« The History (And Decline) Of Treating Affiliates Well | Home | I’ve Been Marketing Online A Long Time »
Customers Are Stupid (wait, maybe it’s you…)
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
There is a forum thread going on right now with online business owners laughing about how stupid their customers are. The initial example was about someone who was given a password to login that looked like this:
EHSKHEQW (Upper Case)
…But instead of understanding that it was supposed to mean that the eight letters were all capitals, the person entered the entire line as the password, including “Upper Case” in parenthesis.
Ha ha Ha, what an idiot - at least that’s what he was being called in the forum post by business owners, but I disagree. Because the flip side to that is that if someone doesn’t understand the instructions you are giving them, by definition you must be giving them poor instructions. If you don’t improve the instructions based on feedback you receive and instead just continue to be annoyed with the problems that it causes, then you are the real idiot.
With the large number of sales that my businesses have done, I have learned very quickly that anything that causes extra customer support problems need to be resolved quickly. In fact, once I crunched the numbers and figured out the average response time involved for each customer support question and divided that into how much I pay customer support by the hour, the dollar amount that each question costs you is very sobering.
My solution:
When we had issues with people having problems downloading products, I created short training videos showing step-by-step how to do it.
And here’s something else that I’ve never heard anyone talk about before:
Here’s your password: Il1O0I1
That’s the type of password that a random password generator will create. Upper case “i”, lower case “L”, the number one, a zero, upper and lower-case “oh”, etc.
How ridiculous is that? How many more problems are going to because there’s something so easily avoided? My solution is to take out those letters and numbers from the random password generator. Problem solved.
If you think your customers are stupid, that’s fine with me because it means you are out of touch with your target market. While you make fun of them and don’t do anything about it, you’re creating opportunity for smarter marketers to treat your customers better. Feel free to send them my way. 
Topics: Oops (Bad Move), Z Info | Trackback URL