Sears has always stood for customer service.  I remember as a kid growing up in the 80s and early 90s that Sears was “the” place for my parents to shop.  Everything from my school clothes to the washing machine came from Sears – and when something went wrong, Sears was always there to take care of things.  Didn’t have the right size?  They’d get it.  Needed advice on what to buy?  They knew their stuff.  Something broke?  They’d knock themselves over to fix it.  They were the hallmark of customer service and if you ask many folks, especially older folks, they will tell you that Sears stood 110% behind the motto, “Satisfaction Guaranteed or Your Money Back.”

Today, a quick search around the ‘net and you’ll see that the  biggest gripe with many folks about Sears is their lack of customer service.  Phone calls that never get returned; orders that disappear into the ether; items that break that take month to get fixed; folks in the stores who just don’t understand what they are selling.  It’s frustrating for them, and as anyone in marketing can tell you, once you get a customer unhappy with you it’s almost impossible to turn them back into a loyal, satisfied customer.

I myself have recently went through this with two orders I placed on the Sears.com website.  Both orders ran into problems – and while I understand that issues come up, what really got me was that nobody really knew (or seemed to care) how to resolve the problem.  Endless phone calls that never produced a successful resolution.  Even when the person at the other end of the phone wanted to help, tried in desperation to help, they often hit a roadblock.  One lady I was talking to tried in vain for over 15 minutes to get the store to answer the phone.

No amount of money can fix bad customer service.  Sure, some of the stores could use some TLC, but you can have the fanciest, most modern store in the world and it doesn’t matter if your customer experience is lacking.  Customers will leave in droves never to return again no matter how shiny the tile is or how fresh the paint smells.

Of course there are stores that try, and some that succeed, in still delivering the customer service that Sears was once known for.  One store that does this amazingly well is the Sears mall store located in Columbia, Missouri.  In my travels throughout the US I have visited Sears stores in over 12 different states.  I can say that hands down, this store far surpasses any other store I’ve been to in the customer relationship department.  It’s not the fanciest or biggest store Sears has (it’s classified as a “B” store), but the people there are truly amazing.

Take for instance a gentleman named Miles.  Miles has been with this store since – well, as long as I can remember.  He’s an appliance salesman, but he’s more than just someone who wants to sell you something.  He listens to the customers, he asks them about what their needs are – and then he recommends a product to fit their needs.  I would drive halfway across the state to buy something from Miles.  I remember a time when I was having a tough time tracking down a light bulb for the water dispenser in our refrigerator.  It used a non-standard design and I went in the store looking to see if they could possibly order one.  Miles listened, then he went into the backroom and came out with one – no charge.  I wasn’t looking for a freebie that day, but he wanted me to leave a happy customer and so he performed a small gesture that meant a lot to me.  That’s what customer service is all about.

Sears corporate would do well to send some of their top brass to this store to find out how to do things right.  They could learn a lot from spending just a few days on the floor with not only Miles, but many of the other employees there.  Even the manager of this store is amazing – I happened to be in the hardware department one day when she overheard me talking with an employee giving my name so he could send me some information to my email.  She came up to me and engaged me in conversation and thanked me for the positive comments I had put in for the store.  Again, here was a gesture that cost the company absolutely nothing but meant a lot to me, the customer.  To this day when I’m in the store if she sees me she will say hello and ask how I am doing – you can’t buy customer satisfaction like that.

My partner Keith worked for Sears for most of his early adult life.  He was a former employee of the Sears in Columbia, leaving 6 years ago to finally get his college degree.  To this day he looks for any opportunity to return to Sears because he, like me, believes in Sears.  He really misses the customers and the interaction he had; and though sometimes I think that perhaps he is seeing Sears with rose colored glasses, I think in the end he really understands what it will take to make Sears great again. 

If anyone from Sears is reading this, believe me when I say there are those of us out here who still believe in the company.  We want to see you survive, to thrive, and to be the American icon you once were.  Money alone won’t make that happen – because in my opinion what can really help turn Sears around is something that costs very little, yet has enormous returns on investment – customer service.

