This should be a ongoing series. There are so many companies who still do not get basic customer service. Today’s example is brought to you by VistaPrint.
I’ve used VistaPrint only a few times: to order business cards for both my wife and I, to have some cheap brochures printed up, and to take advantage of a couple of freebies like branded refrigerator magnets. But since I started to use them the volume of email offers they send me (daily) has reached spamming proportions. I get sometimes two email ads from them a day, offering 24-hour savings on everything from cards to coffee mugs, shirts, hats, banners. Everything I pretty much don’t need.
But today they lost my business. They send me an email (fancy, designed like a newsletter) with photos of my business cards. The ad states that these items still are in my account cart, but if I do not place an order by December 15, they will be removed from said cart. What reason–other than strong-arming a sale–could they possibly have for needing to clear out my cart? Are they running low on disk space? Database is getting too full? Need more room for higher-end customers? I tell you, I can’t believe they have resorted to threatening me to make a sale. Here’s the copy from the email:
We wanted to let you know that the items currently in your VistaPrint account portfolio (shown below), have not been ordered and will expire on Dec 15, 2007. Once the items have expired, you will be unable to recover them.
Well, what goes around, eh? Not that I am a volume consumer of their products, but now I am not at all a consumer of their products. I wonder how many others were equally turned off by this tactic. Do you suppose it worked on lots of others and they just racked up lots of sales? No, I don’t either.
December 12th, 2007 at 8:09 am
multiply the loss of your potential business over 5 or 10 years times the number of referrals that you would have made to vista for being a good vendor to you,times those clients purchases over 5 to 10 years - then multiply that times all the other customers they pissed off, now we’re talking real money.
and in the go-go growth of a web-based business, sales falling off a little in a quarter or two spells DOOM - no funding, more costly funding, no IPO - very short-sigted
kevin
December 20th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Hey Chris - something similar cost Gevalia our business a few years back. They shipped us a “special” that we didn’t order and billed our card, saying that if we could certainly return the product if we didn’t want it. Oh please. I suppose they probably sold more specials that way, but we cut them off altogether. Who comes up with these ideas? Somebody under the wrong kind of metrics pressure, I’d wager.