Here’s a story about the US Postal Service (USPS) that, sadly, will come as no surprise to anyone who has dealt with them. A few weeks ago, a man needed to mail a 20-page document. So he bought a padded envelope that had a letter-size inside area, affixed the right number of stamps, and went to put the papers inside. However, the document didn’t fit, since apparently the envelope could only hold something like five pages at once. So, he needed to buy a bigger envelope.

The new envelope easily fit the papers, but he couldn’t get the stamps off the old one. Feeling industrious, he cut off the part of the old envelope with the stamps, and taped it onto the new one. He double-checked that the number of stamps was still correct for the larger envelope size, and his wife took it over to the post office for mailing.

What happened after she got there was appalling. The USPS employee looked at the envelope, and said that they couldn’t accept it. Apparently, taping over an unused stamp voids it, since someone could just wipe off the postmark and use it again. Well, the employee could have just told the customer about this, offered to replace the stamps, and leave it at that. But no, she had to use her tiny amount of power to be a real jerk.

The woman from the USPS proclaimed that the customer had “defaced government property”, as if taping over a stamp was on par with vandalizing the White House with spray paint. Then she told the customer that she would have to buy brand new stamps, even though the customer obviously knew nothing about the underground world of stamp re-users. And there wasn’t a hint of compassion or understanding about this obscure and frankly ridiculous rule. The employee was a brilliant scholar of postal code and the customer was an idiot, and that was that.

This behavior is unacceptable in any business, least of all an organization that’s funded by taxpayer dollars. Imagine a for-profit business treating its customers and shareholders that way. I’m really disappointed that the USPS has created a culture where treating customers like idiots is acceptable, and probably even encouraged. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that the USPS keeps losing money and crying to taxpayers that they need more funding to stay afloat. Maybe if they extended even the most basic common courtesy to paying customers, then they wouldn’t have so many problems making ends meet.

I know of at least one really bad restaurant that has a long line every weekend morning. The food is mediocre, the service is nonexistant, and the people at the cash register can’t even be bothered to say hello when you pay. And I’m not the only one who feels this way: the reviews on Yelp clearly indicate that the restaurant should be avoided.

If local residents are smart enough to avoid the place, who is filling up those tables and standing in line for an hour? Tourists. There are several hotels nearby, and people seem to gravitate towards the restaurant in huge numbers. Obviously, these people aren’t taking advantage of review sites before or during their trip.

This represents an opportunity for Yelp and similar local business review sites. Tourists and business travelers seem to be underrepresented in their user base. So why not start promoting the service in hotels? Yelp could advertise on the hotel website or in the lobby area, or strike a deal where the hotel concierge desk uses the site to recommend restaurants and other businesses.

Making local reviews accessible from hotels is a win for everyone. Yelp picks up more users, hotel guests get to visit better restaurants that they’ll enjoy more, and the hotel itself earns more repeat bookings as better-informed guests choose to stay there again.

The airlines seem to have a fee for everything these days. But I think they’ve missed the boat on certain charges. For instance, they could levy a fee when someone:

– Listens to music or another audio source so loudly that people can hear it several rows away

– Brings disgusting fast food on the plane that everyone can smell

– Gets up an excessive number of times to retrieve things from their luggage in the overhead bins

What’s so special about these situations? Each one makes the travel experience worse for other passengers. By adding a financial incentive to avoid this behavior, airlines would actually be instituting fees that the vast majority of passengers are happy about. And for the jerks who refuse to change their behavior, maybe the fee revenue they generate could go towards free drinks for everyone else. Considering how stressful flying can be, the average passenger certainly deserves it.

When you’re looking to buy a product online, and the website says something like “Usually ships in 1-2 months”, do you end up buying it? My guess is no. Yet somebody must be purchasing these items, or Amazon and other retailers would just hide them from view when they’re out of stock. But this makes me wonder: to what extent does the time elapsed between purchase and delivery impact the likelihood that a customer will return the product?

My guess is that the longer you have to wait, the greater the chance you’ll forget about the product or decide you don’t want it when it finally arrives. What’s the implication for online retailers? Among other things, make sure to keep customers posted on the status of their backordered items. Otherwise, you may find that you replenished the inventory only to have a large portion of those orders returned by the customer anyway.

After I use my vacuum cleaner, I empty out the bag and clean the parts that touch the floor. But no matter how careful I am, this process leaves some dust and debris on the floor, so I end up having to vacuum that area again. It’s a minor annoyance, for sure. But I worry about how this pattern influences the customer’s perception of the product. After all, if you use a product to solve a problem, but then have to use it again to clean up the mess the first step created, doesn’t that make the product seem rather inept? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I bet the same problem crops up with lots of products and services. All else equal, I think it’s something that product designers should strive to avoid.

A few days ago, I needed to find the addresses of two Metra train stations. So I went to the brand new Metra website and clicked something like “Find a station”. A text box and map appeared, so I typed in the city I wanted: Lake Forest. The map zoomed to Lake Forest, California. Great, right? Not exactly. Metra service only runs in Illinois and some parts of Wisconsin and Indiana, so the result was useless to me.

