What Every Business Can Learn from the Social Media Efforts of @Delta

Posted on January 28, 2012 by TheManager

It was about 6:30 last evening when I found myself at the Delta Sky Club in Tampa, Florida. I was booked on Delta’s 7:45 flight to Atlanta (where I am speaking to a group of Ford dealership managers about Internet processes this morning). I had a yearning for a cup of coffee, but I really didn’t think indulging in a caffeinated beverage that late in the day made sense. (Between my upcoming flight and the strange bed I was soon to be sleeping in, it would be hard enough for me to get any rest. As it ended up, I got a solid six hours.)

I grabbed a clean cup at the self-serve coffee station and placed it under the decaf jug’s spout. Pushing down on the lever I discovered they were out of decaf, so I moseyed to the bar to let the Delta bartender know this fact.

“Oh… thank you,” she replied.

I got a glass of water to hold me while she made the decaf and headed back to my seat in the lounge.

Twenty Minutes is Plenty of Time to Make a Pot, Right?

At about ten minutes before seven, I headed back to the coffee station only to discover that the decaf jug was missing. Clearly, the bartender just forgot to return it after she made a fresh pot, I surmised, so I walked over to the bar to ask her if the decaf was ready.

“Oh… it’s too late to make any decaf,” she replied.

I looked at her and just blinked my eyes for a couple of seconds to get my bearings.

“Um, isn’t nighttime when people usually drink decaf?” I asked.

“Well, I was told it’s too late to make any more decaf tonight,” she replied smiling.

Would You Like a Double Gin & Tonic instead?

I figured that a pot of decaf must cost Delta all of two dollars, so I wondered why they were being so cheap. Had I been ordering double Gin & Tonics all night they wouldn’t have batted an eye – even though my drain on their profits would have been much greater.

Since I really wanted that coffee – to the point that I could actually taste it on my way back to my seat – I decided there was nothing I could do but sit down, shut up and be a good Delta customer. In other words, I was fuming. Not because I didn’t get my precious coffee, but because of the arbitrary nature of how the Delta team at the Tampa Sky Club chose to create rules. They didn’t want to have to clean the pots after a certain hour (I surmised), so they invented a rule that you couldn’t make decaf after six.

They reminded me of a bunch of teenagers working at any fast food establishment fifteen minutes before closing: “Oh shit, here comes another customer. Don’t they know we close in like fifteen minutes?”

Vent or Die

I could keep my now rage about being denied a cup of decaf inside me or I could let it out. I chose to let it out. Of course, rather than throw chairs around the Sky Club or even demanding to speak to a supervisor, I decided to just Tweet about this experience to my 1,200+ alleged followers. (Because it was a Friday night, I was pretty sure that no more than 1 or 2 would even read the damn thing. I just needed to vent.)

I followed that message with one more Tweet a minute later to complete my thoughts about the whole affair:

Feeling somewhat content having gotten this off my chest; I sent a couple of emails, packed up my belongings and headed for the departure gate.

A few minutes after I settled into my seat and cracked open an unsatisfying bottle of water, a Delta agent came to my row and asked for me. Instinctively, I just knew I was going to hear some regurgitation of why they don’t make decaf after 6:00 PM and how sorry she was but that “the policy was important to ensure the blah, blah, blah…”

“Mr. Stauning?” she asked.

“Yes?” I replied.

She followed with “We were wrong not to make a fresh pot of decaf for you in the Sky Club this evening. Can you tell me who it was that told you this?”

I was floored. She admitted they were wrong and actually wanted to know which of their employees needed some additional training on customer service.

After I told her my experience and the brief conversations with the bartender, she thanked me for being a loyal Delta customer and handed me a $12 meal voucher for Atlanta. (Delta knows, you see, that I am flying out of Atlanta today after my meetings and so they correctly assumed that I might have to grab a bite in the airport.)

For the cost of a few minutes’ time and $12, Delta was able to completely resolve a minor situation with a long-time customer (and often vocal critic). Moreover, the half-dozen or so people who heard the exchange on the plane were undoubtedly impressed.

#TheLittleThingsThatMatter

As I hashtagged in both of my Tweets, it’s the little things that matter. Not making decaf for your frequent fliers is a little thing; but it genuinely pisses customers off. Telling your customers you were wrong and offering to buy them a $12 lunch the next day are little things; but these are what customers remember and appreciate.

