate company, Gemvara, whom I wrote about a few weeks ago, MixMyGranola, a custom granola company, and GemKitty, a co-created jewelry provider, are making strides in this industry as well.

While many companies may be subservient and just want themselves to succeed, Wong’s desire is for more companies to understand co-creation to satisfy consumer needs. As I am a huge proponent of satisfying customer needs and providing an excellent customer experience, I was largely interested in this.

Wong hopes that Blank Label will emerge as a hub for everything co-created since they are supporting other co-creation companies as well. Wong told [me] that he likes to share with his customers and community what other co-creation entrepreneurs are doing in order to push the concept along. Many are realizing that customers are hungry for more personalized products that are made specifically for them.

“In fact, while other companies were calling themselves mass-customization businesses, we rejected that old-world term and re-created it as co-creation because for one, it was a snappier term, two, it wasn’t an oxymoron, and three, it was new and interesting to consumers.”

Wong considers themselves, as humbly as possible, market leaders in the co-creation movement. They were one of the first, and still one of the few, who understand customer needs when it comes to clothing. They truly get their consumers and now many consumers understand them.

Although I will never be buying from Blank Label, I would definitely suggest this to any guy looking for that perfect dress shirt. They will certainly be in good hands with a team that understands their needs and seeks to help them fulfill them.

To find out more about Blank Label, visit their website, check out their blog, become a fan on Facebook and follow them onTwitter. You will see on their social sites that they are making huge strides and connecting with many customers via social sharing.

[I'm] quite impressed with what Blank Label has accomplished during its first six months in business and look forward to seeing what the next six months will bring.

Does co-creation interest you? Would you buy from them or have you already?

Note: This post was originally written by me for BostInnovation last week.

Sep
14

Google Instant Review in an Instant

google instant

Google Instant will forever change the way we search. While not a major change, it has altered the way we will search for things online. When I first tried out Google Instant, I began typing in a search phrase and found that the initial results were not what I was looking for. This caused me to backspace a few words and change my phrase before ever hitting enter.

Before, I would have finished my query, hit enter, scanned about 5-6 articles and then decided if that was what I was looking for. Instead, I am saved a few seconds (while not significant, it will add up over time and make searching online more efficient) and able to fine tune my searches more effectively.

There are debates over the effect that Instant will have on SEO value. Quite frankly, I think we all knew that SEO was ‘going out of stye’ for awhile now and Instant may be the tipping point to make that happen. However, I think Google Instant can help marketers better fine tune SEO so their pages show up just as fast and high up in the results list. It may make it a bit more difficult to optimize a site for all the variations of a similar search, but we can at least try, right?

Overall I think Google Instant will be good for searchers. We will save time, learn to refine our searches, and improve SEO on each page we create.

What are your observations of Google Instant? How do you think it will affect SEO?

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Sep
13

How to Subscribe to this Blog

In the past few weeks I’ve received several comments on this blog asking how to subscribe to this blog. For some, the subscribe button seems to work, for others it is not clear how to subscribe.

If you want to subscribe in a reader, there is a link directly to the right of this post that says “Subscribe in a Reader” with the RSS symbol. Simply click on that link, click on the RSS tool you use, and you’re set to go!

If you would rather receive updates via email, there is a form also directly to the right where you can enter in your email address. Every time I post a new entry, you will receive it by email.

If all else fails, simply to go your reader’s website and type in ‘A New Generation’ and then click ‘Subscribe.’

I’m sorry about the confusion on how to subscribe. I will look into getting a more prominent subscribe button on here soon.

If you have any further questions, feel free to ask! And again, thanks for your continued readership, sharing of my articles, and valuable comments and questions.

Keep them coming and I’ll keep on writing!

Kristin

Sep
08

20 Effective Way to Increase Your Online Influence

Remember what it was like the first day of high school? You nervously walk to the bus stop, wondering who else is going to be there. Once on the bus, you cautiously look around at all the new faces, seeing if you know any and looking at others you don’t. During your first period class, you looked around to find some friends you knew, but most you didn’t know. It probably took weeks if not months to build up a good group of friends and influence within the school ecosystem.