I ended up having to navigate through a list of stations to find the right one. That’s a shame, because Metra has all the data they need to improve their results dramatically. All they need to do is look at what they know about their customers, and then make certain assumptions about what those customers need. In my case, people can only ride Metra in a few states. Thus, they could filter the search results to only include cities and states where Metra has stations.

I’m sure there are many other examples of this across numerous industries. And the same approach should work in each scenario. Just think about who your customers and other stakeholders are, and write down what you know about them based on historical data or other sources. Then, when you have attributes that are obvious enough to be considered safe assumptions, try integrating those into your business rules and customer-facing applications. Chances are that task completion rates will increase, and customers will reward you with increased spending and long-term loyalty.

Considering how far technology has come over the past decade, it’s disappointing that some large companies still refuse to adopt tools that would improve the customer experience and drive sales. Here are several examples:

– Among those retailers that operate both online stores and physical locations, some of their websites don’t provide any indication of which products are online-only and which can be purchased in stores. I saw this problem with Sam’s Club and Bed Bath and Beyond — and that was last Saturday alone.

– Most websites still make it far too difficult to estimate shipping costs. Why should I have to add the item to my cart just to calculate the shipping rate? Wouldn’t it make sense to offer this functionality on the product page, since customers could easily be on the fence about even adding it to their cart if they believe the shipping would be too costly?

– Virtually every retailer assigns internal part numbers or SKUs to their products, and makes these numbers available on their website for ease of reference. But some stores hide the info, thus making it a lot harder to ask questions about that product when you’re talking to the store or call center. Why make things so much harder for your customers and employees?

Clearly, the technology exists to fix all of the issues above. However, I bet that some of the companies who are still doing things the old way are crippled by nasty legacy systems that make implementation of modern tools difficult. But if old technology is holding back progress this much in your company, perhaps it’s time to start scrapping the old tools and starting from scratch. Otherwise, the list of things you’d like to do but can’t shoehorn into your old systems will continue to expand — and customers won’t be patient about it forever.

We live in a world of asynchronous communication. You send an email, but you don’t know if the other person has received it. You leave a voice mail, but you don’t know if anyone has listened to it. You send an instant message, but can’t tell if your contact has looked at their IM window. In each case, you won’t know anything for sure until the other person responds to you.

In many cases, there is no need for instant gratification. That’s why email works so well: the recipient can schedule and manage and queue their replies to match their workflow. And for urgent matters, there’s always the telephone. But what about the bulk of communication, which is less than urgent but still important enough to warrant a timely reply?

The important-but-not-quite-urgent category of messages tends to be very frustrating. The sender expects to hear something back right away, but all they get is silence. For instance, they might have asked a vendor when an order will be shipped, or asked a colleague to investigate a problem, or asked a friend about some travel dates. In each case, it’s important for the person making the request to know that the other party received it. If they don’t hear anything back within a short period, they’ll feel frustrated and perhaps a little insulted.

What’s the answer? When someone asks you to do something that might be time sensitive (in other words, that person or a third party will be pissed if you ignore the request for a day or more), just send them a reply right away that says “OK” or “Got it” or “Will do”. It doesn’t have to be elaborate — all you’re doing is letting them know that the message made it through. Give this a try, and I bet your customers and colleagues and friends will bother you a whole lot less about the stuff they asked you to do.

I’ve heard some bad hold music over the years. Usually, this means the music is a few decades out of date, and isn’t exactly the sort of classic mix that customers of all ages will enjoy. Other times, it’s a computer-generated soundtrack that only seems to exist in the alternate dimension of conference call services. But the music I heard while on hold with a small business earlier this week tops them all. The music was totally, um, ghetto — the sort of terrible hip-hop mix you’d hear from the souped-up car next to you after getting off the bus a few stops past downtown. If that’s the kind of music your customers are hearing while they wait on the phone for service, you should do everyone a favor: just let people listen to silence instead.

While walking back from the store on Sunday, I saw one of those signs designed to drum up support for Chicago’s 2016 olympic bid. The ad featured a picture of a cyclist or runner or swimmer or something, along with the text “We support the bid”. Presumably, the idea is that the venue displaying the sign is in favor of the olympic bid.

But there’s just one problem: the ad didn’t appear on an actual business. Instead, it was on a fence directly in front of an empty lot, with no indication of who owns the lot or what it might become. Who, exactly, is the “we” behind the ad? Without an obvious answer to the question, the ad becomes rather meaningless and could easily backfire.

That’s a shame, because this particular lot would be a perfectly decent place for most outdoor advertising. It’s near several hotels and restaurants, a lot of people walk by, and there are few competing billboards. But the ill-conceived text ruins the whole thing. What can we learn from this? If you’re going to place ads on vacant properties, you should probably be careful when using words like “we” as part of the message.