I sup­pose most of you know that I’ve recently cre­ated a “side site” to mar­ket my books, CD-Rs and e-books. I will admit that I much pre­fer writ­ing to admin­is­tra­tion, and I’ve come up with a rather ele­gant sys­tem of distribution.

Now occa­sion­ally, things go off the rails. Once in a while, some­one orders an e-book, and then real­izes that an e-book is a down­load, not a real book — or, one woman used her office address for deliv­ery of a book, and the sys­tem popped out her home address. I got the book back, con­tacted her, and re-mailed the book. I ate the cost of re-mailing the book, which meant I lost money on the sale.

You may be won­der­ing why I’m men­tion­ing this. Well, if you’ve looked at the “sales page” for my book, This End­less Moment you’ll see a review of the book by Joe Vitale — a guy I respect. I sub­scribe to his blog feed, and today he was talk­ing about good cus­tomer ser­vice. He’d sent for a prod­uct, got­ten half of it, fired off an “irate” e-mail, and received a mar­velous reply.

So, what am I on about? Yes­ter­day, I bought a piece of soft­ware designed to make writ­ing fol­low up e-mails eas­ier. It came through what is called a “dime sale” — the price goes up (by a dime — get it?) every few min­utes. The pay­ment was processed through PayPal.

Then, noth­ing.

Nadda.

No link. No page for­ward. No e-mail con­firm­ing (other than from Pay­Pal — who imme­di­ately sent my receipt.)

I waited 30 min­utes, then fired off a slightly annoyed e-mail:

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So, I ordered ****************.
I received my receipt from pay­pal, and NOTHING from you! No link to a down­load, no expla­na­tions, no redi­rects, and NOTHING 30 min­utes later by e-mail.
The sys­tem I use for my stuff deals with every­thing auto­mat­i­cally, includ­ing the down­loads.
This is kind of sloppy, don’t you think?

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OK. So you know I teach com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and that was kind of direct. Still, I rec­og­nize how much effort I put into work­ing with my clients, pro­vid­ing value in my books, etc. And even though the whole thing was over 11 bucks, I was a bit cheesed off.

When I get “cheesed off” e-mails (only 1 or 2 a year, thank­fully) I have a breath before I reply, and try to make the sit­u­a­tion better.

Here’s the reply I got from the obvi­ously over-wrought marketer.

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Hi Wayne,

I’m pleased every­thing always goes per­fect for you; that must be a plea­sure indeed.
I would guess how­ever, that your sys­tem does not do dime sales.
Obvi­ously you were SUPPOSED to be redi­rected, and I have no way of know­ing
that didn’t work.
Here is the link you need to continue:

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Thank you so much for your gen­er­ous patience and understanding.

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Need­less to say, I’ll not be buy­ing from him again. He likely doesn’t care.

Read the post above to see how this should really be done!

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Tagged with: Lifestyle

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