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Annoying customers is much more costly than not communicating with them at all.
Joanne Black
While buying a T-shirt at Gap last Monday afternoon, I was asked by the sales assistant for my email address. By Friday night, Gap had emailed me seven times.
Seven emails in five days is more like a Tinder date gone awry than customer communication. On the first day, the company sent a receipt and an invitation to sign up for emails. I did not reply. Not that it mattered. The next day, Gap sent a “special welcome” discount code. On the third day, an email asked, “Have you used your code yet?” No, I had barely digested my breakfast.
Later that night, there was an email promoting various products. On Thursday, three days after my purchase, another email said, “Please share your feedback”, and invited me to take a twominute survey. I did not take the survey.
My transaction had involved taking the T-shirt to the counter, the assistant asking for my email address, my giving it to her and then paying. There was nothing about which to give feedback.
But it turns out that Gap really, really wanted to know about that transaction, because on Friday, after another email with more marketing bumpf, came the seventh, with the subject line, “So … what did you think?” What I thought was, “I don’t believe this”, and I unsubscribed. In the three days since I did that, six more emails have arrived.
Once, while I was in the lovely Millwood Gallery in Wellington – which, sadly, seemed to be closed the last time I was in town – one of the proprietors was working on a newsletter. As I was on the gallery’s mailing list, the proprietor asked me how often I thought customers might want to receive a mailed newsletter. Fortnightly? Monthly? I thought about it.
“How about when you have something to say,” I suggested. It was not sarcastic. It seemed to me that customers would be more inclined to open the newsletter if they knew it contained something interesting.
Perhaps companies think that communicating online is cost-free to everyone. It is not. Annoying customers is much more costly than not communicating with them at all. I can vouch for that. By email.
Far from being overlooked for jobs because of their age, older people should be welcomed for being from the last generation for whom the dumb things they did or said when young were not captured on someone’s phone. Most incidents have been genuinely, and mercifully, forgotten.
The same relief cannot be offered to subsequent generations, whose every rash photo and tweet exists like plastic in the ocean – mostly out of sight and occasionally noxious, but too abundant to clean up.
Naturally, embarrassment pre-dates digital technology. The predicament in the state of Virginia includes Governor Ralph Northam’s refusal to stand down over a 1985 photo on his college yearbook page that shows two young men in costume: one in blackface, the other dressed as a Klansman. Having first apologised for the photo, Northam now denies being in it. If I were him, I would bags the blackface character, because it is impossible to explain why and to whom the KKK might ever have seemed funny.
The world is full of ignorant racism, sexism and prejudice of every sort. The world is also full of unattractive gloaters, determined to reveal the ethical lapses of others. There should be a point at which the dumbest things most of us once did are allowed to be forgiven, even if, in a digital age, they can never be entirely erased.
Seven emails in five days is more like a Tinder date gone awry than customer communication.