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Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

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Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#171

Post by colechristensen »

bombcar wrote: post #49
hnbad wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "bringing joy", it's emotional manipulation. Intent matters. This isn't any better than MLM people pretending to be your friend in order to sell you tupperware. In a single naive interaction, sure, it may bring joy. But repeated at scale throughout society, it creates distrust by being insincere and devalues sincere expressions of kindness, harming everyone.

That’s the harm - you’re taking things the body and brain are used to and simulating them to elicit the response you want. I’m sure a company could develop an AI advanced enough to imitate a cute employee who is really into you when you have an issue - and use that to encourage you to spend way more because “they love you”. Hell, I bet you could offer “CEO on HackerNews” as a marketing service - keep an eye on posts…

The thing about CEOs on HN is they have to say the right thing to be appealing. CEO on HN saying the wrong thing can really nail down the impression that a company is doing something awful and it’s not just the fault of the marketing intern or some misguided but well intentioned employee. If you hear the same crap from the top in a supposedly personal comment, there’s not much room left for assuming the best.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#172

Post by skyyler »

notshift wrote: post #170
skyyler wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't have much evidence to support this claim No, but you're going to make the claim anyways, aren't you? >but as best I can tell Chick-fil-a has far superior food quality than Raising Cane's. Chick-fil-a holds their ingredients & preparation to the same high standard as they do their customer service, whereas Raising Cane's is much more hit-or-miss, a lot more like the McDonalds or Burger Kings out there. Ah, ye…

Why so hostile? We're just talking about fast food man, lol. > Do you eat a lot of low quality fast food? That could be one reason your gut bacteria are craving food from a fast food joint instead of something that isn't deep fried and covered in Polynesian sauce. No, I don't, which is why I don't crave fast food. I get Chick-fil-a once or twice a month for fun.

To me, fast food is fast food.

Your comment about your preferred deep fried bird eatery being better than another commenter's preferred deep fried bird eatery just came off as bizarre.

My poison is better than your poison.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#173

Post by WalterBright »

iambateman wrote: post #114
gregsadetsky wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it working / were you making money? Automated handwritten notes companies seem like they render text using a handwritten font and then potentially pass it off (via API) to a “print anything and ship it” company — is that an accurate statement? Is there a clear advantage to building and maintaining the hardware / plotting pen portion? i.e. isn’t that something you could do by randomizing font parameters? Also, it…

I was about three years behind wallawe’s reply. The technical parts are fun…the core thing for us was that it was actually written by a real pen. The difference between a print and real writing is obvious to most people, so we wanted it to be believable. Our system used a set of handwritten fonts, along with a bunch of “fuzzing” of line height, line direction, and character swap outs. This created an SVG path that a…

> Our system used a set of handwritten fonts

What betrays handwritten fonts is nobody writes "a" the same way every time. I get that you're addressing this with fuzzing, but that's not enough. The pressure put on a pen also varies, people make mistakes and cross them out, there are ink blotches, etc.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#174

Post by olliecornelia »

samwillis wrote: post #5

There was a brilliant Twitter thread last year showing a project to "hand write" with cnc robots thousands of personalised letters for a mailout. They initially started off with off the shelf hand writing robots, but ended up building their own massive ones to increase speed and efficiency. https://mobile.twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/143888821947...

No post body was provided.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#175

Post by WalterBright »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #135
wikitopian wrote: post #52

Ultimately, culture will be defined by a strange sort of radical authenticity defined by ever more subtle and specific signals of genuine humanity. Sophisticated cants will emerge that are structurally challenging for computers to emulate. And because there's a lot of work going into preventing AI from computing anything racist, sexist, or offensive to HR, the new ways of communicating will likely gravitate towards t…

Interesting idea. Reflecting on it, people already use what would otherwise be unacceptable slurs with their closest friends (at least IME in the UK). Using this as a human-computer differentiator is intriguing. Kinda like if non-humans were really incapable of purposeful harm to humans you could get someone to pinch you to show they're not a bot... CAPTCHA of the future!

> people already use what would otherwise be unacceptable slurs with their closest friends

I suspect this happens everywhere. For a hilarious send up of this, see "Gran Torino".

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#176

Post by WalterBright »

the_af wrote: post #104
ekianjo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being kind is a cultural trait that we have been selected for, over generations, to increase our chances of survival and also ROI. There is nothing gratuitous about it once you understand where humans come from.

Yet many humans still choose to be unkind, rude or obnoxious. So I'll pick the kind ones, regardless.

Older people tend to be nice, as decades of experience teaches them that being obnoxious doesn't work.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#177

Post by nico »

jasonsync wrote: post #78

We used this tactic as a growth hack in our early days (2016), and it worked great! It also inspires sharing on Twitter, which helps drive the recommendation flywheel: https://twitter.com/tdnvl/status/722882182759452675 The trouble is that it isn't easily scalable in-house at high volume. It was great until we realized that we were managing a large scale mailroom. But by then the flywheel was spinning ...

Thank you for sharing your experience.

I was wondering if it would work for saas businesses, as the article talks mostly about e-commerce and hospitality.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#178

Post by Theodores »

telecuda wrote: post #140

We did this a lot in our early days, and while we didn't correlate it with spending, customers occasionally would acknowledge the note in future conversations. To me, it falls in the category of "do things that don't scale" as you try to grow your business. An over-emphasis on customer service is rarely a bad idea.

The premise of the story is nonsense. If you are selling someone a coffee then some doodle is going to please some, however, the important interactions are in customer service and YOU DO NOT WANT ANY HAND WRITTEN NOTES.

I automate customer service emails, starting with the stats to see what the problems are. If all the time is taken up on mysteriously cancelled orders that are not communicated, I slice that off from 'manual intervention' to a well written, considerate and concise email that pulls through pertinent customer order details.

It will take me hours to develop, test and deploy that template, however, once done, it will be well received by the customer. There is a 'from the customer service team' rather than a fake name. The customer service team doesn't even have to press a button for this one to go out, it will be automated.

In time I will go for the other time taking parts of customer service, the goal really being to eliminate as much as possible. What remains can then be given the personal touch, with hand written notes and calls, if need be.

Once this is achieved, customer service can be pro-active rather than reactive.

Getting to this stage takes work. Initially it can be one calamity after another with a random roster of temporary staff of a low literacy level, possibly outsourced having to write what are essentially hand written notes. None of those notes are any good. It is at the txt spk level of communication.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#179

Post by WalterBright »

causi wrote: post #103

These days if I get a thank-you note that looks handwritten I hold it up to the light and check for pen indentations.

Usually just run your finger over it. If the letters are raised or flat, they are printed. If they are indented, they're (usually) handwritten, especially if the indentation is inconsistent.

Re: Handwritten thank you notes increase sales

#180

Post by landemva »

cm_silva wrote: post #41
spicybright wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very reminiscent of the movie Her, where the main character worked at a letter writing service you could pay someone to write thoughtful letters to family and friends.

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