Now let me be straightforward here and say that this isn’t meant to be a Google bashing post.  Even though I argue that Google has lost its innovative spark over the past few years there are still products of theirs that I use on a daily basis – like Google Voice.  What I really wanted to find out, to ask of others, was not so much “Why didn’t Google+ succeed?” but rather “Why aren’t you using it?” – of course you can’t have one without the other, but for each question there are different answers.

So I e-mailed a few friends and talked to a few colleagues who had used, or are still using, Google+ and asked them their thoughts.  The answers I received back pretty much followed a single thread, mainly they saw nothing “exciting”, “different” or “new” about Google+ compared to their usual hangout (Facebook for almost all of them).  One colleague of mine put it this way, “It’s like driving a 2010 Toyota Camry with 20,000 miles on it and the car dealer calling you up and asking if you want to trade it in on an identical 2010 Toyota Camry with 20,000 miles – what’s the point?” 

Google+ never had anything that differentiated it from Facebook.  The one thing it did have going for it was the Google name – and true enough when it was first released we saw this massive frenzy of people who wanted to get in on the ground floor.  Nothing says prestige like exclusivity, and Google did a great job of making it a “you can only get in if you know someone who is already in” type affair.  This kept the initial momentum for the service high for a period of time, but people soon found out that once you were “in” there really wasn’t anything “cool” to keep you around.  Worse yet, the majority of your friends were still hanging out over on Facebook and a party of one gets very lonely after a while.

Meanwhile … In grocery stores marketers use a variety of techniques to watch what you buy and how you decide what brand of peanut butter to purchase.  They use everything from hidden cameras to researchers just blending in with other shoppers to observe your behavior.  I decided to borrow a page from the professional market research playbook then and sort of wandered the aisles of the Internet to see just how much people were using Google+.  It soon became apparent that this was one brand of peanut butter that people weren’t buying.

First I went seeking out popular news articles from some of the major news sites that have Google+ tie-ins.  My first stop was MSNBC where I checked out a number of popular news stories and decided to use one about the death of Andy Rooney as my example (full MSNBC article located at http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45173371/ns/today-entertainment/).

Just take a quick look at the social media share statistics listed for this article.  Over 27,000 Facebook recommendations; 4,700 other shares (e-mail, LinkedIn, Newsvine, etc) – and only 58 Google+ shares.  Compared to Facebook that represents just two-tenths of one percent.  Not exactly a rip-roaring testament to the popularity of Google+.

It was recently announced that Google+ is throwing the doors wide open for everyone – including businesses to set up their own pages.  The exclusivity factory is now moot.  However, again I have to ask – where’s the innovation?  Sure, I can put my business page on Google+ but why?  What are you going to offer me that the other guy isn’t?  And why should I do it at all if all my customers are hanging out on another site?

It’s sad to see Google lose its way with innovation and become a “me too” player.  If you look at the history of both AOL and Yahoo you can see the same fate pretty much played out the same way with both of them.  Yahoo created a lot of firsts for the online world, but then they started slipping.  Instead of innovating they started to copy, acquire, play the “me too” game.  Now, they are pretty much known for only two products – Yahoo Mail and Flickr.  Some argue that these two pieces of Yahoo are the only real saleable assets they have left.  Sad.

What’s the future hold for Google+?  Without innovative new features I don’t see the need for Facebook to get worried about the competition anytime soon.  The problem is that people have already tried it out, kicked the tires, and left.  It’s going to be hard for Google to get them come take a test drive again.  It’s going to be even harder for them to convince people to try their brand of peanut butter.

The file was stored on SkyDrive, in the cloud if you will, so getting to it wouldn’t be a problem – I just needed a way to get too it.  Then I remembered that one of the new features of Windows Phone Mango that I had recently upgraded too was that the Office Hub could connect up with SkyDrive.  I was on to something.

