Services Archives - Page 5 of 13

The Question Mark

Jeff Bezos kept a public email address for Amazon customers. “I still have an email address that customers can write to,” he said in 2018. When a complaint caught his attention, he forwarded it to one of his executives with one character added: a question mark.

Bezos explained: “That question mark is just a shorthand for, ‘Can you look into this? Why is this happening? What’s going on?'” A former manager described the effect: “By the morning, I better have a damn good resolution to whatever this is.”

Amazon Prime

On February 2, 2005, Amazon introduced Amazon Prime. “For a flat membership fee of $79 per year, members get unlimited, express two-day shipping for free.” Jeff Bezos said that “two-day shipping becomes an everyday experience rather than an occasional indulgence.”

In April 2019 Amazon announced that one-day shipping would become the standard for Prime members. It expected to spend $800 million in one quarter on warehouses and delivery.

Promptly Returned or Acknowledged

The American Bar Association’s Model Rule 1.4 requires a lawyer to “promptly comply with reasonable requests for information.” The commentary is specific: “Client telephone calls should be promptly returned or acknowledged.” If a full answer will take time, the lawyer should “acknowledge receipt of the request and advise the client when a response may be expected.”

In Oregon, silence tops the list. The bar’s client assistance office reported: “The number one complaint for 2012 was lack of communication.”

The Short Life of a Sales Lead

In 2011 the Harvard Business Review published “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. The authors audited 2,241 American companies and measured how long each took to answer an inquiry from its website.

Of the companies that answered within 30 days, the average response time was 42 hours. Thirty-seven percent answered within an hour, and 23 percent never answered at all. In a separate analysis of 1.25 million leads, firms that answered within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that responded later.

The Vocabulary of the Next Sale

Would you like fries with that? — The counter question that adds to an order. It is also a joke about low-paid jobs.

Rainmaker. — “A person (such as a partner in a law firm) who brings in new business,” in Merriam-Webster’s definition.

Hunters and farmers. — Sales teams divide the work. Hunters win new clients. Farmers grow existing accounts, often by upselling and cross-selling.

Farming a neighborhood. — A real estate agent markets to the same homeowners for years, so that they think of the agent first when they are ready to sell.

The Credit Card Pitch in the Aisle

On American flights, a flight attendant often interrupts the service to promote the airline’s credit card.

In July 2018 Skift reported, based on leaked internal documents, that United planned to make these pitches mandatory from September 1. Flight attendants would earn a $50 commission per sale, rising to $100 per sale once the pitches were mandatory.

Twice a Year

Americans are told to see the dentist twice a year, and the next cleaning is usually booked before the patient leaves. Insurance plans commonly pay for two cleanings a year.

Where the rule came from is uncertain. One account traces it to an old Pepsodent toothpaste slogan: “Use Pepsodent every day – see your dentist twice a year.” A Cochrane review in 2013 found “no evidence to support or refute” the practice.

The Windshield Sticker

After an oil change, the mechanic puts a small sticker on the windshield. For years it showed the date and mileage of the next visit, three months or 3,000 miles later.

Some car makers now recommend oil changes every 10,000 or even 15,000 miles. In 2016 California state officials said that drivers were wasting millions of dollars on unnecessary oil changes.

Your Customers May Still Be Called

Since June 27, 2003, Americans can put their phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. As of September 30, 2023, it had 249,498,621 active registrations.

The registry has an exception for existing relationships. A seller may still call a person who bought from it “within the 18 months immediately preceding the date of a telemarketing call,” or who made an inquiry within the previous three months.

Auditors May Not Sell Consulting

Section 201 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 forbids an audit firm to sell its audit clients a list of other services. Among them are “financial information systems design and implementation,” “actuarial services,” “internal audit outsourcing services,” and “legal services and expert services unrelated to the audit.”

Under Section 202, other services, including tax work, “must be preapproved by the issuer’s audit committee.” The law followed the collapse of Enron, whose auditor, Arthur Andersen, had done both audit and non-audit work for the company.