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How FTD lost a customer for life

June 9, 2010 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

My heart sank yesterday morning when I went to check my Facebook feed and saw this message from a friend:

Password stopped working on FTD.com. Mechanism for reset didn't work. No email for tech support. Called member services - they only help florists. So, absolutely no way to access ten year's worth of stored events and addresses. Time to say permanent goodbye to FTD.com.

My friend is certainly not the first person to lament how hard it can be to get decent help from an online merchant, but this particular case stings in a number of different ways.

First, my friend (let's call him Todd) had been a faithful FTD customer for ten years. He estimates that he has spent more than $2,500 with them during that period.

Also, he trusted them. They said, here are some tools that will help you stay organized and never forget a special occasion again. So he spent the time and effort loading in his contacts, birthdays, anniversaries – in essence, handing a big part of his relationships over to them. They did not take care of that which he entrusted to them.

And finally, the reason things took a bad turn is just so dumb. One call to tech support was thwarted; another, after a 20 minute wait, gave him the response that there is literally no way for them to retrieve his password or set a new one. His account, for all intents and purposes, is gone.

"There is no way I am now going to assume that FTD is the best choice," he tells me. "I'm now going to assume that one of the dot-com flower companies is going to service an online customer better and will switch my business over to them."

For every Todd who voices his frustration at a situation like this, there are dozens if not hundreds of people who simply slam down the phone, turn off the computer and go shop somewhere else. Lessons to be learned:

If you don't have a phone number on your retail website, put one on there now. And have someone who knows what they're doing answer it.

Treat your customer's data as sacred.All of it – purchasing history, opted-in data, preferences. Losing or misusing customer data is a betrayal.

Recognize the value of each customer. Todd spent $2,500 with them over the course of 10 years, and he's probably going to buy a lot more flowers in the next 40 or 50. There's no reason a senior-level IT person couldn't have been brought in to crack open the database. Each and every customer matters … especially when you consider the further damage that will be done when folks like Todd take to Facebook to tell everyone about what happened.

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