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It’s not what you think
Author: Bill Cusick
June 23, 2005
Let’s face it. We are all selling, all the time. We’re selling our service to customers, our products to market, our golf story to buddies, whatever. What we here at Vox have argued is that, when you sell, you are not just spinning what a service or product can do for a customer, you are selling the resulting feeling or emotion the customer gains from buying a product or associating with your company.
Seth Godin, in his intriguing (though lean) book All Marketers Are Liars, more eloquently postulates this idea. He cites some interesting examples (e.g. why people spend $80,000 on the Porsche SUV when they can get the same chassis, engine, etc. in the VW model for half that). What people are buying, is the feeling and emotional associations they get from the purchase, not the product itself.
Feeding us a line
Author: Bill Cusick
June 8, 2005
I hate SBC. I don’t truly hate companies - after all, a company is not a person - but I hate SBC. We just found out (thanks Mike) that we’re paying over twice the going rate for our DSL service. The reason? Because we’re on one of the "older" plans that they no longer offer. Pardon me? Same service, same bandwidth, etc., for more than double the cost. To change to the lower cost alternative we need to order the new plan, than we need to cancel the old plan, then we need to worry about making sure the static IP addresses are changed correctly. That’s a lot of "we’s". I wonder how long this has been going on. I wonder how long it will really take to go through this little unneccessary hassle. I hate those guys.
And it’s not just SBC that doesn’t bother to mention these things. Comcast is guilty of this selective memory loss as well.
So SBC: you need to stop this behavior…now.
Health insurance - the next customer experience frontier
Author: Bill Cusick
June 6, 2005
I don’t know about you, but we pay through the nose for decent health insurance. By decent, I mean insurance that kicks in pretty early (while still sharing the cost with employees) and that completely covers the big, bad stuff that can happen.
I review our insurance every May, and work with our broker to decide whether we stick with the devil we know - our current plan - or jump to a new company. Given that, I have conversations about things like in and out-of-network limits, deductibles, co-pays, out-of-pocket expense and more. And yet, when I get a notice from the health insurer about a doctor’s appointment I had a month ago, I don’t understand it.
Sometimes, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to send them money or not, let alone what’s left of my deductible to cover. Some of the websites are getting better, but for the most part, great customer experience and health insurers don’t intersect.
Well, we want to change that! After all, when you’re paying a couple hundred bucks per month for health coverage, you should expect to understand what the heck is going on.
