Expect more from your online experience!

Let me briefly discuss positively outrageous service, or POS. It's the concept of making your customers say wow on a random basis. Pretty simple.

The easiest way to do that, in my mind, is to just occasionally give away free shit. Like you walk into Best Buy (they would NEVER do this) pick up the new Ciara album, an AC adapter, and some blank DVDs. You head to the friendly checker girl and she starts to ring you up but says, "Oh, it's national YOU day. This is all free." You go out and tell your friends about your experience. That's one way it might work.

What I would like to see, the idea as it were, is the concept of POS applied to the internet and all its purchasing opportunities. The idea of wowing people.

I think there is a tremendous amount of energy being put into online customer service. We can track our orders, we get endless confirmations and reminders that we're at a secure site, etc. So they're trying.

But what I don't see is anyone trying to take it to the next level. Trying to go above and beyond good customer service, and making it great.

Giving stuff away for free is just one way to do that. But it's harder in a non face-to-face environment. It's hard to make a machine think in terms of POS. At least for my tiny brain it is.

Maybe Amazon sends a book they think you'll like along with your order. Or maybe they pull something off your wish list and just send it. Or maybe the guys from Threadless pull a random customer every week and personally call to thank them for their order. Or Apple throws a customer appreciation party and invites random people who've made purchases on iTunes in the last six months.

Word speads fast. Especially online. The goodwill you can generate from doing things like this is amazing, and in the big picture, so much cheaper than a lot of the available advertising opportunities.