Much like you built up your reputation in school, creating an online presence is just as valuable, if not more. Creating an online influence for yourself can help you gain valuable connections, teach others (and learn from them too), develop power of persuasion, and become regarded as a thought leader.

If you are in the marketing industry, you may idolize people like Chris Brogan and David Meerman Scott for their high influence, visibility and knowledge. I, like many of you, have sat down wondering how to become like them.

Here are 20 key tips to follow to build your online influence:

1. Don’t talk about your service or product. Instead, talk about customer problems and needs and develop meaningful content around those.

2. Be transparent. You will become more credible and trustworthy if you are honest online.

3. Follow great people.

4. Online to offline. Make connections online and continue the relationships offline at events or meet ups.

5. Start conversations with others. If someone shares your article on social media, writes about your product, criticizes you, or asks you a question, answer. That is key to building relationships.

6. Be early in the news cycle so you share information that people are looking for and haven’t seen anywhere else. If you are able to write about or share breaking news, people will come to you more for industry leading breakthroughs.

7. Share good content consistently. When people come to expect you to share and post content regularly, and it is good content, they will keep coming back to you.

8. Let your passion shine. The more devotion and passion you show in your work, the more others will see it and believe it. This will bring them into your content and will entice them to engage with you.

9. Talk about others. If you can praise others, discuss great companies, review an outstanding product/service, etc. people will recognize that, appreciate it, and perhaps return the favor.

10. Repeat your tweets. I will always remember what Guy Kawasaki said about retweets: It is a good practice to RT an article about four times over the course of a day for it to get noticed and shared.

11. Understand your audience and build content around that. If you are a lawn mowing manufacturer and know your audience is interested in lawn care, write about that.

12. Don’t try to be all things to everyone. Instead, master one niche. It is best to focus in on one particular topic (for me it is internet marketing) and share your expertise. Don’t try to write about five different topics; people will get confused about what you stand for if you do this.

13. Be active on other people’s communities. If you want to be seen and noticed, you have to go find other people, not hope that they will come to you. If your audience hangs out on a niche social network site, get involved there and in turn they may come into your community if you build effective relationships on their site first.

14. Listen, then engage. If there is a breaking news story in your industry, a massive online attack on your brand, or a common theme to your listeners’ questions/comments, understand them and then engage.

15. Network with other influencers. Once you have become influential in some degree, begin speaking with others that are already there.

16. Share your ideas. Long gone are the days where we secretly held in every trade secret. Today, it is best to share your knowledge and help everyone around you grow and improve. If you help your industry as a whole improve, then you are in turn helping yourself and your business.

17. Make friends. The more you can enhance a friendship online (and continue it offline) the better you will fare online. If you appear to just be networking for the sake of getting fans and retweets, people will quickly pick up on that and be turned off. However, if you are genuine and building friendships, people will like you and want to talk to you.

18. Give more than you get. The more you can share news and expertise, the better. If you can help your audience, they will appreciate that and that appreciation can go miles towards building your online influence.

19. Use social media to compliment existing message channels. Just because social media is hot now doesn’t mean you should abandon your traditional ways of reaching others. If you are used to interacting with your audience via forums, email, podcasts and events, keep doing those. You can use social media to continue those relationship and gain new ones.

20. Make something worth talking about. David Meerman Scott calls this a ‘worldwide rave.’ If you can create novel, interesting content, others will talk about it and share. If you are simply reposting content that others already put out, you won’t attract many viewers.

What are some ways that you have built your online influence? Have you implemented any of the above 20 methods? If so, which worked best/worst for your or your company?


Sep
07

David Meerman Scott Speaks on New Rules of Marketing and Branding

david meerman scott

The initial rules of marketing and advertising were to interrupt people in order to sell them a product or service, costing businesses millions of dollars from their budgets each year. The rules of marketing and advertising have changed dramatically. Now, buyers are finding the answers to their problems online via blogs, social media, websites and forums.

This week, [I] had the chance to interview David Meerman Scott, a leader at the forefront of Internet marketing and PR, about how he is assisting and creating this shift. He also dives into creating new marketing campaigns for startups in the Boston area, and let’s [me] in on his Grateful Dead fascination.

