I have had two encounters with customer service departments this week as a result of online shopping experiences. Both had happy endings against my expectations.

Mobile phone company

The first was with my mobile phone company, Vodafone. My mobile phone, a Nokia E65, is over 3 years old, which doesn’t sound old by normal standards. A lot has changed with mobile phones since then, and I decided that since it was my birthday I would upgrade to a smartphone. My E65 was able to connect to the internet but with the small screen and the need to scroll the mouse up and down and across internet access was slow and tedious and I tended not to use it.

I shopped around and checked reviews and decided on a HTC Legend. My current mobile phone company has this phone, and for that and other reasons I decided to stay with them. I had a play with it in the store and made my decision. I would replace my $20 per month sim-only plan with a $29 per month contract and pay an extra $10 per month for the phone of my choice – $39 per month. This was equivalent to me buying the phone outright somewhere else and staying on my $20 plan, with the added convenience of spreading the payment for the phone over 24 months.

I ordered it online. Part of the process was to tell them my existing phone number so I could transfer my number across to the new plan. By ordering online I could get a $100 credit and surely it would arrive in a reasonable time. I had ordered the Nokia online and had had to spend time on the phone with Customer Service to sort out the account, so I was prepared to have to do this, and decided it was worth the $100 credit I would receive.

After a week the phone hadn’t arrived so I phoned Vodafone. The nice man with the accent assured me that the phone had been picked up by the courier company and gave me the consignment number. When I asked about swapping my accounts to the new phone he assured me that all I had to do was move my sim card to the new phone. The courier company did not have the consignment number on record and said it would take another couple of days, so I was disappointed when I went out the next day, thinking I was safe, and there was a card saying my phone had been left with the post office.

No matter. I picked up the phone, swapped my sim card over, gave the old phone to my husband, and away I went. I’ve had a lot of fun learning how to use it and playing with Facebook and Twitter and searching for information. I reminded myself to check my account online to make sure I wasn’t paying for all this extra internet usage.

I did, and I was. I had racked up $55 worth of downloads in a couple of weeks. I was still on the old sim-only plan. I was furious. I rang Vodafone and spoke to a nice lady with an accent. She put me on hold, looked into it, and promised to ring me back after she’d spoken with her supervisor.

She did ring me back, the same afternoon. She hadn’t been able to find a $39 plan so had put me on a $49 plan. I exploded. She asked me to allow her to finish. She had put a recurring $10 credit on my account, and had refunded the $55 extra charges. So I now get more free calls and a much higher data limit for the life of the contract.

I’m happy! I just wanted to be put on the contract I’d signed up for. I didn’t expect anything extra. Because Vodafone went to the next level to keep me happy, they have made me a satisfied and loyal customer. At least for the 24 months of the contract.

Printing services

The second experience was with a printing service. A company called ?Vistaprint has been marketing very aggressively lately. They were offering 140 free address labels that you could design on their website, with only postage to pay. I played around on the website and ordered some labels for my business, Heritage Genealogy, with the picture that I use on my website to appear on the labels.

They arrived, and I was happy with them. There was a mistake on the website but that was my fault, not theirs. I rarely forget to put the .au on the end of the website address, but this time I did. No matter, I thought, I can write it in.

I have received, since then, numerous emails offering bargains, and on one of them they were again offering free labels. Since they were free I figured I could correct my mistake and improve the picture, which I did. Once you have completed the configuring of the labels they offer other products and show you pictures of them with your picture and address inserted. There were pads and post-it notes at very low prices, so I ordered one of each. My order came to about $10, plus postage.

When I was checking out, the website offered me an additional pad and  post-it notes with free postage. Since the amount of the postage came to about the same total as adding these items I agreed, thinking I was getting free postage for ordering more items. When I realised that it just meant no further postage would be charged I tried to go back but the order had been placed.

I was furious. I am reasonably savvy when it comes to computers and websites, and I felt I had been tricked into ordering more at the last minute with no opportunity to change my mind.

I think that if this had happened a few years ago I would have chalked it up to experience and left it at that. It was only about $15 more. No. I found the Contact Us page and told them what I thought of their website and their marketing practises.

That was a few days ago. This morning I received an email to say that they had given me a refund on the extra items I’d ordered and an apology for any inconvenience. The extra items have not been cancelled and so they are sending them with their compliments. I have already received notification from PayPal that the refund has been received.

So I’m less furious than I was, and happy that I will be getting what I thought I was ordering in the first place. I still think their website is misleading and I imagine most people who get tricked this way just let it go. I will probably use them again and be more wary, although I now have enough labels, post-its and pads to last me a good long while.

Lessons learned

1. Times are getting tougher for businesses, mine as well as the bigger ones.  Repeat business is important, and for customers to keep coming back they need to be happy and think well of your business. It pays to give a little something to keep them onside.
2. Don’t be afraid to complain when something isn’t right, even if it’s only $15 worth. If they are a business worth sticking with they will fix your problem and go out of their way to offer you more than you expected. They don’t know about problems unless we customers tell them.

Free images courtesy of Ekaterina Gorelova on Dreamstime

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Now all I need to do is to give them something to look at every few days! Volunteers gratefully accepted.

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My $5 limit was reached much more quickly last night, perhaps because more people are playing around on FaceBook on a Friday night. I think more money would be needed to make this more effective, as we still have all day Saturday before any more ads can be shown.

The number of fans for the Society of Australian Genealogists page has jumped from 42 at about this time yesterday to 57. So something is working!

