InfoSphere™ Business Alerts And Intelligence: Customer service

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Yahoo! Stinks - Time To Leave

Share this ARTICLE with your colleagues on LinkedIn .

I have used several Yahoo! email accounts and related functions over the past six years, with very little trouble and great success. But that's all gone now. Yahoo's "Classic" email has been forcibly eliminated, and their new (beta-tested on the public!) email has caused many people, including myself, horrible problems. These are not just the "come-to-be-expected" problems with privacy, data mining, unsolicited marketing. These are truly mechanical and measurable problems interfering with critical functions and dependencies.

Before I outline these 'issues' please let Douglas E. Castle (that's me) the author of many an article and an expert at a shockingly large number of areas within the fields of business, communications and behavioral psychology suggest that you transfer your address books, contact coordinates, saved files, calenders and all information to another provider at your most immediate convenience. When you have finished doing this, delete all of your information from your Yahoo account prior to closing it; further, if you are using a Yahoo! email address as your principle communications medium, switch to another free or paid service now.

Some of the problems reported (especially during these past six months of changeover at Yahoo! Central, located - this is merely rumored - in an abandoned, rat-infested subway tunnel somewhere under New York City), include the following, a number of which I have experienced repeatedly myself:

Increasing volumes of spam;
Decrease in the speed of outbound email deliveries;
Loss in cyberspace of outbound mail deliveries;
Increasing number of inbound deliveries never arriving;
Increasing number of inbound email deliveries arriving as much as several hours after being sent!
So much advertising on the homepage and on the email page that it has become laborious to navigate;
Spoofing of my address to send emails to me;
No customer service problem-solving response to any queries or complaints;
Constant requests to change my password;
Increased system failures and downtime;
Increased incidence of hacking at the user and at the server (or ISP) level.

And I am certain there are more.

Here is a recent extract from a telling article by WebProNews author and pundit (or is it Guru?) Chris Crum, who writes exceedingly well, but who should consider changing his alliterative but less than serious-sounding name. It reminds me of Christmas for some reason.
---------------

Yahoo Mail Classic is now dead. Yahoo Mail users, as of Monday, no longer have the option of using the old version, and must instead use the new version, which Yahoo reminds them, serves ads based on the content of their emails, much like Google’s Gmail has always done. As one might imagine, a lot of users are less than thrilled about this.

“Beginning the week of June 3, 2013, older versions of Yahoo! Mail (including Yahoo! Mail Classic) will no longer be available,” wrote Yahoo in its help center fairwell (via TechCrunch). “After that, you can access your Yahoo! Mail only if you upgrade to the new version. You should have received an email from Yahoo! letting you know that your account required an upgrade.”

Yahoo noted that when you upgrade, you are accepting its Communications Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which includes the acceptance of “automated content scanning and analyzing of your communications content, which Yahoo! uses to deliver product features, relevant advertising, and abuse protection.”

“If you prefer to opt out of interest-based and contextual-based advertising resulting from your scanned and analyzed communications content, you can change your settings at any time using our Ad Interest Manager,” Yahoo said.

So, it’s even letting you opt out of ads, but that doesn’t mean they won’t scan your mail. You still have to accept Yahoo’s terms.

Those who don’t want to use the new Yahoo Mail were directed to download their mail using IMAP or close their account.

Yahoo’s mention of scanning email to serve ads comes as search partner Microsoft has been campaigning against Google for doing just that, despite the fact that Google has always done this, and has always been quite clear about it.

To many people this really isn’t a big deal. Gmail hasn’t had any shortage of users, and it’s not as though humans are reading users’ email to try and determine which ads to show. It’s all automated. Those who are concerned about this practice, however, could play right into Microsoft’s hands.

Suddenly the timing of Microsoft’s campaign seems a lot better from a marketing standpoint. It seemed odd that Microsoft would attack Google suddenly for something it had been doing for nearly a decade and made not efforts to hide. But now we have the previously announced Yahoo Mail redesign, which engages in similar practices as Google, being forced on users.

