About a year ago, I went to the grocery store to buy coffee. They were out of the kind I usually get, so I chose another blend from the same company. Unfortunately, it tasted like crap, so I brought it back to the store. They refused to take it back, insisting that store policy prevents them from giving a refund on anything you’ve opened. I even asked one of the managers, who gave me the same story.

Prior to this little event, I shopped at that store a lot. I probably spent $200 a month there on groceries — until the coffee incident, anyway. Even though I was a loyal customer, they refused to make a small concession and take the bad coffee back. Instead, they clung to the sort of idiotic policies that really have no place in a small, locally-owned establishment.

I decided to shift my grocery spending to other retailers. Today, I’m buying most of my groceries at Trader Joe’s and Amazon. Trader Joe’s is a longer walk, but it’s also better food for less money. The point is that I would never have looked for alternatives if the local grocer just treated me right. In the year since the coffee incident, I’ve probably shifted $2,000 in spending to those other stores.

This means the local grocer has lost thousands of dollars in revenue and hundreds of dollars in margins over an $8 can of coffee. In all, this is a rather striking example of why you should treat your most loyal customers well, and never say that your official policies are set in stone.

If the design of your product provides built-in branding opportunities, be sure to take advantage of them. Whether you sell a physical product or provide an online service, there’s probably a place where your company’s logo appears. This logo makes it easy for potential buyers to identify your brand before purchasing. It also helps them associate the (hopefully good) experience of using the product with your company’s name and logo, increasing the chance they’ll buy from you again.

With this in mind, I’m a little surprised to see products where the logo is crooked, blurry, or even unreadable. This sloppy treatment of such a critical aspect of product branding is like throwing your ad space and mindshare out the window. To potential buyers and existing customers alike, it cheapens the look of the product and reduces the chance they’ll associate your company with a high quality experience.

The next time you get to add a logo to your products or revise your existing logo placements, take the time to do it right. Make sure the logo is clear and crisp, and confirm that it’s being printed or attached straight. If it looks cheap or crooked to you, chances are that customers will feel the same way.

When designing a website, common sense dictates that you should display key information in plain text, rather than rendering it into an image. The rationale is simple: search engines can’t read words that are part of an image, and site visitors can’t do normal things like copying that text into a separate document for later reference. With this in mind, I’m amazed when I see websites that put key information into images, without any corresponding text version.

I came across this issue while trying to locate the dates for a conference I’m attending in November. I tried searching for the conference name on Google, but all the results were from third-party news sites. I didn’t know if that data was current, so I restricted the search to the conference organizer’s site — and got zero results. Only after going to the page and clicking through a few Flash and image menus was I able to confirm the dates. Since the key info was only provided in the image, this was truly the only way to access it.

As a rule, you should use images to reinforce your message and provide visual aids to the visitor. Don’t rely on images to convey key information that would work just as well in a block of text. And if you can’t resist putting that information into an image, try to provide a plain text copy of the same info elsewhere on the page. (Perhaps you could use the Alt tag for this, but most people would never see it.) Remember, just because you can see the contents of the image, there’s no guarantee that your visitors will be able to find that information.

I understand why companies use “vanity” web addresses in their advertising. Typically, the goal is to provide an easy-to-remember URL, and then track exactly how many visitors responded to that campaign. But sometimes marketers forget that people actually have to remember the address before they can type it into their browser.

To be successful, I believe the vanity URL either needs to be a separate domain, such as samplepromotion.com, or a well-known domain with a single entry added on the end, like mysite.com/promoname. When you start breaking these rules, the address is more likely to be forgotten.

I saw a great example of this on Fox, where they were running a campaign for the Dodge Ram as part of the Terminator series. The address shown on the screen was fox.com/terminator/ram. I doubt many people will remember this two-part addition to the fox.com site. To fix this, they could just use fox.com/ram and then let the visitor choose which show they heard about the product on. With this revised approach, more customers will remember the vanity URL, and the marketer will get more accurate tracking of campaign responses.

A few days ago, I went to a boutique theater that I haven’t visited in about a year. When I purchased the tickets, the cashier asked if I wanted to fill out a customer survey. I had some time to kill, so I agreed, expecting to get a brief questionnaire. The survey I received was anything but.

I don’t recall exactly how long the survey was, but I’m guessing it contained at least thirty questions over a four-page span. The questions ranged from the obvious to the absurd. Clearly, nobody on the theater staff thought about the need for keeping things short, so every question the committee came up with was included.

In fact, the survey was so long that I refused to fill it out at all. I’m sure that many other customers will do the same. With a survey or any other form of customer feedback, brevity has a big impact on response. By whittling the questions down to the most useful ones, you’ll get higher response rates and more honest answers. When in doubt, keep your survey to a single page, and start with questions like these:

– How did you hear about us?
– What are we doing well?
– Where do we need to improve? What one thing could we do to make you visit us more often?
– Would you recommend us to a friend?

