CWI Media, LLC
By Gary Cope
Sunday was a big day for football fans as the NFL’s AFC and NFC championship games were played. Both games were incredibly exciting and like so many football fans, I chose to watch the games with a pizza. But what delivery place should I order from? Pizza Hut? Papa John’s? Domino’s? I love Papa John’s and Pizza Hut has the stuffed crust pizza, but I thought I’d give Domino’s a shot, even though they’re not my favorite.
Not wanting to miss any of the game, I decided to order online. I had done so successfully with Papa John’s, so I felt comfortable with the process. Little did I know just how cool, easy and dare I say “fun” the process was! Domino’s online ordering technology is called “Pizza Tracker” and will show you the entire process of your order from the time it is placed.
There are five steps to the process:
- Order Placed
- Prep
- Bake
- Box
- Delivery
The online ordering process was far easier than any other pizza joint on the Web. Domino’s even let’s you choose cash or charge, which isn’t always an option with other restaurants. Once my order was placed, the progress bar you see above glows red to show you what stage your order is at. Way cool!
Then, once your order is delivered the Pizza Tracker page will give you a series of survey questions that ask about your experience. It will even tell you the name of the cook who prepared your food and will ask you how it tasted. And then, you can leave additional comments about the experience.
So, what lesson can we learn from this? Well, even though Domino’s is not my favorite pizza, they do offer a very cool and unique online experience and they really do seem to value my input, so I will definitely order from Domino’s again the next time I want a pizza, or their new oven-baked sandwiches, which by they way are actually better than Subway.
Give you customers top notch customer service, a unique buying experience and show them that you value their feedback and they may just choose your over your competitor. Customer service really is that important.
By Gary Cope
Ah, behold the power of Twitter. I’ve preached about the business benefits of using Twitter and shared examples of other Tweeple who have had problems solved when the company with which they were having issues with saw their gripe-filled Tweets and contacted them to fix things. Well, now I am one of those stories.
Last Wednesday, I wrote a blog post called My Beef with Google’s Web Master Tools detailing my frustration with their recently introduced “Link From” feature that allows you to see which external URLs are linking to non-existent URLs on your domain. The only problem, most of the time the tool didn’t work. I would get an “Our servers are busy. Try again later.”
After a couple of weeks of getting this message, I was fed up and blogged about it. I’d actually posted a couple of Tweets about it, too, but never got a response. But, my blog automatically posts to my Twitter account and later that same day, I got a Tweet from Sagar Kamdar (@skamdar) that read:
@garycope we are looking at the issue with the “Linked From” functionality. will get back to you when it is resolved.
I was floored! I could only assume that Sagar worked for Google. The next day, I got an e-mail alerting me that someone left a comment on my blog post. It was Sagar. He wrote:
The issue has been resolved. (link)
I checked the Webmasters Tools again and all but one “Linked From” function was working. I wrote back:
@skamdar Thanks! All but one of the “Linked From” links are working now for me. The first one on my list still returns “server busy” msg.
Sagar replied.
@garycope we’ll take a look.
@garycope we are unable to reproduce the issue internally. could you tell me the site and link that is ending in error.
This morning, I logged into Google’s Webmaster Tools and the link was working just fine. As a matter of fact, all of the links were working. I Tweeted back to @skamdar:
@skamdar The issue appears to be resolved. I logged into my Webmaster Tools today and did not receive any errors. Great job! Thanks!
I also told him via a comment on my blog that I would write a follow-up blog post (kinda like this one) singing the praises of Google’s development team. So, thanks Sagar and the rest of the Google Webmaster Tools team for using Twitter and actually taking the time to ready my blog and address the issue. It has been a tremendous help. All Hail Google! OK, well, let’s not get carried away. Take care everyone!
