Little things make all the difference
If you find even the smal est way to make people smile, they'l remember you
more for that smile than for al your other fancy business-model stuff.
Here are some things that made a huge difference on the CD Baby website:
Because we shipped FedEx at 5 p.m. each day, customers would often cal and
ask, “What time is it there? Do I stil have time to get it sent today?”
So I added two little lines of programming code that counted how many hours
and minutes remained until 5 p.m. and then showed the result by the shipping
options. “You have 5 hours, 18 minutes until our next FedEx shipment.”
Customers LOVED this!
We answered our phone within two rings, always—7 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days
a week. Phones were everywhere, so even if the customer service rep was busy,
someone in the warehouse could pick up. Al anyone had to do was say “CD
Baby!” Customers LOVED this! Someone actual y picking up the phone at a
company is so rare that musicians would often tel me later at conferences that it
was the main reason they decided to go with CD Baby— they could always talk
to a real person immediately. Al employees knew that as long as we weren't
completely swamped, they should take a minute and get to know the cal er a bit.
Ask about her music. Ask how it's going. Yes, it would lead to twenty-minute
conversations sometimes, but those people became lifelong fans.
Every outgoing email has a “From:” name, right? Why not use that to make
people smile, too? With one line of code, I made it so that every outgoing email
customized the “From:” field to be “CD Baby loves {firstname}.” So if the
customer's name was Susan, every email she got from us would say it was from
“CD Baby loves Susan.” Customers LOVED this!
Sometimes, after we had done the forty-five minutes of work to add a new
album to the store, the musician would change his mind and ask us to do it over
again with a different album cover or different audio clips. I wanted to say yes
but let him know that this was real y hard to do, so I made a policy that made us
both smile: “We'l do anything for a pizza.” If you needed a big special favor,
we'd give you the number of our local pizza delivery place. If you bought us a
pizza, we'd do any favor you wanted. When we'd tel people about this on the
phone, they'd often laugh, not believing we were serious. But we'd get a pizza
every few weeks. I'd often hear from musicians later that this was the moment
they fel in love with us.
At the end of each order, the last page of the website would ask, “Where did you
hear of this artist? We'l pass them any message you write here.”
Customers would often take the time to write things like, “Heard your song on
WBEZ radio last night. Searched Yahoo!. Found it here. I'd love to have you
play at our school!” The musicians absolutely loved getting this information, and
it always led to the customer and musician getting in touch directly. This is
something that big stores like Amazon would never do.
Also at the end of each order, there was a box that would ask, “Any special
requests?” One time, someone said, “I'd love some cinnamon gum.”
Since one of the guys in the warehouse was going to the store anyway, he picked
up some cinnamon gum and included it in the package. One time, someone said,
“If you could include a smal , rubber squid, I would appreciate it. If this is
unobtainable, a real squid would do.” Just by chance, a customer from Korea had
sent us a packaged filet of squid. So the shipping guys included it in the box with
the other customer's CDs. See the customer tel the story himself in this great
video: http://sivers.org/squid.
Even if you want to be big someday, remember that you never need to act like a
big boring company.
Over ten years, it seemed like every time someone raved about how much he
loved CD Baby, it was because of one of these little fun human touches.
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