I’m sure most of you have moved house at some time. Unless you’re really well organised, you ‘lose’ everything. Plus we have to lay a new carpet which is just another interruption, along with everything from registering with a new doctor to transferring utility accounts and ordering new bins.
And amongst this maelstrom we're supposed to try and run the business. Basically it's not really possible, not least because we don’t have broadband until Tuesday thanks to an Openreach cock-up.
So we’re very part time at the moment and will be for the next week. After we do get through it, I have to start introducing you to Andy who will be the new me, probably from late May onwards.
I don’t know if you’ve had to unpack your knowledge of a job to someone but in my experience you don’t realise how much you actually know. After over 23 years flying the DJTees jumbo jet of t-shirts, divorcing ourselves from the daily business is hard, especially telling Andy the best ways to handle customer service, which I’ve found best if you do the exact opposite of modern trends. No chat bots, no corporate middle-management speak, answer promptly and with empathy in normal language. Also answering every question in an email. That one drives me crazy when you email 3 questions and they answer only 2.
Authenticity has to be the baseline I think. It’s also the most simple way to go. Share your loves and passions. After all, that’s what this is all about. Andy loves The Band and Ive told him not to be afraid of celebrating that. It’s important not to try to be the cool guy, try and see the issue from the customer’s viewpoint. It can sometimes be frustrating but there’s nothing to be gained by adopting any other stance.
But these days people are much less aggressive than was the case 15 years ago. Even so, occasionally I do get a customer who doesn’t know me and comes prepared for a fight, the wary you tend to do by default in these days of long-winded, corporate obfuscation. I know what it’s like, having just had a 30 minute call with BT which was infuriating.
These days I almost never get silly emails, whereas in the early days they were common, especially from North America when using the internet was new to people. I’ll share some of them at a later date, but they ranged from not understanding how an exchange rate worked or even was, to everything from death threats to enquiries if I know Brad from London!
I do still get European emails from people who haven't heard of Brexit in 2016 and what it means, even though we state it on the website in red. I admire their ability to divorce themselves from reality and just live in ignorance.
In 2003, when we started, the world was very different and there were only a handful of people doing tshirts, now there’s thousands. The first shirt we sold was of Ray Charles on 18th October 2002, my mother’s birthday, oddly enough. We used to get promo gifts from Google adwords at Christmas because we spent so much with them
So this is an era of change in every way. I shall still be writing blogs though, so I’ll still be around, listening to 70s jazz rock, as I have done for 50 years. Now, I’ve got to find out where our bins are! Thanks for sticking with us, we’ll be back to normal in the next week.