Could Microsoft users have made enough Yahoo users uneasy about this practice in general to get some of them to switch over to its own Outlook.com (the focal point of that particular “Scroogled” campaign)?

As Declan McCullagh at CNET points out, Yahoo actually adopted the policy that lets it scan emails and serve ads back in 2011. He writes:

It’s not clear why Yahoo felt the need to remind existing users of language in its 2011 terms of service. One possibility, though, is an effort to head off privacy lawsuits brought by class action lawyers hoping for a million-dollar jackpot. (If there’s ever any litigation, defense counsel would surely prefer to rely on informed consent rather than implied consent.)
It’s not merely a theoretical possibility: Google was sued in 2011 by a Massachusetts AOL user who sent e-mail to a Gmail account and then claimed her privacy was invaded. Near-identical lawsuits were filed in Marin County, Calif., (PDF) in June 2012, British Columbia (PDF) in October 2012, and Florida (PDF) in November 2012. On April 29, two college students filed yet another suit (PDF) seeking class action status in San Jose, Calif.

The shuttering of Yahoo Mail Classic also comes on the heels of a separate Yahoo Mail privacy-related story. Last week, a BT made some headlines when it said it would no longer make Yahoo Mail the default email service for its six million customers because of concerns that accounts are vulnerable to getting hacked.

Gerry Smith at The Huffington Post writes, “The shift of BT’s 6 million customers to another email service represents just a small fraction of Yahoo’s overall email customer base of about 280 million people worldwide. But the loss of clients could be a troubling sign for a company that relies heavily on maintaining its email users to generate advertising revenue. Yahoo is now the third-largest email provider after Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook.com.”
Meanwhile, the top dog, Gmail, continues to make efforts to stay ahead of the competitive curve. Last week, Google announced the launch of the new inbox for Gmail, which introduces a new tabbed organization interface.

Privacy concerns aren’t the only thing bothering users, however. Business Insider conducted a survey, finding that 57% of users are unhappy with the new Yahoo Mail. Nicholas Carlson lists a few of the specific complaints users shared:

“The mail message frame is not fixed. If you read a new message, and scroll down to the bottom and decide you don’t want to keep it, you can no longer access the delete button. Yes, obviously you can just close the email and then choose it again and delete, but that is a total waste of time and key strokes.”

“Yahoo disappears emails sent between legitimate and active Yahoo accounts.”

“I used Yahoo mail as a central box for most of my domain emails. After switching a couple of weeks ago and sending 30 test mails over three days to make sure it was all working, 6 never arrived. I even have specific filters set-up within Yahoo mail to make sure certain mails do not get put in the trash or spam by mistake.”

“It’s very laggy, and that pause of a second or two between commands makes it extremely frustrating.”

“The new version of Yahoo mail makes all my messages older than a week or so unreadable. I get “Error 45″ and the messages fail to load. There are numerous reports about this on the net; so far Yahoo hasn’t managed to fix it. So, I have to launch the classic version of Yahoo mail just to read old messages. Fail.”

“Right after the switch I was hacked and my contacts all 500 plus were gone without a trace.”

We’ve seen further complaints in the comments of our own coverage.

Users have had since December to get accustomed to the new Yahoo Mail. More on the redesign here.

Yahoo has been engaging in a lot of redesigns across its various properties. This week, Yahoo also rolled out a new look for its search results pages to go with its recently redesigned homepage. A big Flickr redesign was also recently launched.
---------------
All I can say is remember the "rollout" of "New Coke," with its exciting new packaging and slightly changed and cheapened recipe? The damage control marketing campaign was "Classic Coke."

Thank you as always for reading me, and for sharing my articles with your colleagues, connections, co-conspirators, cohorts and concubines via your social media through the use of your ever-increasing arsenal of social media sharing tools. You are deeply appreciated.

