Customer Service Failures – Fedex

Posted on September 22, 2011 by interman

I am starting a new series of posts on customer service. As most of you know, I consider customer service to be one of the things that either makes a company great or drags it to its knees. So, I am going to write about some of the more insane customer service interactions I have had in an effort to show people how NOT to do it.

This week, I was traveling near Hartford, CT. Today, I had to FedEx a check to our stores in Virginia. I like FedEx for a lot of reasons, but on this trip, not so much.

I have an online account, so I login and print the shipping label from the house. I then did the next logical thing; I looked up drop boxes for (1) a FedEx envelope and (2) a place to drop off the envelope. There are no full service locals in Middletown, CT (closest city), so I opted for self-serve. I printed the top five locations and set off at 9:30 am (time is important).

The first location I found, all the supplies in the top (not many there) were soaked and obviously been there for days if not weeks because they were stuck to each other and to the stainless steel container. So, I go to the next container, this one being at the USPS office. I opened it and found the plastic label containers and nothing else. Now, I feel like am on a scavenger hunt. Argh, mateys.

So, on to the third box. Inside were three large FedEx Pacs and nothing else. I know there is treasure out there somewhere. The fourth box, I struck gold. By Wesleyan University, I found a box, fully stocked, dry. Eureka!!! It was now 11:30 am and I was getting hungry from my quest. I look around for Tortuga for some ale and mutton when it occurs to me: “I bet FedEx would like to know that some of their drop boxes are out of supplies”!

Don’t start laughing yet.

I called the FedEx number and when it (yes “it”) asked me to say exactly what I wanted, I politely said “Complaint”. A very nice lad came on and I explained my dilemma and he said promptly “Let me transfer you to a manager”. It is important to remember here that I do not want or need anything, I just want them to fill their boxes for the next person.

The manager came on the phone and I recited my adventure tale. I could hear her typing and then she said “The drivers fill up all drop boxes every evening when they do the pickups.” That was it. Nothing more. Being dazed like a deer in the headlights, I said “So what you are saying is that between 6:00 pm last night and 11:00 am this morning, there was a rush of customers near these three locations and must have emptied them.” She said “Yes sir that is what happened.”

I was speechless. Was Ashton “punking” me? Where was the camera? What do I do? So I hung up. Then I busted out laughing uncontrollably and could not stop. (see the bottom of this post for what happened next).

Here is a company that has a terrific product, terrific brand, good intentions, but fails miserably on the front line customer service.

What does that mean for businesses? Simple; if customer service is not on the top 5 of a CEO’s priority list, look for lost revenue, lost business and struggling employees. This happened to Dell. Michael Dell (whom I met and is incredibly smart) started the company based customer service. Then he handed it over to someone that removed it from the company’s mantra. Michael had to take over again and restore customers to the front.

Customer service and customer satisfaction MUST be at or near the top of any company’s objectives, missions statements, whatever makes every employee aware and every customer happy.

P.S. I felt it was rude of me to hang up so I called FedEx back. A wonderful rep named April came on the phone and asked why I was laughing. I apologized and told her the story. She chuckled as well. She took down the addresses of the boxes and said she would send to the regional facility for fulfillment. She thanked me for helping and apologized for the original answer. Thank you April.

P.P.S. I would love to hear your customer service stories. I will include them here if you want. Feel free to email me or call me (just don’t FedEx them to me). I promise good customer service.

Final Thoughts with Don Noble

 

 

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Let’s have a meeting to discuss that. Or Join me in the seventh circle of hell.

Posted on September 20, 2011 by interman

I HATE meetings. Wow, that is a load of my mind. I am sorry if I offend anyone that really enjoys meetings, but they are a colossal waste of time and money.

I am not talking about training meetings (which are not really meetings, but are training sessions) or informational meetings (like a quarterly results presentation). I am talking about the discussion meetings, update meetings, or the very worst, the “get input from each department before making a big decision” meetings.

Wait a minute, Don. Consultants love meetings. It is true, meetings are an hourly consultants dream. You spend several hours preparing (how often have you heard “I cannot talk now because I am preparing for the meeting at 2), then you get to the meeting and sit while everyone else talks and talks. Meanwhile the consultant sits looking at the billable hours’ clock on the computer ticking away.

In fact, in one of my professional services positions, I had a timer on my computer because we were mandated to bill separately for each minute in each meeting as it was expressly written into the fixed price contract that meetings were above and beyond the scope. One customer that figured it out, excluded me from meetings, and then would come to my desk and recite everything that happened. Well, we billed him for that time anyway.

