BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Usually I try to avoid using UPS, but when both hard drives in my laptop died on a same day and I called Lenovo for replacement – there’s little choice to be had. Last night I found a familiar brown-yellow-white note on building’s doors saying that UPS has made a second attempt to deliver the package. It’s not that I was aware of the first attempt, but who’s counting, right?

Well aware of all the issues facing me I called main UPS number and quickly found out that my package is resting peacefully at the station across the town. We’re only New York City’s most populous borough, with 2.5 million residents and the second most populated county in US, so we only get a single UPS station to pick our packages.

However, much to my surprise, the station is open from 8pm to 10:30pm (that’s right, night hours) for package pickup. Nice location (some warehouse neighborhood), friendly parking spots (half the streets around this huge UPS yard are marked “No Parking Any Time”), easy access (I only had to walk one and half block from the parking spot I found to a small entrance in a fence with no lights on) – all makes it a pleasure to visit and pick up the package.

The staff, though, is very friendly – either on the phone or on the location. I didn’t hit any lines (understandable, given the place and the time) so I got my stuff in well under 20 minutes.

Nice to see a movement in a right direction for UPS. Now if only I wouldn’t have to drive 30 minutes from home to UPS yard – it would have worked much better.

Yet another example of customer service gone wrong implementation that I had stumbled on this morning. My wife ordered some of her stuff online from HSN.com, order arrived in two pieces, one of them wrong. It happens. This morning I fetched a customer service phone number from order’s e-mail and wrote it for her so she could call and request an exchange. As I was leaving I heard her dialing the number and… guess what? An overly-cheery loud and annoying female voice happily announced that she has reached a rewards center, “probably by mistake”. Right… hung up the phone, double-check the number and dialed it again. Oops. Same voice, same message. I stopped, went into HSN’s web site to check the number. Yes, we’ve got the number right, but it still says “rewards center”.

After trying out a few other numbers, we figured the right one. Customer service rep helped my wife out, doing whatver it is they’re supposed to do in order to fix such an issue. However, the problem remains the same – why would someone post a rewards center phone number as a customer support? My guess is it was some marketing genius that decided it was an easy way to upsell existing customers.

From my stand point – it is not.

“An excellent website takes a particularly savvy blend of both great design and great code. Because of this, you often find designers having to figure out code and developers trying their hand at design…“

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Great article if you are involved in web design and if you read it thoroughly. I must admit – in our web design studio we sometimes get carried away with using free fonts and free images. However, the problem (at least sometimes) isn’t our laziness or not knowing any better.

Most problem arise with such “bad behavior” are tied to our inability to persuade clients not to use widespread imagery. At times it gets all but funny – “it worked for them, it will naturally work for us“. Naturally, it won’t. We’re getting better at explaining things to our clients, but we’re not flawless yet.

This, however, poses another opportunity to be better then competition. Alright, we’ll use that image you’ve seen a dozen times, but we’ll try to do it the best we can. So that the next time you see it on someone else’s web site, you would recall our client, not that other web site. Use that image to create a point of origin.

Creativity doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be creative.