Douglas E. Castle for The InfoSphere Business Alerts And Intelligence Blog, The Mad Marketing Tactics Blog and The Business And Project Planning And Management Blog.

Sponsored By:
CFI - CrowdFunding Incubator LLC
ICS - International Connection Services
Global Edge Technologies Group LLC
CFI Business Growth
Douglas E. Castle On LinkedIn - Join Me!

***

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Customer Retention, Referrals And Participation - CEM - Customer Experience Management

Share this ARTICLE with your colleagues on LinkedIn .

For any business to be profitable, it must sell some product or service to customers. Sadly though, in an age of pop-psychology, 5-step panaceas, overnight billionaires and an obsession with technology and efficiency, Customer Experience Management (CEM), seems to be getting increasingly lost in the shuffle. It is being treated as more of an afterthought than as a principal business planning objective. Most businesses regard "getting customers in" as a high priority; after all, it takes revenue (or excessive borrowing and bailouts) to cover the expenses of operating a business But they neglect to go further -- to wine, dine and mine their customers as a source of continuing and increasing revenue.

The sales function (getting prospects into the marketing funnel and converting them into purchasers) is always prominent, unless your business happens to be a monopoly or have a legally-protected territory. But customer satisfaction, retention and participation are generally afterthoughts. This is a terrible mistake.

In a typical business environment, a small group of your customers or clients (the old "80% - 20% rule) are responsible for the bulk or either a) your revenues, or b) your return and referral business. Cherish and nurture this group in order to retain it and to increase its size.

Some Actionable Tips:

1) Respond PROMPTLY and COURTEOUSLY to every prospective customer inquiry;

2) Always ask how the prospect "found" you. If it was through an individual, send that individual a personalized letter (email or snail-mail) thanking him or her personally for the referral (name the referred party), and be sure to include a brief questionnaire about WHY this faithful friend made the referral, and about his or her current level of satisfaction with the service or products received from your company;

3) Send a newsletter (with general content of general interest....notable quotes, scientific breakthroughs, little-known facts, poetry, and the like) to all of your existing customers via email [with a catchy subject line to avoid that sales nemesis -- the black hole of the spam box] quarterly to customers, and offer them an opportunity to express themselves in a survey of some sort -- some of the questions [hint, hint] might even be related to your product or service, and how it might be improved: wishlists and suggestion-box formats are becoming increasingly popular. Make the letter important and information-packed.

4) Award repeat customers (loyalty is to be treasured) and referring customers (referrals are the mainstay of many a business) with special gifts -- substantial ones. These gifts are an investment in continuing and increasing revenues!) Never let them feel unappreciated. Make them feel loved -- and while you're at it, keep your name in front of them at every opportunity.

5) Birthday and holiday cards are usually trite and rather ineffective. A personal telephone call or an email letter (the former is preferred) simply asking the customer or client how he or she is enjoying the product or service, and if he or she is less that satisfied with any aspect of the product or service breeds tremendous customer loyalty. When they make a suggestion, repeat it in a "Thank You" follow-up letter, and say how you are taking action on their valuable input. Make them participants in your business process.

The Objective:

Customer satisfaction, retention (loyalty), referrals and participation in your business.
-----

An "oldie but goodie" excerpt from a ZDNet newsletter says quite a bit about the typical business' lack of focus on customer satisfaction (Customer Experience Management, or "CEM"), due to a misprioritization of the elements required to make a business or brand profitable.

Improve Customer Satisfaction

All the engineering, all the design, all the promotion, support, and service amounts to nothing if your customer isn't satisfied. In this presentation you'll learn how your business can easily overcome its customer satisfaction challenges.
View this now

Revenues drive all business. And customers or clients provide that revenue. Think of them first, AND think of them constantly. Simply stated, "don't forget about them, and they'll probably remember you." Even in difficult economic times, exemplary CEM can make your company and brand stand out -- people will even pay a premium for personal, compassionate, interested attention in this increasingly de-humanized and de-personalized social environment.

Douglas E. Castle