Customer Hell

Who Stole My Baking Soda Toothpaste?

It seems to me that as time goes by the “young, Gen Y” hotshots in the marketing departments of many great companies are intent on losing old-line, tried and true customers by discontinuing the product that brought their company loyal and  repeat customers!

Case in point. Arm and Hammer Baking Soda is probably in every household in the USA. When I was a boy, my mother taught me that baking soda right out of the yellow box was a great toothpaste if you could get beyond the taste. Years later, Arm and Hammer came out with a mint flavored, baking soda toothpaste. Doing what my mom said, I quickly adopted it!

For years I was a happy camper, cleaning my  teeth with mint flavored baking soda and honoring my mother’s folk wisdom at the same time. Alas, this state of bliss was doomed, I suspect by Arm and Hammer’s marketing folks.  It was supplanted by Arm and Hammer’s versions of “White, Whiter and More White” toothpaste (each version chock full of things like Fluoride or Peroxide or  what have you)  to match the competitive toothpaste whiting and botox craze that has descended upon us all!

Even if I could make the transition taste-wise there is a major catch for me here. I have caps on my front teeth. Whiteners DO NOT work with caps. If you use them, some teeth will become whiter than others!

So here we are a victim of the Arm and Hammer’s marketing department. The question that I  have for A&H is why not keep the old tried and true toothpaste on the shelf along with the other versions? On the other hand, you can understand the approach. There are so many choices for toothpastes on the shelves in all brands that it has become a consumer nightmare!

In the meantime, I guess I will have to open a yellow box of baking soda like my mother taught me 60 years ago. And yes, I have an open yellow box  in my fridge. It still keeps down the odors!

We also use their A&H Laundry Detergent, the hypoallergenic one for sensitive skin. In recent years I often have to special order this version at the supermarket. Is this product next in line to get the market department’s guillotine?

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How Federal Express sent me to Hell and back!

We moved. Our advice is: ‘don’t move!” or plan to spend 2.5 hours trying to get your address corrected with Federal Express.

My recent encounter with Federal Express’s web site is an example of how an otherwise good company with an excellent performance record (we have a nearly 20 year history with them) really ticked me off, sucked up tons of my time, and sent me to hell and back trying to change our company address so I could send a document to a waiting client before a 4:30 p.m. drop off time. Talk about anger and frustration.

The address change problem stemmed from the fact that there are not one, not two, but three places illogically located on their website where addresses must be changed separately.

I found one of the places and dutifully filled out the online form. However, when I printed out the airbill, it still had the old address on it.

I went back to the drawing board and eventually found a second place to change the address. When I opened that link it was quite clear that this address change link did not talk to the previous address change link because the form was blank. So I filled out the second online change of address form. However, when I  printed out the airbill again, it still had the old address on it.

I proceeded to go through the telephone help cycle process (another form of purgatory). In the end, I lucked out and found a help desk agent who knew how to change our address in all three places.  Of course, it meant that I had to fill out the address form THREE times to complete the process.

Now you ask yourself, why didn’t a huge, successful company do a usability study before building the site. If they had, this annoying change of address conundrum would have been caught and fixed in the early site development process.

With UPS, DHL and USPS among other competitors just a click a way, it doesn’t make sense does it? In fact, I am seriously looking at the possibility of changing to one of the competitors. My basic concern is will the competitor’s website be easier to use?  Ease of use is what ALL customers want!

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