As I sat in the meeting I managed to use my Windows Phone (a Samsung Focus for the curious) to connect up with SkyDrive, edit the file in Word on the phone and then save it back to the cloud and e-mail it back to my colleague.

Now. Tell. Me. That. Isn’t. COOL!

Isn’t it amazing how far technology has come.  At the ripe young age of 37 I remember the evolutionary path of how we used to transport data.  It started with floppy disks, and I’m sure many of you remember stuffing them into your backpack and running off to the school or library to work on those papers (“Sneakernet we used to call it for the fact that you had to literally walk the data to wherever you wanted it”) – you know back in the days before we all had 3 PC’s in our homes.

Floppy disks stayed around for quite a while and then came ZIP drives.  They stored a lot more data, but their problem was that they were just too darn expensive.  They had a few glory years in there, but they didn’t quite kill the floppy disk just yet.

As more and more of us got connected we started using e-mail to mail files back and forth to ourselves.  It wasn’t perfect by any means but it was good for small documents. 

Along the way we also experimented with CD’s and such, but the fact that they could only be written once made it impractical to use for documents and files that were modified often.  Though somewhere around here I think I still have a stack of about 500 America Online CD’s if anyone needs a coaster.

For the true geeks we also experimented with FTPing our files back and forth.  I remember in college you weren’t a true geek unless you had your own FTP server running – preferably one with the latest warez to share with your college friends.

Finally we got to USB sticks – and their low cost and popularity has made them the favorite for data transport for quite a few years now.  The problem is that if you are like me, you tend to lose the things or find out when you are in a hotel 700 miles from home you left them laying on the kitchen table.  There was also an issue of data integrity – USB sticks do fail and only have a lifespan of so many read and write cycles. 

Now we have “the cloud” – or the ability to store data “out there” on the Internet somewhere and access it using any device we choose to an extent.  Services like Microsoft’s SkyDrive let people store data and access it from work, home or even halfway around the world.  Forget that important presentation?  No problem, just connect up and grab it.  The latest, greatest copy always waiting for you.

It was so cool to see that my Windows Phone could connect up to SkyDrive and not only access my documents, but let them edit them and store them back out there.  Most of the work I do is with Office products, and this has broken down some of the final barriers of me having to be chained to my desk.  Granted, I won’t be writing a Shakespearean play using my phone just yet, but it’s great for touching up documents and adding data to them on the go.

Somewhere around here I have some 5 1/4” floppy disks from my teenage years.  Perhaps its time to find an old drive and upload whatever data has survived on them to the cloud as well.  My childhood could be immortalized in the cloud for generations to come. Now that’s cool.

Unfortunately, I was one outlet short.  Determined to finish the project this weekend I decided to head over to our local Do-It-Best store to pick up one.  Unfortunately, the locally owned store was closed – the owners were away at a conference according to the note tacked to the door.  This meant I only had one choice left – the place I hate the most – Wal-Mart.

I figured that I would just run in, get the outlet, and get out.  I hate shopping at Wal-Mart and it’s the place I use for absolute can’t wait until tomorrow emergencies.  Home Depot, Lowes and Menards are all a 20 minute drive from where I live in rural Missouri and it wouldn’t be until Monday when I’d be over their way.  So I justified my decision to go into Wal-Mart with the notion that it was for one item to finish a project that was long overdue.

I quickly found the electrical aisle and the outlet I needed.  It was a GE brand, though about $0.75 higher than what I was used to paying for similar outlet switches at Home Depot.  I was just about ready to grab it and get out of that place when I turned the package over and saw those three dreaded words, “MADE IN CHINA”.

I was floored.

Here was a product that cost more than the equivalent American made product (Levtron) from Home Depot and yet it was made in China.  I absolutely refused.  I have just had about all I am going to take seeing American jobs being shipped overseas.  It’s one of the reasons I loathe Wal-Mart so much – they are the biggest drivers of sending manufacturing overseas.  I was not about to help them achieve their goal of getting rid of every last job in America.

