Eighty percent of success is showing up. — Woody Allen

My company, Kefta, helps its clients, usually Fortune 500 companies with e-commerce operations, improve their online conversion rates. We typically increase sales by 10–20%. This is not rocket science, more akin to Retail 101, simple things like modifying pages to stop showing offers for products we know the user has already purchased, or making offers more relevant when we know the prospect is interested in a specific product (e.g. because they come from Google after searching for that keyword).

Sometimes I wonder if what we are doing is not too sophisticated by far, when I see particularly boneheaded practices at places that really should know better. Dell is often touted as a model of logistical and operational excellence, and for being a web-centric company. My experience is that many products they carry are not listed on the web site and can only be ordered by phone. You also have to phone to get a discount.

Despite being a telecoms engineer by training, I loathe phones. Phones are great for keeping an emotional connection with friends and family, but are a staggeringly inefficient form of communication for business purposes. They do not leave an audit trail, and even when they do (my voice mail system automatically forwards them to me by email as a MIME-encoded WAV attachment), they hog disk space and are not searchable. You can scan an email in a few seconds, but are forced to listen to voice mail at whatever pace it was dictated. Well, at least with WAV attachments, I can skip back to write down a phone number without having to replay the whole message.

Coming back to Dell, I recently needed to buy a Gigabit Ethernet switch from them. I sent an email to my rep, which he promptly ignored. I tried calling, at least 4 or 5 times, but my only option was voice-mail jail. In the end, I passed the buck to a junior colleague, who tried to leave voice mail and discovered he couldn’t because it was full. With persistence, he managed to get Dell to condescend to taking our order. No customer should have to go through so many hoops just so the vendor can take their money.

I am ragging on Dell, but most IT vendors do as poorly. I can understand expensive support calls receiving lower priority and resources than sales calls — after all, the company already has your money. Not having their act together for the simple matter of order-taking simply boggles the mind. Workflow systems, automatic call distributors and other technologies designed to prevent this have been available for many years. It looks like nobody has bothered to go through the user experience, even though these bugs (and many other glaring deficiencies like session timeouts) could be caught by the most cursory of inspections.

Dell sends an automated satisfaction survey after a sale. Unlike the order-taking process, the survey follows up if you do not respond… That said, it is the usual worthless multiple-choice question format asking me to answer irrelevant questions on a scale of 1 to 10. I don’t recall if the form had a box for free-form comments, but even if it did, the survey design is not-so-subtly signaling that no human is ever going to read what you type there, and thus it is not worth the effort to fill it. The numeric answers are probably going to be collated by an automated report nobody pays any attention to anymore, because garbage-in, garbage-out.

If you are serious about customer feedback, make it open and free-form, and make sure each and every feedback is read by a human (they come quite cheap in the Midwest and the developing world). They should be acknowledged personally (not with an automated reply) and followed through until the issue is either resolved or a decision is taken not to implement the changes suggested (because they are too expensive, impractical or whatever other reason). In both cases, inform the user who bothered to give feedback — most large companies pay a fortune in market research while at the same time ignoring the free (and usually very valuable) insights submitted by their customers. Granted, you cannot always resolve every complaint by unreasonable customers, but feedback on process issues should always be taken into consideration.

Sometimes dropped orders are due to active incompetence rather than careless neglect. While implementing a campaign for one of our clients, we realized there was a bug in one of their ordering forms that would cause them to drop an order. Our software sits on top of the client’s website and monitors it precisely for exception cases like these, and we told them we could, at no extra charge for them, send the dropped order details to an email address of their choosing so the order could be re-entered manually. They declined our offer for various reasons related to internal politics and trade union issues, essentially they were refusing to bend down and pick up money lying on the floor (our estimate was they were losing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of customer lifetime value every month due to inaction).

You don’t have to endure a multi-million dollar ERP or CRM implementation to improve follow-through. Where there is a will, there is a way, and a little creative thinking will usually find a work-around that can get the job done until a more robust solution can be deployed. One of our clients, a major bank, was in the early stages of developing their e-commerce, and simultaneously in the throes of a Siebel implementation. Their online forms would simply send an email to a branch office for manual processing. We were implementing a satisfaction survey for them, and offered to send an email automatically to a supervisor if the customer’s order had not been processed, at least until Siebel came on-line. Poor man’s workflow, but email workflows are often quite effective, specially for remedial situations like these.

As I mentioned, sometimes I think I am in the wrong business, and should instead start a consultancy to teach some clue to large companies that have grown complacent. But then again, that is assuming somebody cares, beyond paying lip service to Customer Relationship Management. There is no point in setting up complex systems to build a lifelong relationship with repeat customers if you can’t even take their orders in the first place.