Henriette Weber

This morning I had a conversation with one of the most passionate and greatest danish media bloggers – Mads Kristensen where I told him, that these days I weren’t too pleased with Threadless – a really great artistic community, with a really bad european customer service.

I had a pretty bad experience with them in january where they refused to send me a new t-shirt even though there was a pretty bad error on one of the t-shirts that I received for my husbands birthday. Their return policy is really not effective when it comes to Europe, mainly because they want to have returned t-shirts with errors on. Problem is that sending the T-shirt back to the US costs twice the amount of the actual t-shirt. So I don’t believe that threadless receives a lot of faulty t’s from Europe.

Anyway they asked me to photodocument the t-shirt in a couple of pictures, which took me about an hour, and in the end they still didn’t want to send me a new t-shirt (even though it was the machinery’s fault)..

nevermind. I think that this threadless case can be shared amongst the rest of us to inspire – and it has inspired me to give a couple of advices on what I would do, if I had a webshop.

so if I had a webshop:

I would pay for shipping both to and from the customer. It get’s rid of the Penny gap and enhances buying motives – like zappos

I would totally do a shop that didn’t do the normal shop cms’ lists – think a bit out of the box.

I would have a blog to describe creative things to do with products, and what happened behind the webshop – like Howies

I would do events together with other webshops inside my field, and actually facility online by offline, and let my customers meet.

I would give things away for free – in order to support the products that I wanted people to buy.

I would do really well by doing really good – and show people I did good.

I would be cool and un-salespitchy and not-interruptive.

I would have great parties in my web-house (or my webshop)

I would oppone something instead of compete against other webshops. Opponing a higher cause makes you smile brighter

I would do development projects and give a part of my sales to a great cause.

If I could I would totally give my customers ecological alternatives – by now there’s no excuse not to
What would you do if you had a webshop ?

Dear CEO of Imerco.

This evening I have had the worst experience I have had in a store ever. really, it was THAT bad (I even choose to use a bit of my  precious time to blog about it – that’s how bad it is). Anyway I have worked “a bit” around e-commerce in my days on the internet and the reason for buying stuff “in real life” (aka. physical stores) has to me always been the personal experience. However these days I get a much better experience online, almost everytime.

This evening something happened to me in your store in city2 that was extremely disappointing to me.

Now, I am in the lucky situation that I got married in May. We got a gift certificate for Imerco that we have been using a bit here and there. Tonight we needed a new sandwich toaster because we have wires sticking out of our old one. We choose to drive our car to city2 where we knew you have a store.

So we look around and you have 1 (1!) toaster on your shelf in the imerco store in city2. We ask the clerk (there was 4 of them in the store and they where really busy talking to each other instead of talking to us) if she has another toaster, she says no. OK very limited choice we think, but since we have a gift certificate we are interested. However the clerk has no intention of trying to sell the only toaster model she has to us. So we leave the store and walk into inspiration (a competitor) where they have the same toaster. It’s a real cool one – so after discussing it we walk back to Imerco to buy the one model they have.

We enter the store and I ask if we can buy the toaster to another clerk. Meanwhile the other clerks are loud and laughing and not being very service oriented at all, hmpf. The “new” clerk tells us that she has to look in the storage room if they have a boxed new toaster that they want to sell. She’s gone for 5 mins. meanwhile we stand still by the toaster shelf waiting for her.

She comes back from the storage room and goes to talk to the other clerks. We think it must be related to the purchase we are trying to do and she’s supposed to be selling us something. However she stands there for 5 minutes and we decide to leave because we are pretty pissed off by now. I get eyecontact with her and she asks “may I help you?” incredible! it leaves me laughing a bit but it infuriates my husband. He tells her that she was actually serving us  and she hasn’t given us a reply about if we could by the frickin toaster. She simply says “oh I thought the others had told us that we don’t have any”. We run out of the store speechless.

Wow. Simply. Wow. Having this experience left me feeling stupid and underestimated. Theres no way I will ever enter an imerco again. Seriously.