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I serve on the Council of the Society of Australian Genealogists and one of the issues we are facing, as do all similar societies, is how to attract new members in the digital age.

I created a page on FaceBook a few months ago for the Society which you can see here. I created a group first, not realising that a page would be better. As of last night the group had 76 members and the page had 40 fans.

Not going to save the Society that way, am I!

Last night I bit the bullet and experimented with ads for the Society page. I have targeted it at people in Australia of any age and any gender, resulting in a target of about 200,000 people. I used the keywords “genealogy”, “family history”, and “research”. I left the default amount for cost per click and changed the maximum per day to $5, down from $25.

The results are encouraging, but it is an expensive way to advertise for a NFP (Not For Profit) to sustain, especially if the costs are being borne, as currently, by a volunteer, ie, me. I can afford $5 per day for a couple of days, but not as an ongoing campaign, and neither can the Society.

Here are the results so far:

Results of SAG ad campaign as at 10:20am

In the 14 hours since the campaign started we have increased the number of fans by two as the result of 10 clicks on the ad (if I am reading the results correctly) for a cost of USD3.91.

Of course, new fans of the FaceBook page doesn’t translate to new members of the Society, and it is just as likely that the two new fans are current members of the Society who hadn’t known we had a presence in FaceBook.

I will leave it running a bit longer, and then I will change the parameters to target older people, who are statistically more likely to be interested in family history. Of course, I have a weekend coming up tonight which may change the results.

Stay tuned!

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As much as I dislike advertising when it interrupts my day-to-day life I recognise that it is an inevitable part of life. When I’m watching TV I don’t mind when ads appear between shows (and in fact I resent it when they don’t as it doesn’t give me time to go and do something I need to do) but I fiercely resent it when it is inserted within the show, especially movies. I particular resent ads that are placed at points in the program other than when the change of scene makes it obvious that the ad should have been placed there.

So, anyway, I dislike ads but I live with them. This policy has now spilled over into my blogs, including this one. In the past I have half-heartedly inserted an ad in the left column of this blog and another one, and have not, until yesterday, done anything to find out how successful (or not) the ad has been. 

My lack of follow-up has been for a number of reasons:

1. My general dislike of advertising
2. My inablility to keep track of the changes in affiliate websites and who is responsible for which advertising company
3. My inability to remember ids and passwords once I do find the website responsible
4. My feeling of  despair when I do get into the website responsible

Advertising for Ancestry, GenesReunited and the Origins Network are all controlled by a thing called Commission Junction. Whenever I manage to find and log into this website it has seemed overwhelmingly impossible, as the first thing it shows me as a default is the first page of a long list of advertisers (mostly in the States) that have no relevance to me whatsoever. Finding advertisers I am interested in has been equally difficult. I take one look and then I run away and do something else instead.

World Vital Records has changed from whoever it used to be to the Google Affiliate Network. I’ d never gotten around to doing what I had to do to move to this new mob. Then there is Google Adsense – all those ads you see down the side of the page, and elsewhere. And Google Adwords. And Amazon Associates….

Yesterday I spent a large chunk of the day sorting it all out. It seems I used to have Google Adsense ads but stopped a few months ago. I bit the bullet and signed up for Google Adwords for my business website. I found an ad I liked for the Origins Network and put that in a couple of places. I found a plugin for WordPress, the software that brings you this blog, that will insert an ad in old posts. An example of that ad appears below (in theory, Google ads don’t appear immediately).

It seems the secret to Commission Junction is to select the By Relationship tab, and so I just see the three companies I have relationships with, namely Ancestry, GenesReunited and the Origins Network, instead of the thousands I don’t want a relationship with. Why didn’t I see that before???! Here are some ads from each of these:

Aren’t they pretty? And one for World Vital Records:

Hmm, not what I was expecting. Unfortunately they don’t show you the ad, there’s just a description, although perhaps that depends on which browser I’m using. How about this one?

It’s a different way to go, sure. I’ve also had a look at the affiliate program for FindMyPast, the UK company, but it seems too much hassle for little benefit. They use a different company called Affiliate Window and want me to pay £5 just to join, and they only make payments when my account reaches £100. I don’t expect that I will ever get to this level so the whole thing seems pointless.

Amazon Associates controls the commission you get if clicking on a picture of a book in your library in LibraryThing takes the reader to Amazon and they buy the book. I have never earned any money this way, but the system is there.

So, dear reader, you will see more ads than you used to. In the current economic climate (don’t you get sick of reading that phrase, and others like it) I need to consider alternate streams of income, although “stream” is an unrealistically optimistic word. Trickle, perhaps. I hope they are not intrusive, and I hope you will let me know if you think they are.

Here is an example from Google Adsense. I will be interested to see what the ad is.

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I’ve been struggling with this question for a long time now. I’ve started sneaking small ads for Ancestry and GenesReunited on my website and blogs which, incidently, don’t work in Firefox V3. If you want to avoid advertising perhaps that is the browser to use!

Why would I do that, if I think that they’re bad? Well, I’ve decided that they are not necessarily so bad. I use the internet a lot and most ads don’t bother me. The ones I don’t like are the ones on FaceBook that have a bigger button than the function of the page I am on so that I click on the wrong button, and some of the more annoying flashing moving banners along the top of eBay pages.

So I figure that if I avoid these types of ads I won’t annoy readers of my sites. And I might even make some money from them. We’ll see.

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