Product Management Blog

Dear Marketers: This is One of the Hidden Costs of Groupon

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Mindy L.:  Hello Tom! Welcome to the Great Wolf Lodge! How may I help you today?

Mindy L.:  Good afternoon!

Tom Leung:  Hi there Mindy

Mindy L.:  Hello!

Tom Leung:  I'm hoping you can help me, I'm kind of miffed at the moment.

Mindy L.:  Sure, what can I help you with?

Tom Leung:  I have reservations at your Grand Mound location for today.

Mindy L.:  Great!

Tom Leung:  And my colleague at work is going today as well but apparently he paid 1/2 what I paid. I'm not asking for a refund but would like request a complimentary room upgrade.

Tom Leung:  :-(

Mindy L.:  At this time we only have our standard suites available for today, so we would not be able to offer a free upgrade.

Tom Leung:  Can u put us in a Grizzly

Mindy L.:  They are sold out for today.

Tom Leung:  oh man. that's a bummer. I hate groupon.

Mindy L.:  Is there anything else I may assist you with, Tom?

Tom Leung:  yes, i'd like to request a coupon for an upgrade next time i visit

Mindy L.:  You would have to request that at guest services when checking in.

Tom Leung:  i feel like i'm paying $400 and my friend is paying $200

Tom Leung:  that's just wrong.

Mindy L.:  Our rates change very quickly this time of year based on room availability. As you can see we are almost sold out for today, so that makes the rates much higher.

Tom Leung:  so what can you do for me next time we visit?

Tom Leung:  and you're partly sold out because you gave the rooms away for 1/2 price to a bunch of people and folks paying full freight like me get hosed.

Mindy L.:  Unfortunately, I am not able to honor any add on amenities or upgrades. You have to refer to guest services when you arrive at the lodge.

Tom Leung:  ok thx, please tell your supervisor i intend to blog about this and post to yelp as well. i'm not pleased.

Mindy L.:  All of our chats are monitored by supervisors at all times.

Mindy L.:  Thank you for visiting greatwolf.com Tom, have a Great Wolf day!

Thank you for visiting greatwolf.com! We hope to see you at the lodge!

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Update: An ABS reader from the ABS Facebook page rightly called out I was a bit condescending and unreasonably upset in talking to the customer service lady.  He's probably right in that this business didn't do anything wrong by charging people different prices and I could have scoured all the deals sites before booking directly from the business itself.  That said, here are some takeaways I'd suggest are worth considering:

 

1.  If you do mega-discounts on the same inventory on 3rd party sites like Groupon while charging direct customers double at the same time, just be aware that it could make the direct customers upset.  Arguably,  those direct customers (the ones who went to your website) might be the highest value ones.

 

2. While it may still make sense to do things like Groupon while charging direct customers higher prices, you may want to consider offering those direct customers something more (e.g. more flexible booking, complimentary services, etc.) which don't need to make the difference but numb the pain a bit more for missing on the great deal.

 

-Tom

Help Test a Minimally Viable Product

Hi Folks:

Practicing what I preach, we've been iterating on a new concept which allows you to one-click call any telephone number from Firefox for free.  Call any telephone number on any web page from browser, bridge to your mobile, or text the number for future reference.  It only works in Firefox now and requires latest version of Firefox.  Would love to get your feedback in the comments here or send it to me directly (tleung <AT> marchex dot com).

Check it out at www.LetsFirefly.com

Thanks,

Tom 

Dear Groupon PM

This is what happens when I click on the unsubscribe with one click link at the bottom of your emails.  Why do I need a username and password to unsubcribe to the daily email newsletter (esp if it's labeled one click)?

 

 

 

Dear FB Pages PM

I clicked on the "Insights" tab for the Always be Shipping Facebook Page and saw this chart.  What does it mean?  It makes my head hurt.

 

Dear AdCenter PM: Why is it so hard to give you my money?

This is a true story from last week and an example of a less than delightful UX.  I speculate this is the partially the result of too many PM's owning little pieces of complex end-to-end UX and maybe a product culture that isn't fanatical enough about customer delight.  

Truth be told, I recently started a skanky UX jihad about one of my company's products so I'm just as guilty of committing customer abuse and can tell Adcenter has made some improvements over the years.  That said, it's been a while since I've been this fired up (probably because you'd think payments is the one thing that should work every time).  Here's how I spent ~2 hours over several days trying to give them more money.

1. Decide to increase my wife's SEM spend for her Seattle condo blog and after having paused adcenter during the recession, decided to resurrect it -- especially now that we don't need to go to Yahoo overture anymore and business is starting to pick up again.

2. Try to log in to adcenter on Chrome and it gives me a big "we don't support this browser" sign. Manage to find IE on my machine and log in to adcenter from IE and select the campaign and hit the unpause action from a drop down.  Done!  Much like the beginning of a Dateline crime story, things weren't all that they seemed...