So this is why I will probably throw out my wedding gift certificate of about 1000 kr for imerco and buy my stuff at an online reseller:

More models online

Better prices

If they don’t have the product they don’t list it

No clerk ignorance and stupidity

In online stores you know that people are selling you stuff. You don’t need to beg a clerk to serve you nicely.

Online I don’t get a really bad service, as I do at your store.

I don’t have to search around for the products in an online store, I can simply use the search field.

I don’t get to waste hours driving to a mall to buy a toaster that turns out to be my worst customer experience ever

All the best

Henriette Weber
ps. I think you can do much better than this

Først af alt, vælger jeg at betegne nedenstående som et meget charmerende karaktertræk hos mig, evig klodset, evig komisk..

Jeg var taget hele vejen til Fields idag for at købe et STOORT lærred til et maleri jeg har lovet at lave til en veninde… så jeg tager min super micra hvor der før har været kæmpelærreder i. endda sammen med en veninde og en baby på bagsædet. MEN idag kunne jeg simpelthen ikke få det ind i bilen, ligegyldigt hvordan jeg vendte og drejede det…

Så tænkte jeg at jeg bare kunne gå op og få pengene retur… hvilket jeg prøvede.. men nej.. selvom det var 3 minutter siden jeg købte det store lærred, selvom jeg havde bon’en og selvom jeg ikke kunne komme hjem med mit lærred – så tog “søstrene Grene” ikke varer retur. så heldigvis tilbød min veninde at tage metroen hjem til hende selv ( med lærredet ) og køre ud til mig i hendes citron farvede citroen berlingo..

men helt ærligt søstrene grene ? I kunne da godt have gjort en undtagelse ? og jeg måtte ikke engang tale med chefen fordi ham kassemedarbejder svenskeren havde jo lige talt med ham i telefonen ?

så søstrene grene er hermed officielt på min boykotningsliste – sammen med matas…

så vil jeg hellere betale dobbelpris for et lærred af bedre kvalitet i Tutein og Koch..

men “typisk mig”.. suk – det er hårdt at være klodset og til grin til tider

just a quick thought.

I was wondering today if my generation ( who were kids in the 80′s and 90′s) were in particularly vulnerable to advertising and commercials?`

I recall sitting at my great grand mothers place and watching mtv “sabrina ” with “boys boys boys”… and it had so many commercials which you ( at that point in time) did not have in Denmark. there was no commercials on danish tv – because the only tv station was licensed by the government. it was only when another danish tv station ( a commercialised one) started that the commercials really came into our face.

But when I was a kid I was crazy about commercials. on TCC and Cartoon network. for candy, for barbies and my little pony’s and Macdonalds. I was told that the best meal I could have was a fast food restaurant. the best way to play was with barbies.

my point is that I am really worried about big firm marketing products at my babygirl.. I hope it wont be as necessary as it was for my parents to tell her that the best meal she could have was at home – and not Pizza or Macdonalds

my exact question.. inspired by Sigurd Rinde

- first of all the when you do marketing for you company – you push your fine products out the consumers, this does not work anymore.. everything has gotten saturated

- with a blog – written by a blogger or a CEO ( doesn’t really matter) you show the customers the transparency of your company – that you are willing to hear what they say.. go ahead pop them some questions ! ask them about your products, and Im telling you they will answer.

this also creates a one-on-one customer satisfaction – especially if you show them that you hear what they are saying – talk about CRM for dummies !
this is the most effective customer management you will ever see… even though you are not managing anything at this point.

so why not compete on transparency ?

another question might be that ” why you should listen to what your customers are saying – and if you need a filter for what they tell you ? ..
well for people to comment on things you blog they must have been touched by what you have written! – they are thinking about it, absorbing it and reviewing it…

I am setting up an advisory board – where I will need hardcore bloggers, other entrepreneurs and anyone else who thinks they have something to give to a creative network email me at henriette@prograes.com and lets play !