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Your membership dues at the Essendon Football Club for 2006 remains unpaid. The bylaws of the club clearly state that unpaid accounts are to be canceled. I’d hate to see that happen if you don’t want it to.
We have made several attempts to move you to action over the past 5 months. Your 2006 Membership and reserved seats will be cancelled unless we receive your membership dues by 5:00pm tomorrow.
Bombers Forever!
EFC Membership Department
I was astonished to receive this unpleasant, cold, lifeless reminder that treated me like a delinquent. This was from a club I have been a member of for 10 years. Yes, my monthly membership dues that are deducted from a credit card were up to date, it appears that there was insufficient funds to cover one reserved seat charge back in August 2005, so this unpaid $13.65 was going to cause the cancellation of my membership and reserved seats...that sale is worth $400 per annum.
My response to this e-mail was equally frosty. I said that this was the first I had heard that my membership was in arrears and that I did not take kindly to their tone or their threat.
To correspond with me, the club had relied totally on e-mail. Apparently they had sent this email to my work account, who knows why I had never seen it, reacted to it or where it had gone. Perhaps, in some re-setting of my spam filter, the email was trapped for one of the myriad of reasons that spam filters appear to block legitimate emails and allow spam to get through!
In many ways email is wonderful. In many ways it stinks. In many ways a letter does things a whole lot better, and then when it is really important, nothing beats a phone call.
What this experience has taught me is that all the methods that would be appropriate to get an important message to a loved one are also appropriate when you are about to lose a customer. Far too often I see examples of organisations treating customers as commodities rather than cherishing the relationship and looking for ways to nurture and mature the relationship to the mutual benefit of the customer and the organisation.
Points to Consider....
Don’t trust email, mail or phone alone for important correspondence. It will be the mix of the three that will secure the relationship that you want with your customers.
I cannot recall ever receiving an email with the following header:
“Abramo, this is important. You do not need to answer it now. However, please click on “Reply” and “Send” as soon as you open it so that I know that it has been received and opened. Thank you.”
Email is chancy at best. Even though I signed up for many Newsletters, my Spam filter will not let me see some of them until I adjust the filtering to allow the myriad of content options that these newsletters display. I sometimes worry that by the time I do all of these adjustments, am I just opening myself up to whatever a spammer wants to send? If a person is tired, rushed or looking at an inbox full of Spam, an important e-mail can be inadvertently deleted along with everything else.
When a response has not been received, what strategy of communication then gets activated?
A case in point: Over the Easter break, I received an email where the “from” filed was empty, and the “subject line” read: “Abramo, your April...” I came within a whisker of deleting it on the spot, but decided to open it. It was from a newsletter that I subscribe to, what is the equivalent situation with mail, would this have happened?
Telemarketing calls are expensive. But in the case of Essendon Football Club, the unit of sale was $400. That’s worth a quick call.
The greatest single bargain in our society is the letter. For the paltry price of a 50ยข stamp, a letter will be delivered up by hand from my office in South Melbourne to a client in Fremantle, probably within two days. You know what, in our industry, I think we forget the simple beauty of this and the power that it can have in delivering a “customer care” message.
The last point is this, if it is transactional, send them an email, if it is important enough send a letter when they don’t respond, but when it really matters, and a customer’s relationship should always matter, then pick up the phone.
Posted on 18th April 2006