I had a remarkable customer experience with CD Baby when I bought Kendall Payne’s wonderful Grown CD. Ms. Payne is one of the burgeoning segment of independent artists making a go of it without major label support.
CD Baby works like gangbusters for people like Kendall Payne. As I understand the transaction, the artist sets a price for the product she provides to CD Baby — it could be $4 or $40 — then CD Baby adds a modest service charge and that’s what it costs. The artist provides finished product which CD Baby stocks, sells and ships. They take their cut and send the rest to the musician. Everybody’s happy.
The day after the CD arrived I got an email that read:
Jim -
Did you get your CD OK? Was everything perfect?
If you liked a CD you bought, please write a little review on the musician’s CD Baby page? Just click the link below, and scroll to the bottom of the page. You’ll see where it says, "WRITE A REVIEW". It only takes a minute and would mean a lot to the artists.
The CD we sent you was: KENDALL PAYNE: Grown
GO TO: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/kpayne
Also… if you like that CD, I think you’ll like some of our editor’s picks, here:
GOSPEL: Contemporary Gospel
http://www.cdbaby.com/style/147
POP: Folky Pop
http://www.cdbaby.com/style/133
Of course if anything was wrong, please let me know! Tell me it was
ORDER # 604500. I’d be glad to help.
Thanks!
–
Derek Sivers, CD Baby
http://cdbaby.com <– new CDs added every day!
email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com
So simple. So timely. So inexpensive. I forwarded the email to marketing friends whose company ships a lot of product in the $10 - $50 range. My note said: benchmark this baby.
The message that came back from one of them said:
just makes me want to cry. I need to get to where things like this inspire/empower me; instead they paralyze me.
How depressing. Here’s a very competent, well-paid manager in a thriving business who can’t see how in the world he could communicate with paying customers to make sure they got what they paid for and invite them to spend again. Could things be any more broken?
When a business process is that disintegrated — in this case by the complete disconnect between order-taking, billing, fulfillment and marketing — isn’t it time to break it the rest of the way and replace it with something that works?
In The Big Moo, one of the Group of 33 wrote:
The only reason the system exists is so that you can make the things you make, right? So if the system is demeaning your work, change the system.
Who can possibly afford to pay managers to sit around paralyzed by their inability to launch the simplest initiative to increase revenues and deepen customer relationships?
Apparently, most of us. I’m surprised how often I hear similar laments from managers whose wings have been clipped by systems that plainly don’t work.
How often do you get an email like the one I got from CD Baby? I get them so infrequently that I figured I’d better write about it.
Here’s a bet. I bet there’s someone in your company who is surprised — maybe even frustrated — that you’re not doing something very simple to increase revenues and deepen customer relationships. And I bet she or he has an idea about how to implement that simple thing in the next 30 days. And I bet all you have to do is ask.
