In a typical post-holiday scenario, I needed to exchange a few pieces of clothing that I received as gifts, since they were the wrong size. So I went to the retailer’s website and tried to locate the items I had. Even searching by the style number from the packaging, I found several entries for every product. Some were in the Top Gifts category, others in the Men’s category, and others in the Women’s category. How could the same item be in all these sections? Apparently, the store sells a lot of unisex items, so they classify stuff in lots of categories at once.

When the same product appears under more than one URL, it’s referred to as “Duplicate Content”. Most of what you read on the topic is related to search engines, in that Google and others don’t like finding the same content in more than one place — and often drop the extra copies in favor of the most important one. This is a complex issue, but my point here is that search engines aren’t the only ones who dislike duplicate content. Customers hate it even more.

Why would customers be annoyed by finding the same item in more than one place? Simple: it’s confusing. When I saw the gift I received in both the men’s and women’s sections, I thought I had the wrong item — until I finally realized the unisex stuff is listed all over the place.

So what’s a retailer to do? Just create a master product page for each item. You can still link to it from each category, but all the entries should point to the same place. Then, put a little category or tag list on that page to say who the product is for, or what attributes it includes. That way, nobody gets perplexed by products that seem to be multiplying all over the website. At the same time, you’ll still be providing the categories and navigation that help customers find the right item in the first place.

Over the weekend, I helped one of my relatives with a computer question that should have been very easy to answer. In short, he needed to switch the video output on his laptop from the built-in screen to an external monitor. After a bunch of trial and error, we figured out the right keyboard shortcut, which was the “Fn” key plus the F5 key.

Why was this so difficult? For starters, this particular shortcut seems to be different on every make and model of computer. I think my laptop uses Fn+F7, while others use Fn+F8 or even F10. Making matters worse, the icon that appears on the keys varies a lot, so there’s no obvious way to figure out the feature from the image alone.

How can computer manufacturers improve this situation? Two solutions come to mind. First, they should try to use the same keys for a given feature. If Fn+F8 is the most popular, they should default to that in future models. Second, they could try using similar icon designs on the keys, or at least write out the feature, e.g. “Switch Monitor”.

Wishful thinking? Probably. But given how cheap it would be to just adopt a standard way of accessing and identifying this type of feature, maybe some computer designers will eventually get it right.

Recently, I tried to locate some good winter movies. You know, the kind that are typically set during the holidays and feature a steady helping of snowfall and wintery adventures (or misadventures, as the case may be). Well, I went to Netflix and tried a bunch of different searches. For instance, I typed in phrases like:

– “winter movies”
– “Christmas movies”
– “movies set in winter”

And so on. However, not a single search produced any useful results. For all their talk about making the recommendation system better, and all the weird “Taste Preferences” that Netflix says I have, they never thought to tag certain movies based on the obvious traits of “good for the winter” or “set during the holidays”.

I don’t know if the type of filtering or tagging that I described makes sense on a year-round basis. Maybe customers are more likely to be looking for actors named “Winter,” rather than movies set during that season. But it certainly seems like there’s a time of year when seasonal or other descriptive attributes deserve a greater role in the Netflix search algorithm. I know the people at Netflix love to run tests, so I’d be very curious to see if this approach helps generate more interest in winter movies that would otherwise go unrented for years.

For some odd reason, I’ve picked up a new guilty pleasure: watching a ridiculous show on HGTV called “House Hunters.” No, I’m not in the market for a house. But with so little in the way of new programming available in December, it’s hard to resist watching the generally clueless people choosing between houses that you couldn’t pay me to live in.

There’s one common theme that just cracks me up every time. A ton of these houses and condos are being sold without appliances. Many lack a washer and dryer, and a surprising number of them don’t even have a refrigerator or stove. Apparently, the previous owners took the appliances with them.

Maybe this is standard practice, but it’s still quite stupid. Instead of the property being move-in ready, the prospective buyer will have to purchase and install the appliances before they can live there. That’s an obvious obstacle. All else equal, I bet properties that include a full set of appliances sell faster — and for a higher price.

Nobody would try to sell a car without the tires. You probably couldn’t sell an iPod without the charger. A cell phone is a tough sell without a battery. So why do people rip out critical elements from homes before putting them on the market? Whatever the seller saves from taking the appliances with them is surely dwarfed by the cost of keeping the property on the market longer, and the lower offers they’re likely to get for a property that isn’t move-in ready.

There’s a great frozen pizza I like to buy at Trader Joe’s. Among other things, I selected it because it has the lowest calories and fat among all their pizzas. On my most recent visit to the store, I noticed that the box had changed a bit. And along with it, the calories went up, while the fat content went down.

What happened here? Did they change the ingredients? Or, did the ingredients stay the same, but they just measured everything using a new method? No matter what the cause, I’m sure I’m not the only customer who will be puzzled by this disparity. And I bet some people will stop buying the product or switch to another one if they’re confused by the sudden change in nutritional info.

