CD Baby is cool :D

Customer Service and Support is too often a lost art in practice among too many businesses operating in our modern age. Customer service is the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase.

According to Jamier L. Scott, “Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”

INITIATION (ARC-2000) by Sumi Tonooka & Erica Lindsay | CD Baby Front Page Feature Slot

Customer service
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Its importance varies by product, industry and customer; defective or broken merchandise can be exchanged, often only with a receipt and within a specified time frame. Retail stores will often have a desk or counter devoted to dealing with returns, exchanges and complaints, or will perform related functions at the point of sale.

Customer service may be provided by a person (e.g., sales and service representative), or by automated means called self-service. Examples of self service are Internet sites. However, In the Internet era, a challenge has been to maintain and/or enhance the personal experience while making use of the efficiencies of online commerce. Writing in Fast Company, entrepreneur and customer systems innovator Micah Solomon has made the point that “Online customers are literally invisible to you (and you to them), so it’s easy to shortchange them emotionally. But this lack of visual and tactile presence makes it even more crucial to create a sense of personal, human-to-human connection in the online arena.”

Customer service is normally an integral part of a company’s customer value proposition. In their book Rules to Break and Laws to Follow, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. write that “customers have memories. They will remember you, whether you remember them or not.” Further, “customer trust can be destroyed at once by a major service problem, or it can be undermined one day at a time, with a thousand small demonstrations of incompetence.”

From the point of view of an overall sales process engineering effort, customer service plays an important role in an organization’s ability to generate income and revenue. From that perspective, customer service should be included as part of an overall approach to systematic improvement.

INITIATION IS DISTRIBUTED BY CD BABY

Now on iTunes

The logistical planning for the release of Initiation (ARC-2000) by the stellar quartet co-led by pianist, Sumi Tonooka and tenor saxophonist, Erica Lindsay was very thoughtful.  And the promotion was just as thoughtfully planned to include two Radio Promotion campaigns by Mark Elf (Jenbay Jazz) and a typically effective Publicity campaign by Ann Braithwaite (Braithwaite and Katz), in addition to the normal on-going 21st Century marketing that is done by the Artists Recording Collective (ARC).

Coordinating the retail availability of a release with the radio and publicity campaigns is vital for potential sales.  Initiation (ARC-2000) was successfully delivered for retail sales and worldwide distribution to CD Baby in advance of the marketing, but did not arrive to all of the retailers when the CD debuted on the JazzWeek radio charts at #39 (peaking at #17).  An initial inquiry seemed to have solved the matter, yet weeks passed and the music was still not yet available at the major retailers – like iTunes and Amazon.  Several more email exchanges and two telephone calls proved just as ineffective toward solving the issue.

CONFLICT AND RESOLUTION

The problem was finally solved today via a telephone call to CD Baby with the assistance of a Customer Service Representative named “Franklin” – don’t know if that is his real name and don’t care, he rocks!

It was a pretty cool conference call.  Common sense prevailed in the fact that Franklin listened to our concerns and then found out what would satisfy us as his CD Baby customers, toward a mutually positive and professional resolution.

The hope of taking advantage of the critical acclaim that has been documented about the music on Initiation (ARC-2000), was not the primary reason why we confronted this situation.  The processing of this particular release just wasn’t handled according to their own business standards by CD Baby – a company who made its reputation and now maintains its credibility largely by the quality of service it provides to independent artists.  That’s what gave us the most pause…

But, Franklin made a big statement about CD Baby and Customer Service – they still get it…

And, that’s a good situation for the independent recording artists and labels in this new digital music age because most of us depend upon the practice of such vital professionalism in our B2B releationships with firms like CD Baby.

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