I had the CEO of one of my recent customers tell me (after I asked why every Thursday was booked on his calendar) that he forced everyone to have their meetings on Thursday so he would only waste one day of the week. When I got up from the floor from laughing so hard, I told him my strategy.

Any meeting that goes longer than 15 minutes is a waste of time.

Yes, in fact, no matter the assignment or job I am about to take (full-time, part-time, contractor, nanny), the very first words out of my mouth are exactly that. I tell everyone I don’t like meetings and they if they go longer than 15 minutes, then I will go and do something else.

I have had customers ask me to run their meetings for them. You would be surprised how much faster the day goes when everyone is prepared for the meeting, the discussion is moderated and kept to the point, items needing more work are taken off-line, and of course I have little Nerf footballs to throw at violators (ok, I made that last one up).

So, don’t call me if you like meetings and do not want to change. Maybe I will change the name of my company to “Meeting Busters”. No, maybe not.

Final Thoughts with Don Noble

P.S. I have renamed my Blog in tribute to Tom Sharp of Kelser Corporation. After every (short) meeting I had with him, he would say “Final Thoughts with Don Noble”. I am going to assume it was out of respect. Thanks Tom.

 

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Be afraid, be very afraid (of who is looking at your data)!

Posted on September 18, 2011 by interman

I was delayed by a few days as I was doing research. That being said, I found something out today that pretty much scared me silly.

A little background. As most of you who know me, I used to be a technologist. Now it is a hobby of mine. I like to know how things work so I can also understand how to fix them.

My son and I are traveling and while traveling, we stopped at Starbuck’s, McDonalds and several other places with public Wi-Fi. When stopping at these locations, I started thinking again about internet security. If you remember when TJ Maxx lost all those credit card numbers, the kid who did it was bored and sat outside different stores looking for open Wi-Fi networks. He then used a packet sniffer to read every packet. I thought that was way too easy to it was then that I began my research.

Fast forward a little to when I started writing this at my hotel. I was streaming a movie from my home server and was listening to it in the background. (FYI, the movie is legal and I legally own it and was simply place-shifting, for those authorities reading this blog). In the middle of writing, my internet connection stopped and I called technical support. Long story short, the ISP shut down my internet access because I was downloading copyrighted material. WOW!

After that, I started digging. I read about deep packet sniffing, Wi-Fi monitoring, security protocols and other similar items. What I found startled even me.

The statistic for the day: the odds that someone is looking at your internet packets at any given time is about 99.999999% and the odds that they are looking more deeply than you think is about 99.999998%. And yes, they can figure out what you are doing.

I do not want to write a technical article, but I do need to include a few things to make my point. First of all, if you do not believe me, think about the route that one packet of your data goes through. Your computer (hopefully virus free), to your wireless router (hopefully not being sniffed), to your ISP (probably listening to avoid lawsuits), to a backbone internet provider (probably AT&T who is defiantly listening), to the company’s ISP (probably listening to avoid lawsuits), to the company’s internal network (reading every packet to understand bandwidth, to their servers (hopefully not compromised). Now, add in layered monitoring by the FBI, NSA,  and other acronyms and you see my point. Here is just one of about a billion articles on the subject.

Let’s face it; this makes Facebook security look like a non-issue. For the record, I do not believe in illegal downloads. I think a certain amount of monitoring is important prevents terrorism. I also believe in the Bill of rights and especially privacy and due process (which BTW, this monitoring seems to violate all of these). But this is not why I wrote this article.

The question remains, what is your business’s vulnerability to this threat. Small businesses are the most at risk, followed by larger companies that do not take the threat seriously. Small businesses do not have the IT resources to work on this problem and cannot devote time to learning.

But any open ISP can be and most probably is a listening post (BTW, AT&T provides the most free internet Wi-Fi in the United States). In fact, I could imagine a scenario where the MPAA or the NSA for that matter, pays the ISPs to scan every packet looking for copyrighted material. Any other find (pornography, passwords, and your mother’s recipe for cookies) is just a bonus.

How is your company protected? How many of your employees (from the CEO to the janitor) access company data from a public hotspot (airport, Starbucks, a smart phone)?

Two of the companies I consult to are creating professional services around this topic. I am also considering starting another company that does nothing but security. If you want any additional information, either from them or me, please email me.