As you may know, Scott currently resides around Boston, but is known worldwide for his ideas that are scripted in his two books, The New Rules of Marketing and PR and World Wide Rave.

New Rules is currently published in 24 different languages, and for good reason. Not only does Scott speak throughout the United States on new marketing, but all over the world. Scott also spent a majority of his 25-year marketing career overseas. He was the Asia Marketing Director for Knight-Ridder and afterwards was based for almost ten years in Tokyo and then Hong Kong.

No boundaries or borders have or will stop Scott from carrying out his passion and message. His twenty-five dedicated years to the marketing industry illustrates this.

Out of all the places in the world, Scott has now settled in Boston. I couldn’t help but ask why he chose to reside here of all places. He told me, “While Madison Avenue in NYC is the center of offline marketing, Boston is the center of new (web based) marketing with all the plugged in people and companies located here in the Boston area. When you attend local events such as tweetups, you’re not just meeting the top people in Boston, you’re meeting some of the most influential new marketers in the world.”

Rightly so, as Boston has been named as the world’s marketing and social media hub, and just yesterday we announced that Boston is still on top as the #1 Global Innovation Economy.

Since most are already familiar with Scott’s widely documented and agreed upon marketing theories, [I] decided to instead ask him how to create a successful marketing campaign for a start up company around the Boston area based on successful and failed campaigns that he has seen.

“[The] main thing is to NOT focus on your company’s products and services. (Nobody cares about your products except for you and others in your company),” Scott told us. This is why it is highly advised to never self-promote your brand on social media or blogs because no one wants to read about you; they want to read about their problems and how they can be solved.

“Most of the implementation challenges people tell me about involve the shift from marketing products and services to the much more effective approach of focusing on a buyer persona and creating information that helps solve problems for buyers,” continued Scott. I learned of this exact concept while in college, as I was assigned to read his book New Rules of Marketing and PR for one of my courses. This was one of the most resonating points from his book at the time.

“A secondary challenge is to get marketers away from a reliance on offline marketing techniques and [get] started with online initiatives.” Companies that have used traditional advertising and marketing find it very difficult to let go of offline activities and switch to a more uncontrollable online marketing strategy.

To alleviate some of their concerns, Scott has created a Marketing Strategy Template which you can access here. This is a simple two-page plan to help companies, “shift out of the comfort zone of preaching about products and services and advertising features and benefits.”

Parallel with corporate online marketing is Scott’s strong belief in personal branding. You will see his personal brand laid out very well on his website, blog, and Twitter page. Scott took the time to explain the difference between corporate and personal branding from his perspective.

“Well, all marketing comes down to people working with people. So all branding, at itsessence, is personal branding. Companies like Toyota and BP get in trouble because they develop these big corporate brands but when you look closely in a time of crisis, it falls apart because nobody knows or can engage with the people.” We saw this all too well during BP’s crisis management efforts that failed miserably for awhile.

Before [I] ended [my] interview with Scott, [I] had to ask about his passion for the Grateful Dead since he and Brian Halligan of Hubspot wrote their new book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.”

Aside from being an avid fan, Scott found himself, “amazed that the band could attract such a huge following. When I really thought about it, I realized it was because of their marketing. So did my friend Brian Halligan who is CEO of HubSpot. So we decided to write a book about it.”

While Scott is a local resident to Boston, he is making his own worldwide rave for new marketing concepts. I, and probably many of you as well, have emulated many of his strategies both personally and at our jobs to learn the new ways of marketing and PR.

To keep up to date with David Meerman Scott, I highly recommend checking out his website, reading his blog, attending some of his speaking engagements, and following him on Twitter. You will be surprised how much you will learn from him very quickly.

Note about Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead: “In this spirit, Brian and I are donating 25 percent of the royalties from our book to the Grateful Dead Archive at the University of California, Santa Cruz, to support further study of the Grateful Dead.”

I originally wrote this article for BostInnovation under the New Marketing Column, as I am their New Marketing writer.

Sep
03

AT&T Represents The Worst Of Customer Experience

I have never had enough fuel to write a post that criticizes a company, but my experience with AT&T has been so terrible I feel that it needs to be discussed.