The lessons that all businesses – whether they’re a B2C or B2B establishment – can learn from how @Delta handled this “little thing” are these:

Be diligent and genuine about your social media pursuits. If you’re going to be on Twitter or Facebook, don’t do it for branding or marketing purposes; and don’t just become another spammer. Be social. React genuinely. Solve problems. Or shut the hell up.
Be quick and don’t escalate the little things – SOLVE THEM. I don’t know who made the decision to greet me on my plane and present me with a meal voucher, but this decision did not have to be reviewed by a committee. Imagine if the team that monitors Delta’s Twitter account had simply waited until the next day and responded to my Tweet with “Dear Mr. Stauning: blah, blah, blah…” That would have been infuriating (I know, because another minor issue with a company last week was handled just that way. They would have been better off ignoring my Tweet than to send me down the customer service path of hell I am currently on.) Delta has empowered someone to make quick decisions in the field to solve minor customer issues. This seemingly tiny act can do more to defuse a bad situation than all the “we’re sorry you feel this way” emails and calls from insincere customer service drones.
In all relationships, it’s truly the little things that matter. This is especially true in the realm of customer relationships. The customer is not always right… but, they are always the customer, and when it’s your fault that they feel bad you need to tell them it’s your fault, and then you need to fix the problem.

But The Steakhouse Did So Much More…

Some of you may be familiar with a similar, albeit more extravagant, response from an overpriced steakhouse to a loyal customer who also Tweeted his desires from the Tampa airport. The differences in this case are that Delta (in my opinion) wasn’t looking for publicity, just hoping to satisfy their customer. Additionally, Delta operates on a much smaller margin and deals with many more customer service issues than a chain of restaurants, so sending a guy in tuxedo to deliver me a porterhouse dinner would not have been fiscally responsible. Finally, the guy who Tweeted about steak was just a whiny traveler who wanted something he couldn’t have.

(Well, I guess the two stories do have a little in common.)

The 10 Douchiest Job Titles in America

Posted on January 22, 2012 by TheManager

The 10 Douchiest Job Titles of 2012

For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to keep my business cards free of my title. I feel this way for a couple of reasons: primarily, I don’t want those outside of my company getting hung up on my title; also, I really don’t give a shit what you call me inside the company; so long as the work is challenging and fun – and that my role can somehow influence the company’s results.

Of course, I understand I’m in the minority here. There’s an episode of Cheers that humorously magnifies America’s love for important sounding job titles when Woody, Sam and Carla individually go into Rebecca’s office to demand a raise; only to come out overly satisfied with nothing more than artificial titles.

So, while I get why some people want a title and want to proudly display it on their business cards, I struggle to understand why anyone would want a title that basically screams to the world “Hey, look at me: I’m a major douchebag.”

Do you have a douchie title or do you know someone with a douchie title? If so, please share them here. For now, here is my list of The 10 Douchiest Job Titles of 2012:

10. Lifetime Value Business Leader – This title is douchie for so many reasons, not the least of which is that I have no fucking idea what it means. To me, this title sounds more like something that would be inscribed on a crappy award you get from the Fort Wayne, Indiana, Chamber of Congress than something you would print on a business card. Chances are, if you’re a Lifetime Value Business Leader, you probably can’t lead and likely provide no value to your business (even in the short term).

9. Talent Acquisition Expert – I have two major problems with this total douche bag title: first, if your title shows that you are an “expert” anything it means you are exactly the opposite; and second, the title “Talent Acquisition Expert” springs from the same political correctness that brought us such classic douchebag titles as “Sanitation Engineer” and Subway’s oxymoronic “Sandwich Artist.”

8. Director of Customer Experience – Taking care of customers should be Job One for everyone at your company; but if your business actually names someone their Director of Customer Experience, your front line employees are likely just paying lip service to the actual customer experience. Of course, that’s not what makes this title so douchie. What makes this title really douchie is that the role can only be filled by complete and utter douchebags. Think about it: have you ever met a Director of Customer Experience who didn’t annoy the fuck out of everyone around them? Sickie sweet phoniness does not make for a great customer experience.

7. Chief Motivational Officer – Similarly to the Director of Customer Experience role, if your company needs anyone with any variation of the word “motivation” in their title, then you have a real motivation problem. In fact, your lack of genuinely motivated people will not be solved by giving some made-up title to someone who cannot execute; but he’s really fucking nice so you named him your Chief Motivational Officer. Fire this guy and use the money you save to buy the employees a pool table for the break room and pizza every Friday.

6. Entrepreneur – This title is certainly douchie on the surface: it screams “look at me; I’m a real risk-taking maverick.” Yet these risk-taking mavericks who call themselves entrepreneurs are using the more cultural (mostly incorrect) definition of the word as “someone who starts a business that promises economic gain, but also entails great risk.” In fact, the word actually describes any manager or owner of a business – regardless of actual risk or gain. Putting “entrepreneur” on your card is equivalent to putting the non-descript “manager” as your title; only way more douchie.