It’s a slap in the face really – the reason they “outsourced” and “offshored” these jobs was for lower prices.  After all, why pay an American worker a living wage when you can get Chinese people to work for $2.00 a day?  Yet this Chinese made product cost MORE than the Made in America product.  Where was all the savings going?  Who was profiting off this?  Oh, that’s right – Wal-Mart and the manufacturer, GE.

I walked out of that store in disgust.  People around here praise Wal-Mart yet they really have no idea.  They are paying more for the products that are of inferior quality and helping ship their own jobs overseas in the process.  They are literally shopping themselves out of a job.

As much as I wanted to finish this project this weekend, it can wait.  I’ll give Home Depot my business and buy their cheaper, Made in America outlets.  Not only will I save money, but I can leave the store with my purchase knowing that I at least did a small bit to help keep American workers working.

Wal-Mart is a scam.  Plain and simple.  Wake up, folks.

Wal-Mart carries “American Greetings” – and, as the name suggests, I was expecting them to be quality cards Made in the USA.  After all, American Greetings has been around for quite a while – not quite as well-known as Hallmark, but still they carry quite a selection and variety.  Imagine my surprise when the cards all revealed they were “MADE IN CHINA”.

I was disgusted to say the least.  I looked over many cards – and every one of them was stamped “MADE IN CHINA” on the back.  I couldn’t believe it – how much money could they possibly be saving by printing cards in China versus America?  Whatever the savings were, they certainly wasn’t passing it on to the consumer – the cards were all $4.00 and up!

Determined I was not going to support a company that ships American jobs overseas I threw down the cards and left.  I then made a special trip to Hallmark in Columbia, MO and found plenty of cards still made here in the good old USA.  Sure, I spent more money in gas than I saved, but I stood by my principles.

The funny part is, the cards that were made in the USA – they were cheaper!  $2.50 versus $4.00 for “Made in China”.  So much for all that savings, huh?

How will the economy in this country ever get better if companies such American Greetings keep outsourcing every job they can?  And when they do outsource there is ZERO SAVINGS for the consumer – in fact, we end up paying more.  That money goes right into their corporate pockets.  They apparently never heard of this guy called Henry Ford who was famous for saying that he had to pay his workers a good wage, otherwise how would they ever be able to afford to buy his cars?

American Greetings, you’ve lost my business.  There is no way I will support a business that treats the American worker like they are just another “number”.

Ever since Windows Phone 7 came out last fall, I’ve been following the various offerings.  I’ve steered many a friend from purchasing an iPhone or Android based phone over to Windows Phone 7, usually by going to the store with them and showing them some of the features that caught my eye.  I even got to play with an evaluation version, briefly, of the Samsung Focus.  I feel so in love with it that I immediately began singing the praises of not only the Focus, but of Windows Phone 7.  I found that if I could just get my friends and others to try one, they too became hooked.

Without a doubt “the” feature that attracted me to Windows Phone 7 was the live tiles.  These are the tiles you see on the home screen of the phones that react to different events.  Get a new e-mail?  It changes the number to reflect it.  New status update from a friend on Facebook?  Their picture shows up on the tile.  Upcoming event?  The tile reflects the event.  Simply put, the live tiles let you get information from the phone without being sucked into the phone.  How many times have we seen people walking down the street or in store just totally absorbed by fiddling with their phone?  The beauty of Windows Phone 7 is that you don’t need to be engrossed in the phone itself – you simply glance at it to find the update you are interested in; if you need to know more, you select the tile to be transported to that specific event.  Simple brilliance – and ever friend I’ve shown has been hooked.

There is also the simple elegance of the clean design.  I hate clutter, and the one thing I’ve noticed about WP7 is that it feels as if the OS was designed for a phone.  It wasn’t simply “adapted” for the phone or slapped together.  Things just flow.  You really don’t need to sit there and hunt for the next screen, or next command – it just flows naturally.  I wish desktop OS’s could work as well as Windows Phone 7 does in this regard.