Surely there’s somebody at the company who is responsible for the presentation of the nutritional info on the packaging. And when this info changes, the right thing to do is provide a little summary on the package itself, or put up corresponding signage at the point of sale. Something like this would do the trick: “We recently updated the ingredients in many of our frozen products, so you may notice that the nutritional information has changed.”

Granted, this doesn’t tell you why the changes were made. But at least it acknowledges that the customer is smart enough to notice the differences and make an informed decision about whether to keep buying those same products.

A few weeks ago, I received an automated reminder call from my doctor’s office to confirm an upcoming appointment. However, they called fairly late in the day — certainly after what I would consider normal business hours. I wasn’t near my phone at the time, so I ended up with a cryptic voice mail message from them. I then had to call the next day and talk to a live person, thus defeating the purpose of trying to automate this process in the first place.

Granted, they should probably change their message so that it’s clear even when left on someone’s voice mail, e.g. saying that there’s no need to call back if you’re keeping the original appointment. But the larger issue here is the actual scheduling of the automated calls. It seems obvious, but anyone using an automated phone call system should restrict the calls to very conservative business hours, like 9 to 5 on weekdays.

After all, what’s the point of calling at 7 or 8 pm if people are less likely to be at their phone, and might even be annoyed at getting a call so late? Plus, I would guess that people are more likely to call back with questions right after they receive a reminder call. If you’re placing these calls outside of your own business hours, you’ll just be frustrating people even more when they try to reach you during those times.

In short, the best time to place automated reminder calls is during business hours. You’ll reach more people on the first try, and customers won’t have any reason to be annoyed with you for calling at times that they’re unavailable, or during periods that your own call center or storefront or office is closed.

Last week, I called a store and asked them to place an item on hold for me. The retailer was having a big sale on lots of products, so I figured there was a good chance they’d sell out before I got there. However, once I arrived and asked for the item, it was nowhere to be found.

It turns out this wasn’t a problem. They had plenty of copies of that product in stock, and I quickly found one in the right size. I ended up buying something totally different, though, since my original choice wasn’t as nice as it looked online.

But what if I did want the first product? What if I got there and it was sold out, and they didn’t put one on hold for me? I would have been quite pissed. All of this made me think of a few tips that stores should consider when letting customers place items on hold:

– Tell the customer where they should go inside the store to pick up the item.
– Assign a claim number to the request, so there’s some element of accountability.
– Offer a service to hold the item longer than the usual end-of-the-day or 24 hour hold time, perhaps by charging a nominal fee for the privilege.

By implementing one or more of these improvements, the retailer would probably get more of the people who put items on hold to actually buy them. At the same time, the experience would be less haphazard from the customer’s point of view, thus improving their overall satisfaction with the purchasing process.

No, it’s not like Fight Club. You can talk about it all you want. But seriously, why do so many companies include competitors in their outbound marketing lists? I get several emails like that every week. A company that directly competes with us sends an email asking us to buy or resell their stuff. How dumb is that? Maybe they’re too lazy to check if their spam lists are filled with competitors instead of prospects. Perhaps they’re too naïve to know the difference. Either way, I can’t imagine the approach is getting them much in terms of results.

After going through many alarm clocks that were just too stupid to keep using, I finally have a fairly intelligent one. The best feature is the ability to move the time selector both forward and backward. In other words, if you overshoot the intended time when programming it, you just move the dial the opposite direction to reverse the change.

It’s amazing how few products support this simple adjustment, and how inconsistently it’s implemented. For example, my oven lets you increase or decrease the temperature with arrows for each direction, but there’s no such capability when setting the built-in clock.

I guess it’s a lot cheaper to make things with one-way controls. Or maybe that’s just the “standard” approach in the industry. Either way, the sorry state of these designs suggests that simply providing people with finer control over their inputs would lead to considerably higher customer satisfaction.

This seemingly innocuous text is from the tech support page of a vendor that I won’t be naming. If you saw this message, how would you interpret it? I’d say that they’ll get back to you by the next day, except in rare situations where volume is high. Well, after exchanging several emails with them, here’s what they really mean:

– Weekends are excluded, so the actual response time is 24-72 hours, after you factor in 48 hours of weekend downtime.
– Even during the week, responses often take two days instead of one.
– They only seem to send replies at the very end of the day pacific time, so hearing back in anything less than 24 hours is quite unusual.

What should the message really say? How about this:

“We try to respond to emails by the end of the next business day (US pacific time), but responses may take 2-3 business days when support volume is high.”

Yeah, it’s not as short and sweet as the original text. But at least it’s honest and tells customers what to expect. It’s frustrating enough when a product doesn’t work right. Customers may feel like the implicit promise of the product has been broken. It’s the job of tech support to make things right and restore the customer’s confidence in the product. But if your tech support process goes and breaks even more promises, it’s awfully hard to ever make that customer trust you again.