Printers' Ink, September 16, 1915: "Sales Letter Experiences with Two Million Customers" by Charles R. Wiers
A 112-page weekly issue of Printers' Ink, filed for Charles R. Wiers, then correspondence manager at the Larkin Company, a Buffalo mail-order house.
What it is
A 112-page weekly issue of Printers' Ink, filed for Charles R. Wiers, then correspondence manager at the Larkin Company, a Buffalo mail-order house. His article on pages 12 to 20 is about training the people who answer customer letters. New correspondents attend a company school, sit written examinations every two weeks and use the products at home. One clerk agreed with a coffee complaint because his mother disliked the coffee; after testing a can at home he wrote a better reply. Wiers argues for letters long enough to answer every point in a complaint, for putting any concession in the first paragraph, for refunds without strings, and for truthful letterheads. His cases include a woman who kept a damaged baby carriage until its replacement came, which changed Larkin's replacement policy, and an eight-year-old complaint about crazed dishes, settled on the customer's word and followed by a $15 order.
Why read it now
Most of this still holds, and some of it is now standard service practice. Wiers's rule that a correspondent must know the product before answering complaints is what good support teams do with product training. His advice to put the concession first, before any explanation, matches how people read: the razor-blade letter he quotes buries the replacement in its last paragraph behind nine lines of self-praise. Settling old complaints on the customer's word, and counting the $15 and $23 orders that followed, is an early case for lifetime value. The TARP studies for the US Office of Consumer Affairs in the 1970s and 1980s later found that customers whose complaints were resolved quickly were more likely to buy again. What has dated: the moral tone, the stereotyped Irish washerwoman, and a lecturing letter to a teacher whose house burned down, which refuses to cancel $32 and cites Lincoln. His warning against blanket brevity is sound: length should fit the case. Use: audit ten recent complaint replies and check that each one puts the remedy in its first sentence.
Passages worth keeping
no man can impart to another what he does not know himself.
لا يستطيع الموظف أن يقنع العميل بمنتج لا يعرفه، لذلك يبدأ التدريب بمعرفة المنتج نفسه.
The truth is that what may seem small to you is often big to him.
ما تراه الشركة مسألة صغيرة قد يكون عند العميل مشكلة كبيرة، والرد يجب أن ينطلق من نظرته هو.
If a customer wants his money back, send it to him quickly, and be sure that whatever you say about the refund has no strings attached to it.
إذا طلب العميل استرداد ماله فأعده إليه بسرعة، ولا تربط الاسترداد بأي شرط أو عتاب.
She wanted soap and not system.
العميلة لم يهمها شرح إجراءات التعبئة والتدقيق، بل أرادت ما نقص من الصابون فقط.
it's worth while to adjust old complaints strictly on a customer's word, even though you may not have a scrap of paper to prove the right or wrong of the claim.
من المجدي أن تسوّي الشكوى القديمة بناءً على كلام العميل وحده، حتى لو لم يكن لديك دليل ورقي.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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