5. Company Evangelist – The only people who should be allowed to have “evangelist” on their business cards are those hell-bent on saving our souls and taking our money. (Just taking our money is not enough to make you an evangelist.) In all seriousness, if you don’t spend your Sundays on television speaking to a bunch of sheep and fleecing them of their life savings, then you need to leave this off your business card.

4. Guru – The word is Sanskrit, and if you did not know that, then you’re not a fucking Guru. Moreover, this type of douchebag title is one of the “self-anointed” kinds. This means that no one ever called you a Guru (unless their tongue was firmly planted in their cheek) – you gave yourself this title; and for that, you are a douchebag of the highest order. In fact, you might just be the Guru of douchieness.

3. Mentor – What in the world would prompt someone to put this drivel on their card as their title? It is the job of everyone in your company to mentor to those with less seniority, knowledge or experience than themselves. However, if any douchebag put “Mentor” as their job title on their business card, then they are just announcing to the world that they really value their experience and opinions a whole lot more than the rest of us. I can honestly say that I have not learned a thing from a single person who ever “tried” to be a mentor to me. The true mentors in my life never tried, it just came naturally to them – and they gladly mentored without fanfare or the need to be officially called a mentor.

2. Visionary – Putting this on your card literally screams that what you lack more than anything else is vision. Because… if you had any vision at all, you’d see what a douchebag you look like with this on your card. Let me break this to you gently: being right about a few things does NOT make you a fucking visionary; knowing more than your boss about technology or the Internet does NOT make you a fucking visionary. “Visionary” is a title people bestow upon you at death (think Steve Jobs), not something you call yourself when you’re still alive and annoying the rest of us.

1. Thought Leader – The King of all douchebags, the “Thought Leader,” is another self-anointed position. Those who use this title to describe themselves really see their place in your industry as Socrates meets Einstein. They believe – generally because they have a below-average IQ – that they are both philosopher and genius. While the rest of us see the obvious for what it is, the self-proclaimed “thought leaders” point out the ordinary as if they’ve cracked the genetic code. Deep inside I think many “thought leaders” are truly just “do nothings” who gave themselves the title of “thought leader” because they don’t want to do any real work; they just want to regurgitate what others have published.

…

Generally speaking, I think the Internet magnifies the self-importance that the douchebags who proudly display any of my Top Ten douchie titles tends to feel and feed upon. Make no mistake, I get that many of you who read this think I’m a douchebag for my often ranting style of writing. The difference between me and the douchebags that might desire one of the above as their titles is that I know whatever I write will be douchie to someone.

Of course, if you happen to be one who thinks my writing is douchie, then I feel good that I could help you feel superior to someone; even if it is just some douchebag who rants when he writes…

How TrueCar.com Caught Car Dealers Off Guard

Posted on January 9, 2012 by TheManager

The Internet is (finally) introducing progress to the car business… whether automotive retailers like it or not.

While the Internet itself has so far been little more than an evolution of how car dealers do business (think about it: dealers have been receiving and responding to sales leads from Internet customers for more than fifteen years, yet most dealerships still see less than thirty percent of their sales coming from these online customer inquiries), what TrueCar will bring to dealers is nothing short of a revolution… and most dealerships aren’t prepared.

TrueCar’s business model is designed to eventually eliminate car dealers. For now, they seem content with just getting rid of the pesky commissioned car salespeople. If TrueCar gets their way, every car dealer in the country will provide the actual selling prices of their vehicles up-front; with no haggling. This, it seems, has gotten some in the industry a bit peeved.

“It’s not too late to put this beast down,” commented one such peeved industry veteran about TrueCar on one of the leading automotive dealership forums, DealerElite.net. Others on the site are calling for government investigations and dealer boycotts of TrueCar.

Can they put the beast down?

Forget for a moment how good their model of showing a guaranteed selling price is for consumers, TrueCar still needs car dealers to pay them $299 to $399 per vehicle sold or TrueCar will simply go away. If dealers truly abandon TrueCar, then what?

Unfortunately for the TrueCar detractors, there are two unstoppable forces at work that guarantee that even if TrueCar crashes and burns, the TrueCar business model will not only survive, but eventually become the industry norm. These forces are competition and consumers.

