It’s a Little Weird When Your Best Customer Experience of the Week is with the Government

Mariquita has been doing a lot of personal admin lately for us.  This week had a little surprise in it.

Verizon continues to be one of the most awful, painful vendors in the history of the universe.
At least their phone network is solid, since any interaction with the people at the company is so bad.  We came to the conclusion this week that they actually do some things which aren’t just the usual bad customer service or outrageous pricing — they have some policies in place that are literally designed to systematically rip off their customers.  The one we ran into was (after 45 minutes on and off hold, of course) that the data plans for Treos are prepaid for a month, but when you go to cancel your data plan, they tell you they HAVE TO cancel it the day you call, even if you have days or weeks left on your plan, and they CAN’T issue a refund for unused days.  But if you complain loudly enough, a supervisor can keep your service active through the end of your pre-pay, or can issue you a refund.  So in fact, they are telling their customer service reps to lie to their customers in the hope that their customers don’t push back so they can keep your money while not delivering your service.

She had a similarly bad experience dealing with our insurance company about car insurance.  State Farm just has a ridiculous set of procedures in place around changing car insurance that cause their customers to jump through hoops several times over for no apparent reason at all.  There have been several stupid things, but this week was needing to take a brand new car to get inspected before insuring it within three days of buying it.  But we had to take it to a specific mechanic on the “approved list” to get it inspected.  That place required an appointment (which meant two trips).  It couldn’t be done at the dealer.  Then the actual inspection lasted about 30 seconds.  Maybe they were just making sure there was an actual car, not a pretend car.  Harry Potter, beware.

And then came the surprise — Mariquita’s trip to the DMV to trade in our old license plates.  She was in and out in under 5 minutes with a prompt, efficient, friendly person handling the transaction with a smile.  Wonders never cease.

It doesn’t take a lot to be great at customer service, just the right mindset and culture.  It’s amazing that Albany (or at least a small pocket therein) seems to have figured that out before some of the biggest companies around.

Always On is Too Much On

Among other things last week travelling abroad for work, I learned another good CEO lesson — sometimes it’s ok, even good, to be a bit out of touch. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m Always On at the office, while travelling in the US, and usually at home and on weekends as well.  And as I’ve said before in various postings (here, here, here, and definitely here), it’s great to completely unplug at least once a year for a peaceful vacation with friends & family.

But last week was a nice lesson in the middle ground.  I had an international cell phone that people at work didn’t seem to want to call, so they could in an emergency, but no one did for routine things.  I was 5-8 hours off on time zones, so people didn’t think to reach out.  I did email once or twice a day when time permitted, so I stayed in good touch, but I wasn’t grinding out email responses on my Treo every time I took a deep breath.

And the company was fine.  As far as I could tell, sales were even up, so maybe I should semi-disappear more often!

Merry Whatever

We had two horrendous customer service experiences at Return Path lately that just leave me scratching my head about how one could possibly run a business that way.

In the process of buying some holiday gifts for a few of our larger clients, we first tried to order gift baskets from Harry & David.  But we couldn’t, because they wouldn’t take our order via Excel spreadsheet — our office manager would have had to enter each order in a web form by hand.  I imagine the conversation going something like this:

Andrea from Return Path:  “Hi, I’d like to give you $2,500.”

Clerk from Harry & David:  “Um, no thanks.”

So, ok, fine, we moved on to vendor number 2 – Wine Country Gift Baskets.  We ordered something suitably nondenomenational, and the ordering experience was great.  But we heard back from a number of clients (ones whose last names were probably like mine – Blumberg, Goldstein, you get the idea) that they were surprised we send them such a Christmasy present.

So were we.  So we looked into it, and apparently our vendor ran out of whatever we ordered and decided to just go ahead and send something entirely different, without asking us.  Again, one has to wonder how that decision went down, but possibly something like this:

Clerk at Wine Country Gift Baskets:  “Hey boss, we’re out of wine and cheese, so how about we substitute in a nativity scene?”

Supervisor:  “Whatever.”

Clerk:  “Should I call the customer to see if that is okay with them?”

Supervisor:  “Is that my donut you’re eating”

Why bother being in a customer service business if you’re not actually going to service customers?  It’s too bad everyone isn’t as fantastic at that as Zappos.

Humbled at TED

I’m at my first TED Conference this week, and while I’ve watched countless other bloggers around me pounding out post after post summarizing different presentations (which I won’t do — feel free to see the site for official stuff), I’ve been struggling to find something to write about.  Then it hit me today.  I kind of feel at this conference the way I did when I started college.  Totally humbled.

I was #2 in my class in high school.  Straight As, a few A+s thrown in for good measure.  Then I got to Princeton and felt like an idiot.  I was convinced I was bottom quartile at best.  Everyone around me was either like me or better, smarter, more intellectual, more well rounded, taller, thinner, better looking, better teeth, the works.