Don

”’Before we were bombarded with the Television reality series, “Big Brother” described any overly-inquisitive or overly-controlling authority figure, or attempts by government to increase surveillance.”
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_did_the_expression_%27big_brother%27_originate#ixzz1YH2FSiHc

 

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Small Business Banking in the 21st Century

Posted on September 15, 2011 by interman

I have to be honest; I debated writing this particular post as it probably will piss off at least one of my friends. But after yesterday’s incredibly frustrating but enlightening day, I had to put this down on paper (metaphorically speaking, of course [Liar, Liar]). Warning: this is longer than my normal posts.

I follow the economy quite closely (my favorite non-work hobby) especially trying to adapt models to fit small business needs (demand rising, lending tightening, etc). Normally, the models work in classic symmetry but sometimes barriers to efficient models appear.

So, here is the story. My wife and I purchased a small business last year with 4 years of historical records. We have been running it for a year now. Like every small business we have invested in it and the first year did not show much profit but enormous growth. Some would say we know what we are doing. So we bought two more such businesses in June, again with 4 years of history. So, we are making money and running a successful small business enterprise.

We are opening a new store in a metro area. The lease amount is quite high but when I showed the landlord our financials (business not personal) he was satisfied. Wow. I heard commercial leasing was tougher since the last two recessions, so I was impressed.

So here comes the fun part. Our bank (will not name but they have a rising sun in their logo) where we have put our money and our cash flow for the past year, is a joke when it comes to business banking. What’s funny is that their problem is probably indicative of why most banks in the US are dysfunctional and this country is stuck in a rut.

To summarize what happened:
A banking rep came to my office and we discussed my short and long term plans. This was not her job and she made it clear that she was doing this temporary until the new person they hired started. She then laid out our required materials and I started compiling. I felt like I knew what was going to happen.

I received an email when I submitted our paperwork. This is the funny part:
1. The bank will not process this (approve it) unless I go though the SBA lending department. Which, of course, has tougher standards than the bank? (I will talk at length in another post about the SBA lending process). So I am caught in catch-22.
2. The trucks I want to lease are $96K and we have a threshold of $100K for corporate leasing to take over. However, the entire package has to be approved by the SBA lending process anyway. So, no lease if the bank would not approve me for a loan anyway. Catch-22.
3. They cannot even begin the process until they have a complete application (all 400 pages) of tax returns, financial statements, etc. And even then, that only gets to the application phase and no guarantees.

To make my point, you need to know what happened next. I went to another bank (that we do business with) and what the person told me was “I am not surprised. The head leasing person quit last year and the place has been in turmoil”.

Now if you read this far; congratulations, I am about to make my point. There are statistics that say that small businesses are responsible for 98% of hiring. So based on my experience with this bank and others, I see the current banking climate like the Hoover Dam. There is all this cheap money (the water) available to banks and lending organizations, the dysfunctional nature of banks has blocked all but the most un-needing business customers from receiving any of the funds. Either key people have quit or the bank has a zero risk policy, but no one knows what they are doing or no one wants to take any risk with business customers.

So, thinking back to my conversation with Diane Feldman from Gap International about high performing companies, this is a lesson for CEO’s. In your company, when transitions occur (personnel, market, customers, technology), it is very important that you address these changes and not just hope they work out. It is very easy to lose focus on some details when a company grows, but you need to be aware that small decisions can cause big disruptions.

Anyway, I am thinking of starting a bank. I read an article about how to borrow at near 0% from the government and then buy treasuries (cannot remember if it was bonds, notes, or bills) and then live off the interest. So if anyone wants to start a bank with me, send me an email.

 

 

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What is your time worth OR should I be doing that?

Posted on September 14, 2011 by interman

A long time ago (well, it felt like a long time), I read an article that detailed a way to choose what things you should do yourself and what you should pay someone else to do. I cannot remember the author or publication but full credit to them. I do think this is a very relevant subject so I am going to try and recreate here.

The principle goes like this. Let’s say you make 75K per year. You are paid for about 240 days per year @ 8 hours per day. Note: a lot of my colleagues will challenge this number but for the example, changing the number only slightly changes the outcome and does not change the premise.

So, in this example, your time is worth about $39 dollars per hour. The article went on to say that, using this as a hurdle, any task that you can pay someone less to do, you should make them do and any task you would have to pay more, you should do yourself. So, if I can pay my neighbor $20 per hour to mow my lawn, I should have him do it and put my time to something that makes $39 per hour.

