1. A Tale of Two Thank You’s from a Customer Experience Perspective

    Friday, 7 Jan 2011 5 Comments Posted by:

    This morning I got two emails. One from Dell and other from jetBlue, both companies I am a repeat customer and I have agreed to get email updates with offers and news. In both emails from Dell and jetBlue had a similar subjects: Thank You for… but left with a completely different feeling about their intent on customer experience.

    Let me start with jetBlue, I was one of the millions traveling in the NYC area during Snowpocalypse 2010. A lot of flights in/out of NYC airports were delayed or canceled. It was bad because families were stranded for several days until the weather conditions changes, airports dug out all the snow and airlines could be up and flying again. It was the weather that caused the problems, not the airlines or airports. But jetBlue made a decision to thank me, along with other jetBlue customers for our patience during the snow storm and interrupted travel. jetBlue went the extra step and awarded 10,000 TruBlue points (reward miles) to me (and I am assuming all interrupted travelers). A simple thank you would have been more than I expected. Instead they apologized, acknowledged, and rewarded – good and consistent actions to reinforce their message and commitment to customer experience. Their intent was to communicate their concern about the customer experience during a difficult week for travelers.

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    Dell sent me an email thanking me for being a great DPA customer (Note: DPA is dell preferred account – which is Dell’s private label credit card – a financing method to purchase products sold on dell.com. Full disclosure, I used to work on Dell’s financing product back in 2002.). I just bought a new laptop battery which might have triggered this email. A simple thank you for your purchase would have sufficed, but it felt like Dell was thanking me with a handshake (“Thanks for being such a great DPA customer. We really appreciate your business.”), at the same time reaching into my wallet (SHOP NOW >). Dell’s message was acknowledge and let’s move onto another transaction.

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    Which company would you be more excited to talk about? Which company would you feel good about and ready to do business with again? Granted jetBlue had a crisis as the event trigger to communicate with me, but Dell had a trigger as well, I just bought something on dell.com – both brands could have said thank you and ended their communication – and that is acceptable. What examples have you seen where companies express a pure intent in their customer experience?

    • Michael

      I see the JetBlue as good customer relations. The Dell pitch is just thinly veiled spam.

    • http://www.antseyeview.com seanmcd

      Michael. thanks for reading and commenting on the post – you provided a good snopysis.

    • http://twitter.com/Miss_Dazey Miss Dazey

      Without a doubt Jet Blue understands that their customers are important and human. I personally don’t read ones like the Dell one, usually unsubscribe from this companies.

    • Anonymous

      Couldn’t have summed it up better than Michael. I’d like to see a comparison of two messages from companies with similar goals, though.

    • http://www.facebook.com/cristene Cristene Gonzalez-wertz

      It’s nice to see someone say something nice about an airline. I fly USAir, they don’t often give the opportunity to say anything nice. But I digress…

      We have to realize first of all what the value of a good thank you is. It is not a pitch. It is not a presentation. It is an acknowledgment of gratitude. Combining it with anything else weakens its power (unless its an expected reward).

      Unfortunately, so many companies fail to realize the value of a good thank you. It was last summer – yup LAST summer, that I bought a refrigerator from Sears. It followed a washer and dryer bought a year earlier. I not only received a thank you note – which was hand written – from the store (in fact the saleswoman). I was thanked again for my prior purchase. Which is why, in redoing my kitchen now, I will go back to Sears and buy the $4000 in new appliances I picked. Everyone says retail loyalty is gone. Yet Sears near me will get $8,000 in 3 years with nary a rewards point parted with.

      SSDD – I once worked with the now defunct MBNA who did a smart simple thing so seldom done in the credit card business and now ever so slightly worming its way into other places. The standard for handling inbound calls was – literally in the first 15 seconds of the call, acknowledge the customer including their tenure. “Thank you, Ms. Gonzalez-wertz, for being an MBNA customer for 12 years.” I took my business elsewhere after they became BofA – because the only people BofA knows how to thank are its executives.

      - Cristene
      http://www.museandmaven.wordpress.com