Service Untitled

I bought a memory card for my phone through Amazon’s marketplace from a store called thememstore.com. I wasn’t expecting much – it was just a memory card that cost like $30 or something. I wanted the card to get to me in a reasonable amount of time and work. Those were my expectations. They were met when I received the package about 5 days after ordering and it worked fine in my phone.

However, the company went the extra mile through a little thing that ended up making it a fairly notable experience. In the box with my memory card and the packing list were two lollipops. They were the good types of lollipops (my favorite type) and I was impressed. A friend of mine was with me when I opened the box and she noticed there were lollipops in the box and was impressed.

Now how much did that cost The Mem Store? 50 cents? Maximum? Wouldn’t that be cool if Amazon or even a different, smaller retailer like Headsets.com included a lollipop with every order? It is a pretty cool idea and makes a difference. Not everyone will like the lollipop specifically, but it definitely makes the experience less run of the mill.

It is a series of little things like including the lollipop in the package that collectively can make a big difference in a customer service experience. If you can find five or six other “lollipop” things that you can add to your customer service experience, it will make a noticeable difference.

There are lots of opportunities to do things like that. For example, Kayak.com could send a postcard to customers who make travel reservations from the location they are about to go. If it is a major location like Florida, New York, San Diego, etc., it wouldn’t be hard to keep the postcards around and send them out with some text saying “Hi from New York! We look forward to seeing you and thank you for using Kayak.com.” That is just one idea – I am sure there are hundreds of other things that can be done.

Remember when they used to give lollypops at the bank? I’m not sure if they do that anymore, but I remember as I got older (even from like 5 to 7), it became harder to get lollipops from the banks. I’m not sure what, if any banks give out lollipops now, but it is a good idea. The cost is low and it makes people happy.

I’ve had back luck with technology today. The USB cord for my phone (which is like a week old) stopped working and the monitor for my desktop (which is like 6 months old) also stopped working. Who knows? There may be two more customer service stories over the next week or two.