Quick Background:

I have been a customer of AT&T for over eight years on my family’s plan. Last year my contract was up so I renewed it with an iPhone. The service was decent for awhile, but as of the past three months it went downhill fast.

The Issue:

Every single call I had, whether a three minute conversation with a friend, an hour long call to home, or a half hour long conference call, would drop for no reason. It is not the location that was the issue; I made calls in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and San Francisco and had the same problem.

I brought my iPhone to Apple first because I love their customer service and assistance. They graciously replaced the phone for free TWICE for the same problem, but highly recommended that I go to AT&T to get help with my service issues.

Soon after getting my second replacement phone, I found out I could be put on my company’s Verizon plan so they would cover the monthly costs since we all use our cell phones for work calls. Between not wanting to deal with AT&T to fix my service problem (I know their customer service is not helpful from past experiences) and wanting to be on my company’s plan, I decided that I was going to leave AT&T.

When I signed up for AT&T I signed the contract and agreed to the $125 cancellation fee if I left before the two years were up; I was not expecting to leave this early. However, since my service was so terrible, I felt I had a strong case to fight the cost.

I called AT&T and explained that all calls, work and personal, dropped every time no matter where I was. This was unacceptable for a service we pay good money for. I then told them I was planning on leaving. The woman on the phone immediately copped an attitude to me and refused to understand my problem and would not waive the fee.

I said I understood that I signed a contract which included the cancellation fee, but then I asked, “Doesn’t the contract say that AT&T will give you service that works?” Their commercials even boast that they have the highest coverage nationwide of all services. The woman replied with, “Well we don’t guarantee complete service. Sorry you didn’t receive good service.” (in a very cold tone nonetheless).

Frustrated, I said I disagreed with their reasoning of not letting me get out without paying the fee, and ended the conversation. Since I was under my mother’s account, she proceeded to call them the next day. The man she spoke with was VERY rude to her, and eventually told her, “What, do you want us to put up a cell tower right next to her house?!” (Not to mention this guy was the manager as she escalated the issue to upper management). I live in Boston, there should be great service in a big city.

They refused to waive the fee for her as well. She firmly told him that she would be taking our whole family off of the account as soon as her and my brother’s contract were up since they were so unhelpuful and rude. They did not care.

What this demonstrates:

AT&T doesn’t get customer service. I am sitting here questioning why Apple was even partnering with them since Apple is the epiphany of great customer service. If you want repeat business, loyal customers and great word of mouth marketing, then treat the customers well, take time to understand their problems, don’t get rude or snappy, and act (even though you may not believe) that the customer is always right.

Isn’t that the long standing practice of customer service, that the customer is always right? If you disagree with the customer, you don’t get paid. AT&T was so adament on charging me $125 for leaving the service, but now they are losing three accounts (which pays them over $200 a MONTH!).

Think about the opportunity cost here: lose one account, leave the customer happy even though they are leaving, and continue getting paid by the remaining family members. Or, take your $125 and lose three accounts. Doesn’t it just make sense to waive the fee?! If anything, it is the disappointment of their customer service that really fires me above the actual fee.

In the end, I ended up getting rid of AT&T and having to pay the cancellation fee. AT&T, you win in that aspect, but lose huge with my family and I. Little did they know that I’m a blogger and am writing this right now. I figured it was worth it to get rid of that worthless company and pay a fee to do so and be able to move on with Verizon instead. (Although I’m still not happy that they still made me pay when they didn’t hold up on their end of the service).

Conclusion:

The customer is always right. Take time to understand the customer’s problem. They were not focused on my problem, they were focused on their immediate benefit. If you can’t foresee the wrath a decision like this can have in the future, you are not an ethical company.

A final note to AT&T:  you failed me and those that are reading this. If you chose to understand my problem and realize it is a legitimate one, I would still have left your service but would have left knowing you treated me well and understood me. Instead, you are left with an unsatisfied customer, a degrading post that I hope many read, and are losing more accounts just because you wanted your fee.

If you have AT&T, how have they treated you? Have you switched because of their poor service and support? Let me know your story below. (I hope AT&T sees this post and comment threat).

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