The phone is also a powerful social network integrator – there is no denying that younger and older generations alike are clustering together online at sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and countless others.  WP7 has done an excellent job at integrating these social networks.  Plus, when you like your Windows Live account, it opens up a whole new world of integration between Windows Live and WP7.  I sold one friend on WP7 merely by pointing out how well it integrated Facebook!

It’s good to point out that WP7 doesn’t just “connect” to the social networks, but it integrates them.  You will notice that it’s not about what so and so is doing on Facebook, and who sent you a text message, and what colleague called you from work.  Rather, it’s about what people are doing.  You can see that Fred called you from work this morning, send you two text messages and posted a status update to Facebook – it’s the timeline of Fred.  The same for Seth, Jennifer, Zach and all your other friends.  WP7 is about connecting you to your friends and colleagues – not about trying to differentiate between social apps and networks.

So yes, Windows Phone 7 in my opinion rocks.  So why do you ask don’t I have one?  Well, like most people nowadays, I have to budget my expenses and since my old Windows Mobile 6.1 phone works (and has for over 2.5 years now) it just isn’t in the numbers for me to get one.  Trust me, I’d love to be able to put my “money where my mouth is” but as an adult (versus that pimply kid I was 17+ years ago) I have learned how to admire from afar.  And admire, I certainly am…

Rock on WP7!

That all changed last Thursday while surfing Netflix on demand for a movie to watch and came across “Wal-Mart:  The High Cost of Low Prices”.  This 2005 documentary interviewed many former and current employees of Wal-Mart from all ranks—from cashiers to high-level executives.  The story throughout was the same – Wal-Mart considers employees and small, family owned businesses enemy #1.

Tale after tale of tactics by the company to push employees to work longer, harder and many times off the clock.  Stories from executives of how many employees were told to use welfare and other public assistance programs just for necessities.  Can you imagine being a full time employee and still having to use WIC or Medicaid?   Apparently that is common practice with Wal-Mart.  Their own employees making below the poverty levels, and Wal-Mart really not giving a damn. 

Then there were the stories of the China factories that produce for Wal-Mart.  The horrific working conditions these people have to face on a daily basis.  Stories of young males and females who should be enjoying their youth working and living in the factories because that was policy.  It was nothing more than modern day slave labor.

I could go on, but I really encourage you to watch the documentary yourself and listen to employees tell the Wal-Mart story.  You be the judge.  If you can watch this film without shaking your head in disgust then perhaps Wal-Mart is the store for you.

As for me, I’m officially 100% Wal-Mart free.  The one holdout in our family, my dad, has even switched with me.  We now support our local merchants, which we are lucky enough to have quite a few of (the Wal-Mart in Boonville, MO hasn’t managed to put them all under yet – though I am sure they are trying ). 

The amazing thing is – even after a weekend of shopping at local businesses, many of which are family owned – I noticed something:  I wasn’t paying more.  In fact, in a few cases we noted we were paying less – much less than Wal-Mart.  What’s more we noticed that many of the goods we were now buying were stamped “Made in the USA”.  Something that Wal-Mart has just about managed to destroy completely – American manufacturing.

As for me, and the rest of my family – we took the pledge to be Wal-Mart free.  I encourage you to do the same.  Don’t be fooled by the high cost of low prices –  many of which aren’t really low after all.

You can read the entire thread over on the Enterprise Job Scheduling & Workload Automation group on LinkedIn.  Below I’ve included one of my posts where I talk about my thoughts on the subject matter.

A few things…

[…]

"Watching the jobs": First, nobody at our company watches the jobs. The Enterprise Manager (we use Control-M) is never running 24×7 on anyone’s desktop. I tell people from day 1 that the Enterprise Manager is strictly a "novelty tool to give you pretty pictures". All jobs should be setup to handle known errors correctly, and to escalate and use other tools to notify for unknown errors. We are strictly lights out. Right now we are on Christmas holiday and nobody is "watching" anything in our scheduling environment. It’s all handling itself and if something should go wrong then the tools will take over to notify us and help us handle it appropriately.