This conference so far has been the same, and I mean that in a good way.  The sessions have varied from fascinating to boring to Bill Clinton cool to Paul Simon and Jill Sobule entertaining to completely over my head.  My fellow TED attendees include royalty, billionaires, captains of industry, Oscar winners, and dignitaries.  Add it all up, and there is a giant aura of accomplishment and intellectualism in the room that makes me feel like bottom quartile at best, maybe more like bottom decile.  That’s a great thing, though.  It’s always good to have a reminder of the larger global issues, picture, and opportunities, and a window into the people thinking about solving them.

I Hope I Didn’t Make You Sick, Too

Fellow entrepreneur and MyWay blogger Chris Yeh takes me to task for my post last week entitled Humbled at TED.  Although his blog post was pretty harsh on me — saying essentially that I’d lost my brain and made him sick by fawning over celebrities (which I didn’t do) — his comment on my blog was a little more measured, just reminding me that people like Bill Clinton is human and puts his pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us.

I think Chris missed my main point, and since he decided to go public blasting me, I’ll repeat here what I emailed him privately before he decided to blog this:

Oh I don’t put them on that much of a pedestal, although perhaps my post sounded like that. My comments are more driven by a combination of:

– the great things they’ve done for humanity as opposed to the more mundane commercial that most of us do

– the immense knowledge of specialists in fields I know little about

– the level of intellectual discourse among the regular attendees…more than I see on a daily basis by 10x

Plus, pedestal or not, it isn’t every day that one sees Clinton, Bezos, Khosla, Branson, and Brin/Page all in the same room at once. 🙂

Anyway, thanks for the comment. I may blog it and my response.

Still, Chris’s main comment to me is probably a good one, which is that “treating the successful as if they were on another plane simply perpetuates the belief that you’ll never achieve the same kind of success.”  And on that point, he’s 100% right.  There is greatness and success in all of us, whether we’ve tapped into it yet or not.

Staying Power

I interview a lot of people.  We are hiring a ton at Return Path, and I am still able to interview all finalists for jobs, and frequently I interview multiple candidates if it’s a senior role.  I probably interviewed 60 people last year and will do at least that many this year.  I used to be surprised when a resume had an average job tenure of 2 years on it — now, the job market is so fluid that I am surprised when I see a resume that only has one or two employers listed.

But even the dynamic of long-term employment, as rare as it is, has changed.  My good friend Christine, who was a pal in college and then worked with me at MovieFone for several years before I left to start Return Path, just announced that she’s finally leaving AOL — after almost 11 years.  Now that’s staying power.  But most likely the reason she was able to stay at MovieFone/AOL for over a decade is that she didn’t have one single job, and she didn’t even work her way up a single management chain in a single department.  She had positions in marketing, business development, finance, operations, planning, strategy.  Most were in the entertainment field, so they did have that common thread, and some evolved from others, but the roles themselves had very different dynamics, skills required, spans of control, and bosses.

That’s the new reality of long-term employment with knowledge workers.  If you want to keep the best people engaged and happy, you have to constantly let them grow, learn, and try new things out or run the risk that some other company will step in with a shiny new job for them to sink their teeth into.  Congratulations, Christine, on such a great run at AOL — it’s certainly my goal here to keep our best people for a decade or more!

Years ago, I heard then General David Petraeus give a talk to a small group of us about leadership. He was literally coming to us live from his command center in Iraq or Afghanistan when he was running the whole theater of war over there. I realize he subsequently had some tarnish on his reputation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor around handling classified information, but the main thrust of his talk, his Formula for Strategic Leadership, still stands as one of the more memorable talks on leadership I’ve ever heard and is no less relevant as a result.

Given that I still remember it vividly 14-15 years later, I thought I’d recreate it here with my own annotations after the four principles. It’s a simple 4-step formula:

1. Get the big ideas right. Obviously, you aren’t going to go down in history as a great leader if you consistently get the big picture wrong. That doesn’t mean you have to be right about everything and every detail. But if you pick the wrong market, bet on the wrong approach, happen to get your timing wrong by a few years…it’s hard to win.
2. Communicate them up and down the organization. Every mature leader knows that ideas and plans only go so far if they stay in your head or get filtered down through leadership teams. For your values to take root, for your strategy and strategic choices to make sense, and for people in the organization to be able to connect their daily execution to your company’s north star, you need to spend a lot of time communicating those things throughout the organization. Different groups, different meetings, different channels. And then, when you’re finally exhausted and sick of hearing yourself say those things over and over and over again…keep saying them.
3. Personally oversee their implementation. Leaders who throw things over the proverbial wall — “here’s what to do, now go do it while I move on to something else” — are not really strategic leaders. The devil is in the details. If you can’t bother to spend a few minutes overseeing the implementation of your strategy and carefully watching when and how it works and doesn’t (see next item), you may be a good visionary, but you’re not really a strategic leader.
4. Memorialize and institutionalize best and worst practices. This is where so many leaders fall down on the job. When something in your organization wraps up — a launch, a quarter, a project — you have to do a retrospective, curate learnings both good and bad, and publish them. That way your whole organization can have a growth mindset as a system.

There are about a zillion books on leadership out there. Most of them are probably between 200 and 400 pages long. While they may all have variations on this theme and colorful examples behind them, this still rings true for me as the essential formula for strategic leadership.