Sorry We Screwed You Up. So Here's 10 Bucks

John Talbott isn't a fan of what he calls “apology marketing.” He isn't a fan of Budget Rent a Car.

So he finds the two fanless items in combo, not once but repeatedly. This was the e-mail that had him laughing…with derision at what the car rental company seems to regard as boilerplate CRM:

Dear John Talbott,
Budget mistakenly sent you an email invitation to take a Customer Satisfaction Survey for a rental you completed in the past.

Delivery of this email was unintentional. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

To show you how much we value your business, and as a further apology, we've included an offer for $10 off on your next rental that commences on or before December 31, 2008. See terms and conditions below.

We hope to see you again at Budget in the near future. Rest assured, on your next Budget rental we promise you not only a great deal, but the quality service you expect.

Sincerely,
Rachelle Becker, Manager, Budget Customer Service

Nothing much wrong with that on its own, I opine, although apologizing for mistakenly sending a customer satisfaction survey seems more than a little stretched. But wait, there's more.

“I'd have thought this was perfectly normal,” John says, “except I received a very similar e-mail apology from them the month before because they had ‘inadvertently’ sent me an e-mail in Spanish instead of English. Which, of course, caused me more teeth-gnashing ‘inconvenience.’?”

Those 10-buck apologies do add up. But what also adds up is the negative attitude dumb CRM generates.

I'm picking on Budget here instead of some of my favorite targets such as Sprint, Comcast and the new AT&T because John Talbott sent the samples to me.

And that's just what they are — samples of corporate-think in which the letters CRM (customer relationship management) already are largely discredited because they're mindless, thoughtless and managerially casual. My son Bob (who writes the online column “Keep the Joint Running”) and I have dubbed this approach CEM — customer elimination management. That, in effect, is what so many of these “Send that guy our standard Apology Marketing e-mail” messages, decided and implemented on a minor bureaucratic level, accomplish.

How big a deal is it to implement two processes, each one so easy a reasonably bright 8-year-old can run the department?

• Process No. 1: Tailor a message to a specific circumstance, with an easily understood and comprehensible payoff, whether psychological or financial, cut and sewn to custom-fit that situation.

• Process No. 2: Set up a simple “Uh-oh!” computer block to prevent sending the same message or even a parallel message to a customer or prospect you already have outraged or amused. Automatically, although you may not wrest the critical knife from your customer's hand, you will dull the blade.

Oh, sure, some customers and prospects are teeth-gnashing troublemakers, dedicated to their own CHM (customer hates management) campaign aimed at every marketer they and their cohort nuisance-suited lawyers can find as targets. A third process might apply to those: If you recognize them, don't do business with them until and unless they sign what you represent as a “standard” agreement. (Don't make a big deal of this. That cadre is rare enough to be unworthy of major attention.)

A more draconian creative decision may work to the benefit not only of the marketer who adopts it but to the benefit of every one of us who toils in the dungeons of direct marketing: Impose a time limit of two years on all boilerplate communications. When a form letter has endured for two years, delete it and replace it with a new one, written and approved by a team which at best never saw the original and at worst had nothing to do with it.

We all preach “one to one.” Certainly, at the height of this deadly Age of Skepticism, we should listen seriously to our own dogma.

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HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS (www.herschellgordonlewis.com) is the author of 31 books, including the recently published “Creative Rules for the 21st Century.” He's also written “Hot Appeals or Burnt Offerings,” the curmudgeonly titled “Asinine Advertising,” and “Effective E-mail Marketing.”