Of course, there are a lot of arguments and conditions to this example. If the $20 per hour does a job half as good, should you step in? What about the satisfaction of making your spouse feel better when you take something off the honey-do list (a big one in my marriage). But, put those aside for a moment.

I wanted to see if you could translate to the business environment. What is interesting is that I see a lot of companies making the same mistakes day after day.

I was CFO for a technology company about3 years ago. The CEO was an extremely intelligent man but I found out that he was billing himself out to customers for work that could have easily been handed to someone else. Instead the company suffered as he was always out on assignment. In the end, the company had to sell to maintain payroll.

At another company, I found out that the sales people (including the top 2 guys that were responsible for 90% of the sales) were filing out purchase orders, dealing with vendors, and spending hours on conference calls trying to project manage a client. Here the sales team was dragging down their (and the company’s) average per hour wage because of the tasks they were being forced to do.

My ongoing goal of using numbers and finance to improve the efficiency of companies, boils down to this: Look around your organization. If you have people doing tasks that are able to be performed at a less costly rate, shouldn’t you make some changes?

Thanks to Stan and Matt for the inspiration for this post.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
-Abraham Lincoln

 

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Are your wheels on the ground and are you headed in the right direction?

Posted on September 14, 2011 by interman

A very smart colleague of mine (Diane Feldman from Gap International) and I were having a conversation about what makes companies successful. As we continued our discussion, we came up with a metaphor that seemed to be perfect in describing what it takes to be a high performing organization.

An automobile on a journey.

Think of an automobile as a company with the CEO/President as the driver. There are two major components to this metaphor. (1) the physical auto itself and (2) the destination and how to get there.

The physical car is the company itself. The tires are like sales people or the sales process. It they are getting good traction, you can go faster or slower without regard to the weather conditions. The gas tank is your product. No matter what you sell or provide, having a full gas tank (good products and services) keeps you going. I like to think of the engine as the people that deliver your products and services. If it is finely tuned and working in unison, you have all the power you need to move forward. Finally, last but not least, you have the structure and shell. This is all the support services of the organization. Purchasing, accounting, finance, etc.

The destination and how to get there and is the more amorphous of the two. The CEO needs to have a vision of where the company is going and how it is going to get there. Sometimes this is explained in the vision statement or the companies goals and these are reasons why they are good to have. But it goes beyond that. By defining the market, the opportunities, the threats (yes, SWOT analysis), it is easier to figure out what where you are going. Metrics and research are your guideposts and road signs. Your GPS is a way to see how others would get to your destination, but may not be the best route (traffic, congestion, road work aka, competitors, saturation, and legal issues).

The examples are plentiful but the example explains itself. If you have a really strong car (company) and you know all of its parts are ship shape, but you have no firm direction or vision, then you are not really going anywhere.

If however you know the market perfectly, have your strategy all laid out, your path chosen with all the landmarks laid out, but you do not have the car (company) internals in line, then it will be a very rough ride. Blow a tire, battery dies, run out of gas, lose a key employee, etc.

I have known both types of CEO’s. One CEO I know one who is brilliant. He came into a company and within a month had the entire vision, direction, path, and obstacles laid out for a highly successful company. What he forgot was the car to get him there had parts from three different makes put together, one tire missing, and the timing of the engine was so off, that the pistons were pushing against each other (sound familiar). The CEO failed.

I knew a terrific CFO that was promoted to CEO. Within a month, she had the company humming. Each department worked together perfectly, the car was in tune and polished, everyone liked it. But when the CEO was at industry conferences or approached by the media, she never talked about the future, just how well her company ran. Within a year, sales had declined and then the company started losing people because of a lack of business. The CEO could never understand with a well run car/company, how you could not succeed.

So, the moral of this story is simple. Unless you have a good running car (company) and have the destination and directions (vision and focus), you can never be a high performing CEO.

Diane Feldman works for GAP International, whose work ranges from enterprise-wide breakthrough growth and organizational change management initiatives to transformational leadership growth and leadership development programs. For more information, see http://www.gapinternational.com/.

Donald Noble, well, you know who I am by now.

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My New Website

Posted on September 13, 2011 by interman

After much prodding from my clients, colleagues, friends and my wife, I have decided to update my company website. I am changing the format to a blog to I can continue my advice.

So, for those who don’t know me, my name is Donald Noble and I am an accomplished entrepreneur, CFO, franchisee, teacher and adviser. I write this blog to put into writing my answers to most of the questions i have answered in my career.

So read, enjoy and from time to time, please comment.

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