While there have probably been hundreds of dealers who have dumped TrueCar as a provider of sales leads since the industry call-to-arms officially began in November, there have likely been hundreds more who’ve signed on. Dealers, you see, want to sell cars; TrueCar, it seems, actually helps them do that. The competitive nature of car dealers simply won’t allow them to leave these sales leads to their competitors.

From a consumer perspective, one might ask “what took so long?” Why is it we can discover the actual selling price of everything from iodine to iPads before we ever leave for the store, but with cars we still have to haggle as if we’re walking through the Istanbul Grand Bazaar? With or without TrueCar, consumers were already moving toward no-haggle pricing for their vehicle purchases. TrueCar accomplished just one thing that had not been successfully deployed before: displaying the final selling prices of identical vehicles from competing dealers… and this, you see, removed the dealers’ greatest advantage in the car deal.

Why would dealers ever knowingly give up their advantage?

It only took a few car dealer indiscretions to allow TrueCar to get into the position of radically reforming the way new cars are sold to the public; and nearly all of these are examples of failed leadership at the dealer level.

Because most managers of car dealerships got to their level without the assistance of a solid training program or a heavy focus on process or process improvement, it’s no surprise that they “lead” with virtually no focus on these, as well.

Automotive retail provides some of the best examples of bad leadership, likely due to its history (“no one trained me, why should I train anyone?”) and its unbelievably high turnover rate (“why train my salespeople, when they’ll just end up working for someone else in a year?”). Additionally, car dealers have survived for years without the need for formal training programs or progressive leadership; why should anyone think they need these today?

With no focus on training or continuous process improvement, most dealership Internet sales managers – the ones who should have seen TrueCar coming and warned the others – were so busy playing with Facebook and Twitter; so busy thinking they were in the technology business that they never even realized they were in the business of selling cars at a profit. Of course, for most Internet managers, it didn’t help that since they receive almost no respect or support from the other managers in their store – including their direct supervisors – it is doubtful anyone would have listened to them about TrueCar anyway.

Interestingly, the dealerships that wasted (and continue to waste) countless hours and dollars to perfect some social media identity generally feel that social media is a revolution in the auto industry – while missing the true revolution: transaction price transparency and the guaranteeing of transaction prices via the Internet.

Not all dealerships want to put the beast down…

The dealership owners and general managers who never fully embraced the idea of selling cars online are the ones that are the most annoyed by TrueCar. They are the ones rallying their local state associations and regulatory agencies to protect them from themselves. Progressive dealerships – those organizations where everyone is pulling toward the same goal; and where the future brings opportunity, not uncertainty – are comfortable with the move to TrueCar. Many of them got rid of commissioned salespeople years ago.

In his book, Adapt Or Die: How The Internet Is Destroying Dealer Profits And What To Do About It, Kurt Baumberger warned of this phenomenon three years ago. Did any dealers listen? Perhaps a few, but for the most part, dealers continued to run things as they always had: heavy on telling and yelling; light on teaching and improving.

What is most surprising to me is that anyone is surprised. There has been a race to the bottom in automotive retail since the first online listing of vehicles became available. I think what is also surprising is that it’s taken until 2012 for this to become a reality in automotive retail.

Progress happens…

TrueCar is merely the first. Soon, industry leaders like Cars.com and AutoTrader.com will have to insist that dealers post guaranteed pricing on their new vehicles or consumers will simply flock to TrueCar (and the soon-to-emerge clones) to avoid the hassles of negotiating.

To those outside of automotive retail, the TrueCar detractors are probably starting to resemble what the horse-drawn carriage makers, smithies and groomsmen must have looked like as the first automobiles started rolling off assembly lines over 100 years ago. Cursing progress does nothing but make those doing the cursing seem small-minded and naïve.

The thing about progress is that it progresses – whether those in the way of progress like it or not. The progress that is radically changing the car business today has been moving like the lava flows of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano. It has been slow and deliberate, but it’s gaining strength. You can try to divert it; but you cannot stop it. It is steady and it is devouring everything in its path.

So is TrueCar a consumer’s best friend?

I think there might be genuine concerns over how TrueCar acquires and manages private customer data; but I think the real threat they hold over car dealers is their guaranteed up-front pricing. They could get rid of their silly bell curve and no longer aggregate sales transaction data; and their effect on the industry would remain unchanged. They could also stop telling consumers what dealers paid for their cars, as this information is irrelevant in the transaction and has been available online for years, anyway.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I was first exposed to the TrueCar bell curve in 2009 – which showed what consumers had paid for similar vehicles – and I was impressed. Back then, I felt it would be a game-changer for TrueCar.com. Since then, TrueCar has expanded their online offering to include certificates guaranteeing what consumers would pay from member-dealers for a given vehicle. This innovation, coupled with pitting dealers against each other on a single webpage, made the bell curve unnecessary. Now the TrueCar bell curve is nothing more than worthless eye candy.)

