While shopping for a household cleaning product, I was shocked to see how dangerous most of the products are. According to their labels, the risks range from mild skin irritation up to “irreversible eye damage”. Ouch — these things sound more like what you’d find in a toxic waste dump than anything you’d bring into your home.

Eventually, I chose one of the cleaners that had only mild risks listed, and was in a fairly stable gel form — rather than a liquid that could get splashed around or spilled. And then it hit me: one of these brands really ought to play up the safety angle. They don’t even have to be “green”. In a market where everything else is highly toxic, simply positioning the product as “safer” than competing products (with some details to back it up) might be enough to earn significant market share.

Asking a customer to “calm down” is probably one of the worst things you can do. Think about it for a moment: if the person is genuinely pissed off, they’re going to view the request as condescending — an indication that you don’t understand why they’re upset. Similarly, if they’re already calm but you ask them to calm down as part of your regular customer service script, they’re going to figure out that you haven’t been paying attention to their actual state of mind.

Rather than telling people that they need to change their outward behavior, try asking them what it would take to resolve the problem as they view it. If you focus on addressing the actual reason why they’re unhappy, you’re much more likely to end up with a customer that behaves the way you want them to. In other words, spend your time fixing the problem, not guessing at how someone may or may not be feeling about the situation.

Thankfully, I have never worked for a collections agency. But given the current economic climate, I’ve been party to more than one conversation where a customer owes a vendor some money. They’ve got the same sob story as everyone else, and want a few more weeks or months to pay up. The trouble is, this scenario usually ends with the customer paying exactly zero of what they owe.

Given the above, it’s no wonder that vendors are hesitant to just extend a customer’s terms whenever they ask for more time. Yet there’s a good compromise for both parties: the customer pays something, anything — no matter how small — towards what they owe. It may seem trite, but this show of good faith can go a long way towards maintaining and eventually restoring the relationship when economic conditions improve.

I don’t have any data on it, but I’m guessing that customers who pay even 10% of an overdue bill are much more likely to make good on the rest later, compared to the true deadbeats who won’t pay a dime today and expect a free ride.

Whenever I make certain types of changes to my investment account, the company sends me a written confirmation in the mail. (This happens despite my preference for email notifications — “for your security”, they assure me.) So I get a letter in the mail, no big deal. But this goes from curious to annoying when I’ve made a few changes at once, and I’m greeted with a pile of envelopes from the same company.

If a company is sending me more than one piece of mail at the same time, why don’t they just collect all the messages from that day and put them in the same envelope? Better yet, why don’t they give me the option to receive all written correspondence in a weekly or monthly digest? A few envelopes and stamps saved for each customer, times a few million customers, should add up to significant cost savings — all the while being less annoying to the recipient.

Every day or so, I get a piece of spam from a site that I no longer use. Technically, I guess it’s not spam, since I did actually sign up for the site many months or even years ago, and I probably never turned off their email options. But here’s where it gets fishy: these emails don’t provide any way to unsubscribe, aside from logging into the website and changing your preferences.

I’m sure the site owners know that lots of registered users are inactive, and have no clue about their login information. By foregoing a proper “Unsubscribe” link in favor of forcing you to log in, the site virtually ensures you can’t get off their list. While this practice might be compliant with anti-spam regulations, it’s certainly not an ethical approach.

So unless you’re trying to be a spammer, always provide customers with an “Unsubscribe” link in each message, or let them unsubscribe by replying to the email. Don’t force them to log in to your site to complete the task. Otherwise, you run the risk that they’ll never be able to stop the unwanted messages, turning every one of your emails into a reminder of why they hate your company — and encouraging them to tell others how much you suck.

While waiting for a haircut over the weekend, I was subjected to the usual assortment of generic pop music on the in-store radio system. Interestingly, the salon just had the stereo tuned to a normal radio station; they weren’t playing Muzak or satellite radio. As each song came and went, I noticed a striking similarity between the songs on the pop station now, and the ones I heard in college ten years ago.

In short, a lot of the stuff on generic pop stations today seems to be indistinguishable from what they played five or ten years ago. This makes me wonder: what if an artist took a song from a decade ago, remixed it a bit, and released it again today? Would it gain traction on the radio and sales charts?

When you’re talking about pop music, it’s unlikely that anyone in today’s target audience would be old enough to recognize the song, let alone remember that it’s “old”. While I’m not aware of any singers that have re-released their own stuff every ten years or so (aside from “greatest hits” albums), it would certainly be an interesting experiment. And if the approach was successful, I wonder if the current listening audience would welcome the history and pedigree of the songs, or instead reject them as last decade’s product.

As I look ahead at my plans for the new year, I keep coming back to a troubling observation: anecdotally, the things I work the “hardest” on tend to be the least satisfying in the long run. I’m not saying that pursuing a goal isn’t worthwhile, or that putting effort into something is a bad idea. Rather, I think there’s a connection between working “hard” on something and our later evaluation of how successful the project ends up.

At the core, this is an issue of perceptions. When you’re building a product or writing a blog or doing any other task because you believe in the value of that task, you’re doing the work on your own terms. You probably chip away it on a regular basis, upping the effort when the needs or goals dictate it, but it never feels like hard or grueling work.

On the other hand, there are times when you have to research a specific topic or write a proposal or finish a job because a customer or your boss told you to. This type of task comes out of nowhere, often with an idiotically short deadline. It requires a lot of your time and feels like hard work — because it makes you put aside the things that you would normally be doing. By interrupting your optimal workflow and taking you away from the tasks you enjoy, it’s a pain in the ass and carries an opportunity cost as well.

Everyone says you have to work hard to be successful. But this doesn’t mean that you should commit your discretionary time towards things that feel like hard work. In fact, the opposite approach may actually be the most productive. Focus on the projects that flow naturally from your interests and motivations. The less these feel like hard work, the more they’re probably doing for your long-term success.

Software products have long and complex license agreements. Movies on DVD don’t seem to have any lengthy license, just a warning not to copy or show the movie in public. So why do you only have to agree to the software license once, yet DVDs stick the same warning up there every time you watch a disc?

I’m sure there’s some nuance here that I’m missing. Maybe DVD players can’t store a record of which discs you’ve watched before. Wait, that can’t be it, since my DVD player automatically remembers where I left off when I try to watch an old disc again. So I don’t think technology is the hurdle here.

Current practices aside, whoever makes the decision about a one-time license or disclaimer versus something that appears every time you use a product should be aware of one key point. The more that a person sees something, the more familiar it becomes, and the more likely they are to just ignore it next time. Basically, it’s a ‘cry wolf’ problem. So while it may seem logical to pummel users over and over with a big nasty disclaimer, that process might be making them unwilling to pay attention to such messages in the future.