by Todd Albertson on July 28, 2008
Britney Spears
By 2003, Britney Spears was the first artist in the history of Nielsen SoundScan to have four consecutive albums debut at number one, and she was one of the hottest celebrities in the world.
In 2004, Spears announced a career break in order to start a family. Because of this break and a variety of personal problems, her career was all but dead by 2006, and she was reduced from “super star” status to fodder for late night comics and tabloid magazines.
Americans love to give second chances. (We also love to destroy our heroes first, but that is a subject for another blog post.) So when the announcement was made that Spears would perform “Gimme More” at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, the anticipation was huge. This was to be her “come back” appearance when all was forgiven. She was [click to continue...]
by Todd Albertson on June 8, 2008
I am traveling this weekend and stayed at a motel last night. This morning I turned on the faucet in the shower. It has a single control (as opposed to separate hot and cold knobs). In America, the hot setting is supposed to be counter-clockwise (to the left). In some other countries this isn’t the case, but it is suppose to be that way here. I turned the control so the water would be slightly cool. It turned out to be very hot instead.
This would normally would have just been annoying, but it escalated to frustration because the faucet control even had the H (for hot) and the C (for cold) labels in the correct spots. The shower was plumbed improperly. When I checked out this morning I told the manger thinking she’d like to know about this problem. She replied “Yea, it has been that way for over 20 years now. We probably should fix it someday.” Ugh…
by Todd Albertson on May 27, 2008
I was recently trying to contact someone regarding one of my domains. The company is based in the US and their website is in English. I had to use a webform which wouldn’t accept my submission unless I selected a language preference. My choices were English - UK, English - Other, English - All Other Areas.
This seemed just plain dumb to me. What are they going to do, customize the spelling in their reply depending upon how you answered this question? Yes they could be using this for market research but there are far better ways to gather this type of information with web analytic tools.
Bottom line, it was just poor web design and not user friendly!
by Todd Albertson on May 20, 2008
Many years ago I was a customer of a CPA who had another business client which had the distinction of being the oldest customer of a bank which had recently been acquired by US Bank. The customer was upset because the service had gotten so bad that he closed his account. He thought this would “get management’s attention.”
It did not. No one asked him why he wanted to close his account or even later asked why he stopped doing business with their bank. It seemed that no cared. This always puzzled me because “Customer Service 101″ says you want to take care of your existing customers as they are a lot easier to retain than finding new ones.
Jump ahead ten years to today. This year I have been having the same problem with three vendors. They are small organizations (one and two person companies). I have been a good customer for many years, have not been demanding, paid my bills promptly, and have been understanding when they got busy and missed deadlines. All have gotten some notoriety this year and have lots of new business coming in.
It appears too much business. They are no longer responding to emails, messages in voicemail go
unreturned, projects aren’t getting done. This saddens me as these folks seem to be getting too big for their old customers. So like that US Bank customer, I’ve just stopped doing business with them.
Wouldn’t you think they would eventually wonder why? It doesn’t appear they do. Go figure!
