Dear SuccessTrack, a freebie from me

Dear SuccesTrack

Why, if you invite me (twice, received two separate envelops in today's mail) for a Free one-day seminar to

"Discover £12,000 worth of (Confidential) business, marketing and intern secrets used by our Platinum Clients that will make 2010 your most profitable year ever"

and on the 8 page invite (no doubt written with the greatest attention to detail) you add a little post-it note stating:

"I think this will be right up your street. See you there?
J."

and all I have to do to get this freebie is donate £ 10.00 to your Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity Appeal, allow me to give you a great business/marketing tip that will never ever fail:

Make sure you've got the name of the person you're inviting right, specially if they already ordered something from you!

Two envelops, and on not one of them they got my name right. I'm not Yakir Hermans and I'm not May Hermins.

My name is Karin Hermans and I will not be attending your freebie, thank you very much.

Comments

[Shuaib]

Hey Karin

I got the same sort of thing this morning!

I got an envelope saying Stanley Shuaib (when previously they had the correct name Shuaib Suria) - something has definitely corrupted their database!

How should we alert them of this glitch?

Shuaib Suria
AHEALTH

[Karin H.]

Hi my friend

Would we, should we?

I know one of the speakers of the event receives my blog-alerts too, and knowing how tuned he is on taking care of details he will no doubt alert SuccessTrack.
And if they, like every business nowadays should, have rss feeds on searches (blogs, twitter or other) on their business name they will find this post soon.

The devil is in the detail, I'm not saying we never make a mistake is this, but then again I don't promote myself as The Expert on how to grow your business (we just carrying on with the growth ;-))

Karin H

[Jonathan Jay]

Hi - As Shuaib correctly identifies, an export error occured, annoyingly, which mangled first names. A nuisance, but these things do happen and the mailing had already been posted.

Karin, the reason you received two mailings is because you're in our database twice. As you know, all of our data capture is automatic, which means that the enquirer/purchaser enters their own details and it goes straight into the database - so we have you as Karin Hermans and Karin Hermins. Some do this to track where their data is being used, but that does explain the misspelling on the surname and the two mailings.

Technology explains the mismatch of first name and surname

Regards

Jonathan Jay

[Karin H.]

Hi Jonathan

Thanks for dropping by.

And it seems (again) that automation isn't everything.

Karin H

[Shuaib Suria AHEALTH]

... not indeed!

And as a mangled version of the well-known saying goes:

"To err is human ... but to really mess things up, you need a computer!"

Getting someone's name wrong, according to what I remember from Dale Carnegie's flagship book: "How to win friends and influence people" is one of the worst things that can happen, as apparently one's name is one's favourite word of one's vocabulary in any language (and by one I mean everybody, not just the Queen!).

Yes shouldn't really happen, but unfortunately it sometimes does.

So Karin Hermans, are you now going to attend this worthy event given the big man himself has to come down to apologise on your blog?

Shuaib Suria

[Karin H.]

LOL Shuaib, I do hope by now you know me better than that :-(

It's as you say: a computer only does what you tell it to do (it's not the technology that makes the "computer says: no" - it's the programmers or users).

Besides, all I read is an explanation on technology, no apology.

Both you and I are "students" of Paul Gorman. When he makes a mistake - which he does, he's as human as the rest of us - he immediately turns around to say: I'm sorry, I've messed up, I apologise.
He doesn't blame technology or (heaven forbid) his Holly. A big man knows how to make a sincere apology and from such a man/woman I want to learn how to grow my business.

Karin H

[Jen]

Jonathan's response makes me a little sad. Any person on my team would have done a better job at apologizing! Instead what just comes out is this sore-loser defensive stance, without any concern for the inconvenience you've experienced. :|

[Karin H.]

Hi Jen

That's what I read in it too. A nuisance and my fault I received the incorrectly addressed invite twice. It sounds like he feels more inconvenienced that us.
Me, me, me where anyone who knows a little bit about client-relationship should talk to/about and focus on you, you, you.

How hard is it to write: "sorry, we messes up on the invite - we didn't carry out more checks before it was mailed. Now you received a wrongly addressed letter and in your care even twice because it appears your details somehow are submitted twice in our database (one slightly different than the other) and are right to feel annoyed - I would too."

Or something like that. We do seem to live in a "blame-culture": It wasn't me!!!

Karin H