Customer Service

Last night I tried to make a Spreadshirt store for I Should Be Writing. I’d done some personalized shirts from there back in April and was quite pleased at the quality. But suddenly I was overwhelmed- so many tshirt colors, scores of shirt options, and many other clothing/item choices as well (aprons, ties, thongs, messenger bags, etc). Then overwhelmed sensation turned to frustration as I realized I couldn’t put the ISBW logo on most of the non-tshirt items. I suddenly felt that they offered too many and too few choices at one time.

As many of us tend to do, I went to Twitter to blow off steam, posting essentially the paragraph above, but in 140 characters. I watched some TV and went to bed. This morning, this was in my TweetDeck:

Oh cool, I thought. Spreadshirt customer service is paying attention. Neato. Good job Spreadshirt. While I tried to think of a way to form my frustration into a customer-service-answerable question, I looked up Ms. @jeggers, figuring “Spreadshirt customer representative.” Not quite.

Well. CEO and “customer advocate” – the second was very true.

So I’m still trying to figure out how to form my “AUGH! Too much! Too little!” issue into a problem with real solutions, but I know when I do have a question, I’m pretty sure this woman on twitter, who I followed and immediately followed me back, will be there to help me or point me in the direction of someone who can.

This kind of service seems common sense. Run a search for your company’s name (and/or select keywords like “custom shirts” probably) on Twitter, reply to people who have something to say about your product. Through casual mentions on Twitter, I’ve been contacted by Brad Sucks and by someone from SyFy who wanted to know what I’d found misspelled in one of their commercials (“sneak peak” – one of my greatest pet peeves). Some companies have blog comments they never look at, forums they never look at, and others go out of their way to find out where people are talking about them, and get involved with the discussion.

Yesterday I was having a discussion with a friend about a future project. Some of his ideas felt innovative, but also on a level of such basic common sense I wondered why no one else was doing them. (Including me!) Then I realized that one of the first things you can do to make yourself stand out – in business, or writing, or marketing, or whatever – is figure out what basic, common sense things aren’t being done. Forget thinking outside the box- there are plenty ideas in the box that are just being ignored.