Suggestion Box: Recover after you’re caught with your tail between your legs

Editor’s Note: Sometimes the most effective way to learn customer service best practices is to share experiences with one another. There’s a great deal we can learn from independent garden center staff and owners, but hearing perspectives from retailers outside of the industry can expose us to new ideas. That’s why we’ve created “The Suggestion Box,” a platform where leaders from other industries can share their stories and place suggestions in your suggestion box.
 

When customers experience a problem with their merchandise and a full refund isn’t an immediate option, what do you do?

That was the question Hallmark was faced with when about 1,000 of their “Jingle” interactive toy puppies lost their bark shortly after Christmas in December 2011.

“Jingle” was a toy that barked and sang in reaction to certain words in an accompanying storybook. “If I said Jingle was a good dog, he would bark and wag his little tail,” says Camille Lauer, social media manager at Hallmark. “He’s very lifelike and it was very easy to fall in love with this very loveable creature.”

During the holiday season, Jingle was extremely successful, Lauer says. He had national advertising, distribution in major retailers like Walmart, CVS and Walgreens, and was sold out at a $35 to $40 price point.

So when the Jingles began to malfunction, Hallmark was faced with a public problem because about 50 of those 1,000 parents took to Facebook and Amazon with their complaints.

“They were upset because their kids were distraught,” Lauer says. “This lifelike dog had essentially died.”

Parents said things on Hallmark’s Facebook like, “Shame on you, Hallmark,” and, “You made my kid cry,” and left two-star reviews on Amazon (although Hallmark doesn’t sell the toy on that platform) that showed up before anything else about the toy did.

“That’s really compelling stuff,” Lauer says. “We never had to deal with this very public dynamic of customer service before.”

But the social media outburst helped Hallmark bridge some internal gaps with its customer service methods. “This sort of vocal minority on social media is what it took to get some attention, and [it led us] to take this to some of our leadership and say, ‘We’ve got to do something about this. I know you are all already focused on next Christmas, but we’re still trying to fix this Christmas,’” Lauer says.

At $35 to $45 per toy, Hallmark wasn’t equipped to give each customer with a malfunctioned toy a full refund immediately, so the company had to recognize customer’s concerns and make it right in a different way.

Jingle 2.0 wasn’t set to release until the following year, but “Nugget,” another interactive toy puppy, had just come to market. So Hallmark sent a free Nugget to the people who had reached out and reported the Jingle malfunctions.

“We didn’t just send them a replacement product, we wanted to make it right,” Lauer says. “We included a card in the box for Nugget that said, ‘Uh oh, Jingle lost his bark! We’re so sorry. He just has to rest his voice for a while. But in the meantime, we sent you his friend named Nugget to keep you company.” Then when Jingle 2.0 was ready, they were sent the replacement, too.

“It would have been nice to pull that solution together much more quickly than we did,” Lauer says. The first complaint came on Dec. 26, 2011, and Nugget wasn’t sent out until March 2012. But now Hallmark is ready to handle a Jingle issue like this one if it ever comes up in the future.

Lauer says she’s happy about the improvements. Jingle bridged the gap between executives and the customer service experience, and increased testing standards for their toy products.

There’s still more work to do, she says. The company is continuing to pressure-test customer service standards at retail, creating consistent and effective methods for handling complaints.

“We’ve made a lot of headway,” she says. “And we continue to hold up Jingle as the dog who taught us a lot of lessons.”