Last weekend I went to the store to buy Monopoly and it was damn hard. If you’ve ventured down the game aisle of late you’ve probably noticed that there are a few more versions of the Parker Brothers classic including but in no way limited to Bass Fishing Monopoly, Boston Red Sox Monopoly, Cat Lover’s Monopoly, US Coast Guard Monopoly, Chronicles of Narnia Monopoly, Elvis Monopoly Collector’s Edition, I Love Lucy Monopoly “California Here We Come” Edition, and my personal favorite, pictured above, Monopoly Electronic Banking featuring the pre-credit crisis back-of-the-box headline “Make Millions with a Swipe of Your Card!” I have walked by Monopoly for years thinking we should get it but these versions have intimidated me to date. I bought plain ‘ol Monopoly for $10.99.

The point? It was hard to do business with Monopoly. Not hard in a way that I couldn’t overcome but I would have bought earlier had the experience been a bit easier. Sometimes if you take a step back you can see that your business has a lot of sales barriers in place that you may not have seen. Did anyone at Parker Brothers question that perhaps with the development of I Love Lucy Monopoly “California Here We Come” Edition that they were on there way to overwhelming some customers? A minor concern? Yes. Worth discussion? Absolutely.

Here’s a tip: the next time you have a meeting or retreat with your team write the headline above — Is It Hard to Do Business with Us? — on your wipe board and discuss away. Make a list and start picking them off. Not overnight but over time you will streamline your customers’ experience and leave fewer people confused in your aisles …

You walk up and down the aisles of a store … Can I help you?

If you don’t already know the story of Southwest Airlines, you should. Take a quick minute at the beginning of a post-holiday week for a quick refresher courtesy of a segment from last weekend’s CBS Sunday Morning – you can read the text or watch the video here. Basically, it all comes down to a seemingly simple business model projected by the airline’s former CEO, Herb Kelleher. He asserts that if you focus on your employees then all of the rest will fall in to place. Because if you take care of your people, then they project their pleasure onto your customers, who in turn have favorable experiences and continue buying, which in turn pleases your stock holders or whoever your business serves. Herb’s also responsible for one of my favorite quotes: “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things!” No bull. Just a remarkable company.

… that can save you from certain doom. We all know about the week JetBlue’s been having so I’m not gonna bother to recap. How do you come back as a business from a nightmare like this? Today JetBlue announced their Customer Bill of Rights. Nothing real exciting on paper but remember the old adage of “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it”? Well, what’s gonna save JetBlue is how they’ve said their Customer Bill of Rights.

Go to their website and they’ve posted it clearly on the homepage (big duh after a bad PR week – you do NOT want to hide your response). BUT what they’ve posted isn’t a document stating the rights. In fact at a cursory glance I can’t find any webpage or pdf that lists them in writing. No, this link takes you to a YouTube video nested in the site of JetBlue founder and CEO David Neeleman telling you the Bill of Rights. Not a typical CEO standing at a podium addressing the troops. It’s an intimate setting with Neeleman in a open-collared shirt talking about their FUBAR week and his promise (the company’s too – but the implication is that he’s personally vouching) on how their going to make it better. And the cherry on the sundae – he closes by asking for your business. Well played, JetBlue.

And it didn’t stop on the website. Neeleman was all over TV this morning making the rounds. They responded quickly enough to get into the news cycle and may end up changing the story. My prediction? JetBlue is going to come back from this. They’re a remarkable business that is working to handle a terrible misstep remarkably.

Speaking of which … do you have a Customer Bill of Rights? If so, is it on your website? If it’s on your website is it buried?

An oldie but goodie with a slight addendum in light of the impact of social media.

• A customer who is pleased after doing business with you tells one person
• A customer apathetic to your experience tells no one
• A customer who has a bad customer experience tells approximately nine people OR …
• … they blog about it and you experience the online firestorm that Kohls has had after someone’s cell phone camera met up with a messy dressing room