I’m not a manager – I’m down in the trenches with the rest of you. However, there is a reason these tools are no longer called "Batch Scheduling" and are now called "Workload Automation". The idea of anyone watching anything is so 1979 it isn’t funny. If you aren’t automating failures and error recovery then you aren’t using the tool correctly. Three years ago I set out on an effort to massively overhaul our environment to automate everything that required manual intervention. Today, we all go home at 5pm and don’t worry about it.

As others have pointed out, no you don’t need the full GUI on your mobile device. However, you need to be able to interact with your jobs no matter where you are when things go wrong. I have absolutely no need to see my entire environment — but when a job errors and automation cannot recover from it I need a menu of options presented to me. For example, today I get an Alarmpoint notification and I can (from my phone):
* Force the JOB OK
* Bypass the job
* Rerun the job
* View SYSOUT (sends it to me via email)

I can do this no matter where I am on whatever device I am using. Those 4 commands let me do most of the diagnosis I need to do. It doesn’t solve everything, but it’s been at least 8 months now since I’ve had to wake up in the middle of the night and take care of anything. Compare and contrast that to three years ago when I was lucky to make it through a night without being woke up.

It’s all about how you use the tools – and companies nowadays are looking to take a lot of this stuff to the next level and are investing money to gain efficiencies. If you still have a staff that "watches" 24/7 that is not a job I would want to be in because I can almost guarantee you that those jobs won’t be around in 5 years time.

[…]

· This popular show took us back to the days of drive-ins and sock hops.  However, it was never meant to be a series, and was originally made as a one-off episode.  Do you know the name of the show?  Better yet, do you know the ORIGINAL name for the show? Hint:  “Sit on It!” 

o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8A9WFrBK0w

· It was 1986 and Wal-Mart was still mostly unknown to many people.  This retail powerhouse was the largest in America, and owned a wide range of companies including Borders Books, Builders Square, OfficeMax and the Sports Authority.  Originally known as the S.S. Kresge company, this retailer is still in business today but has since lost its top stop to Wal-Mart.  Do you know the retailer?  Hint:  The “light” in this store became a pop-cultural icon.

o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXKsJHs6rmA

· This company brought us many of our modern innovations that we take for granted today – computerized speech, cellular communications, fiber optics, high speed data lines and teleconferencing to name a few.  There is almost a 100% chance you use their technology on a day to day basis.  Hint:  You would “reach out and touch someone” with them.

o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhOWtEooLBk&feature=related

· They were the one of the largest automotive service companies in America for most of the 1960s through the 1980s.  Their trademark “Muzzler” was probably on one of your dad’s cars and the name of their batteries would later go on to be a popular movie series featuring Bruce Willis.   Long before AAMCO and Jiffy Lube, many people took their car to this retail giant for car maintenance.  Hint:  There was always “more for your life” at this store.

o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAMWcjBR-Ys

My agenda is full for the week, and there are a lot of sessions I’d like to attend.  The fun starts off tomorrow morning with morning workshops.  I’m going to be attending one talking about how to kick-start capacity planning efforts in the workplace.  I’m eager to find out how others have done it and how we can use it at CARFAX to continue to deliver better performance at a low cost so we can continue delivering the best vehicle history information possible to consumers and dealers so people can make a smart used vehicle purchase.

During the week I will be posting information from the conference here at on my homepage, and also on Twitter.  If you are a Twitter tweeter feel free to follow me at @robertstinnett to get near-real-time updates from various sessions.  If you can’t be at CMG this year it will be the next best thing – or at least just enough to justify you attending next year!

Of course it’s not all just geek talk here at the conference.  Gaylord Palms is a huge resort complex and tonight they had a terrific live Christmas concert going on.  This wasn’t some run of the mill concert, these guys rocked!  They have the place decorated beautifully for Christmas.  I feel more in the Christmas mood here in Florida than back home in frigid Missouri!  You can’t help but get in the festive mood with all the wonderful sights around this place.  Very cool!