Why Consistent Messages Matter During a Promotional Disaster
Ryan Eudy | Aug 05, 2014
From simple typos to ill-timed strategies, there are many ways a company promotion has gone wrong. A misprint on discounted items without having "Limit 1 per customer" printed below. Forgetting to copy edit the rules and stipulations. False advertisements. There are plenty of ways to go south.
Below is a fictional representation of a company promotion gone horribly wrong for them, and spectacularly right for the customer.
There's a scene in this movie called, Punch-Drunk Love. In the beginning, the main character's obsessed with buying up chocolate pudding cups from a well-known company that offers a certain amount of frequent flyer miles with every pudding cup purchase.
As it turns out, they forgot to limit the range.
On 4-packs, 12-packs or higher, there wasn't a "Limit 1 per bundle" or "No cross-promotional deals" label anywhere. So when a store ran specials on "Buy 2 pudding packs for the price of 1," the main character grabs a shopping cart and goes around and empties every display of pudding. The store is essentially chocolate pudding-less, but more importantly, the company who ran the promotion faces the hard truth of handing over 1,000,000 frequent flyer points for $500 worth of pudding.
Now back to reality: Imagine sending out a promotion before clearly examining every last loophole, and then come to find there's an error somewhere. A big one. Since it's already been sent, you must now go into damage control. Meanwhile customers are calling asking all kinds of questions, and the company doesn't have enough time to adjust and train support to properly deal with the issue. Now maybe you sent out a quick memo summarizing what to say, but how do you know every employee in every office received it and is saying exactly that to confused customers?
Because the last thing you need is to break the trust between you and the customer. That's why consistent messages - no matter whether they're 100% helpful to customers or just 50% - are important to help quell the fires of a company blunder.
And a simple custom message using Thinkzoom solves that crisis. It's communicating what to say to your support team to relay to customers while you try to figure out where to go next. Within our platform, you can build custom groups for just the Support Team, then create that course, upload it and set the course as a requirement. From there, it's a matter of tracking who has and who hasn't seen it. It's accountability in a short window, but more importantly, it's peace of mind in the fact your staff is gaining the knowledge to be consistent in how they troubleshoot customers.
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