By getting this key information, you’ll gain insight into where customers come from, what they like and dislike about your organization, and how likely they are to spread the word to other prospects.

While shopping with my wife last weekend, I thought about some of the high-tech enhancements that people have proposed for dressing rooms. For example, at least one company has designed an interactive mirror that shows how different outfits might look. But then I realized that the most valuable enhancements are probably much simpler than that.

In particular, two changes would make a big difference in the dressing room experience. First, there should be seating near the dressing room so that a friend or spouse can wait close by, rather than having to wander elsewhere in the store. Second, there should be a simple control inside the dressing room to help summon the person who is waiting. I’m thinking of a light that the first person can turn on when they’re ready to show off an outfit. This would function like the taxi light outside a hotel, though I realize that’s a rather crude comparison.

The benefits of this approach are quite obvious. The person trying on the clothes would have a much easier time showing them to their shopping companion. Meanwhile, the latter person would be able to relax in comfortable seating and only venture over to the dressing room itself when their input is needed. By implementing these simple changes, the retailer would sell more products, while reducing the number of returns that occur when someone’s husband, wife, or best friend decides they don’t like the items purchased.

I bought some clothes at a well-known retailer over the weekend. They had a really big sale and did a great job promoting it inside the store. Afterwards, I noticed that my bag even had “Sale” written on it in huge letters. While this serves as a nice reminder to me about the event, they’re missing an opportunity to use the same bag as an advertising tool for attracting more customers.

In particular, the bag design had two major issues. First, the store name was rather small and used a low-contrast color. Second and most importantly, there was no mention of the nature of the sale or when it ends. Without this information, a prospective customer would have no way of telling if the sale was at a store they like, and if it’s still running.

Fixing the bag design would be easy. Keep “Sale” in big letters. Then, add the store name and logo in a large, legible fashion. Finally, add a description of the sale itself, e.g. “Save up to 40% through October 5”. By making these changes, the retailer would turn every customer into a walking billboard to help promote the sale event, with virtually zero incremental cost.

Many websites and web-based applications have a “Tell a Friend” feature. The idea is to make it easy for people to share content or products that they enjoy, without the hassle of drafting a separate email and then copying in the info. However, most of the Tell a Friend features I’ve seen are buried at the bottom of the page, or listed among many other options on the sidebar.

Actually, I don’t think the location of the feature matters that much. People who want to find it will probably be able to do so. But that’s the problem: a customer has to think about using the feature and then seek it out on their own. There’s a much better approach: automatically asking people if they want to tell a friend after certain events have taken place.

For example, a site might show the Tell a Friend box after the customer does any of the following:

– Registers for a free trial
– Signs up for a newsletter
– Converts from a trial to a paying account
– Completes a purchase
– Reaches a certain usage milestone, e.g. 25 reviews submitted

As you can see, the goal is to automatically prompt people to spread the word about the product or service at the very point that it’s fresh in their mind. By focusing on trigger events like the ones above, you can be virtually certain that people will be at their most receptive. After all, they have just taken actions that prove their engagement level with the product.

What should the notification look like? Nothing too fancy. Perhaps the screen could say: “Congratulations on placing your first order. Would you like to tell a few friends about our site? Just enter their email addresses below, and we’ll send them a $5 coupon towards their first purchase.” No matter what form the message takes, this event-driven strategy should lead to vastly more new customers than the old, passive approach.

I recently received an Amazon package that contained some small but heavy items. The box was partially open when it arrived. The cause was obvious: they didn’t use enough packing materials, so the contents bounced around wildly during shipping, nearly breaking through the tape that held the box closed. I’m sure Amazon has guidelines for their packing process, but obviously they weren’t followed this time.

Short of doing a visual inspection of every box, I would imagine it’s hard to verify that orders are being packed correctly. A series of random inspections might improve things, but lacks the punch of actually showing what happens when things are done wrong. Thus, I would like to see Amazon send things to themselves to verify compliance. In other words, send one dummy order to an unmarked Amazon office for every 500 or so real orders. Then, when things arrive in bad shape, photos would be sent back to the originating facility to help show the staff what customers see in these situations.

In other words, shipping center staff would get a first-hand glimpse of how their work affects the customer, and gain a better understanding of why it’s important to do it right.

I had an appointment with my dentist yesterday. But right before I was supposed to leave, the dentist’s office called me to say they were running behind, and asked me to show up a little bit later than my original appointment time. Then, when I got there, I ended up waiting another 20 minutes past the new time. Normally, this would be a rather annoying delay. But because they took the time to call me, I didn’t mind waiting at all.

We’ve all been trained to expect long, unpredictable wait times at the doctor or the dentist. Whether they realize it or not, my dentist’s office is doing something remarkable by bucking the trend. It only takes them a few seconds more per patient, but makes a world of difference in customer perception. Now, whenever I hear someone talking about how long their dentist makes them wait, I’ll be ready to tell them about this experience — and perhaps send a new customer over to my dentist in the process.