With some in the industry mad as hell about TrueCar’s use of data, it is interesting that as recently as this past weekend, TrueCar CEO Scott Painter was quoted bragging in a New York Post article about the plethora of data sources his company employs to produce their useless bell curve. “We collect information from consumer reports, insurers, lenders, government records and other industry sources in addition to what the 5,400 US dealers provide so we can decipher the true cost of a new car,” said Painter; clearly oblivious to the government’s and the public’s feelings about data privacy.

Everyone is missing the point…

Consumers, if asked, would likely tell you that they don’t care how much dealers paid for a car; “just tell me how much I’m going to pay.” Dealers, because they hid even the latter information from their buyers until they’d successfully worn them down in the dealership for a few hours, have no one to blame but themselves for the growth of TrueCar.

When we buy a book on Amazon.com, we don’t care how much Amazon paid for the book or how much profit they make from the sale. We only care about the transaction price, the delivery terms and the service before and after the sale. The same is true of buying a car. Why should I care if the dealer who sold me my last car made $5 or $5,000? All that mattered to me was the price I paid, the delivery terms and the service before and after the sale.

If TrueCar wasn’t so busy trying to get every scrap of data from every consumer vehicle transaction, they might realize that the TrueGold they provide to consumers occurs when they pit dealers against each other to post guaranteed selling prices. Of course, just as car dealers suffer great leadership voids, so does TrueCar, it seems. CEO Painter comes across as an egomaniacal prick (which, more often than not, means he probably is an egomaniacal prick to everyone around him); he also seems to truly relish his role as the villain to his paying customers: the car dealers. (Not a smart move, if you plan to withstand the inevitable competition for the long term.)

Sincerely, TrueCar Dealer Development Team…

To their dealer-customers, TrueCar behaves more like a government agency than a trusted partner; and their customer communications are signed by divisions and not people. It will be easy for dealers to dump them once real competition emerges or the major online classified websites begin posting guaranteed prices for new and used cars (and thus start driving leads and sales, instead of just expensive branding).

What won’t be easy for dealers is to get this horse back in the barn. If comparison shopping is a way of life for consumer seeking a $500 HP, what makes anyone think it won’t quickly become the norm for someone considering a $30,000 Honda? The leaders in the automotive space understand this, because leaders understand progress and they take advantage of it – even if it means destroying a business model that works today.

The leadership lesson in all this for those in and out of automotive retail is two-fold: First, business owners and their senior leaders must take a stake in the innovations brought on by technology (and not leave this to some “Internet manager”); and these same leaders need to find ways to leverage the inevitable change to their advantage (or they need to be ready to do something else with their lives).

Like it or not, progress has come to automotive retail; and it’s not going away.

Dear Occupy Wall Street Protesters: When Did I Become the Bad Guy?

Posted on October 10, 2011 by TheManager

It seems that as a pro-capitalism, successful business leader that I am somehow partially to blame for what ails the protesters who’ve joined the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. I am the enemy. I am the bad guy.

While I’ve tried desperately to comprehend both their demands and their end game, I have to admit that I am at a loss. One day someone who seems to be an OWS muckety muck (they don’t have any true leaders as of this writing) is claiming that all of capitalism must go; though the next day the protesters are joined by union leaders (whose members are employed by companies that benefit from capitalism) and the message is that corporate greed must go. (Is there anything more amorphous than “corporate greed?”)

It would be nice, actually, if they only had these two viewpoints; but the truth is that for every smelly twenty-something you see holding a sign (or an iPhone), there is a different take on what it is they are trying to “solve” with these protests.

I put the word solve in quotes because I’m not sure they want to solve anything. They really just seem mad that they don’t have all the same luxuries as the successful people in our society (the bad guys). Most of them just seem to want those of us who’ve worked for what we have to give it all back to “society” so that we can all be equally miserable doing without.

When Did I Become the Bad Guy?

By most protesters’ definition, I am a bad guy. I have my own business and I make a good living. My children have cool gadgets and we live in a nice house; in a nice neighborhood. I am really very satisfied with my life. A life, I might add, that did not happen by accident. So I need to know: When did I become the bad guy?

As an eight-year-old in 1971, I began selling candy door-to-door in Glendale, Arizona. I’m not sure how much I made, but it was probably somewhere around $10 per week. (We were poor when I was growing up, so if I wanted to buy anything, I had to earn the money to buy it.)