I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
marshallhaas.com
I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
1–10 of 94 posts
Re: I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
#2Similarly there is a phenomenal company called HandWrytten. It uses robots to write thank you cards with ink pens. I upload a spreadsheet of all of my contacts, with a message for each, and the robot beautifully writes out the card in my own handwriting; personal hand writing is an extra fee. Takes about an hour for 155 contacts.
I keep up with hundreds of people in my job and something personal like this really goes a long way.
Re: I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
#3Similarly there is a phenomenal company called HandWrytten. It uses robots to write thank you cards with ink pens. I upload a spreadsheet of all of my contacts, with a message for each, and the robot beautifully writes out the card in my own handwriting; personal hand writing is an extra fee. Takes about an hour for 155 contacts. I keep up with hundreds of people in my job and something personal like this really goes…
From one perspective that's quite thoughtful. From another that's going to significant lengths to deceive your customers into thinking it's much more thoughtful than it is.
Re: I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
#4This is just Mail Merge 2.0 and it feels just as gross as companies trying to pretend they send "personalized" emails when it's all automated. I half-expected this to be a story about a new approach to support/outreach but no, it's just the newer version of "Hey $firstName!".
It's astounding to me that the founder not only did this but then wrote a blog article bragging about it as if this was good idea. Clearly the customers thought this was real (as seen in their replies), I can't imagine most of them would feel the same way if they knew it wasn't personalized at all and was just a deepfake.
The bit about "I would clone myself to greet people so I could work in the back", is super cringe. I'm not even going to open that can of worms... I don't believe this is ethical at all unless there was a clear disclaimer (which it appears there was not). Lastly "the genie is out of the bottle" is a terrible justification.
Re: I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
#5I'm a big fan of Marshall but this is just so clueless. People appreciate the video *because of the cost* that... that's the thing! This is not genuine, at. all.
>If I was a retail store owner greeting customers at the entrance and someone came to me and offered to place a clone to do the same job, so I could be productive in the back, would I take that offer? Yes.
No you wouldn't. Because a creepy clone at the entrance that is unable to reply to customers or interact with them in a genuinely dynamic way would be terrible. Which is what this is.
I don't like being negative but this, this just sucks. You're tricking people in believing you paid a higher cost for that video than you did and thus about the amount of fucks you give about them. Furthermore once more companies start doing this, this format will lose it value because it no longer demonstrates anything even from actual genuine people.
Re: I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
#6Similarly there is a phenomenal company called HandWrytten. It uses robots to write thank you cards with ink pens. I upload a spreadsheet of all of my contacts, with a message for each, and the robot beautifully writes out the card in my own handwriting; personal hand writing is an extra fee. Takes about an hour for 155 contacts. I keep up with hundreds of people in my job and something personal like this really goes…
Expect it's not personal at all... it's just a lie that fools a good number of people. I absolutely hate these types of letters because it's easy to see them for what they really are, a trick to invoke a completely un-earned emotional response.
Re: I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
#7I saw another startup doing this few days before and from the looks of it I'm guessing many more are coming.
I'm guessing soon it will be like the automatic emails which address you like "Hello {{first}} {{last}}!" and anytime I see anyone using my name in subject line it generally has quite the opposite effect on me.
I'm guessing same is gonna happen to videos. As the saying goes, fool me once...
Re: I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
#8Similarly there is a phenomenal company called HandWrytten. It uses robots to write thank you cards with ink pens. I upload a spreadsheet of all of my contacts, with a message for each, and the robot beautifully writes out the card in my own handwriting; personal hand writing is an extra fee. Takes about an hour for 155 contacts. I keep up with hundreds of people in my job and something personal like this really goes…
From one perspective that's quite thoughtful. From another that's going to significant lengths to deceive your customers into thinking it's much more thoughtful than it is.
Not disagreeing with you, but isn't that what a lot of advertising does?
Re: I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
#9This seems at least a little unethical. At the very least, I would think worse of a company that sent a video to me that seemed personalized, but later turned out to be mass-produced. He has an ethics section in the article, but doesn't doesn't go very deep and (unsurprisingly) concludes that his own actions were perfectly fine.
The root of the problem is why customers respond well to these videos: they're surprised and impressed that the CEO of the company would take time out of his day to record a thank you video just for them. And the fact is: the CEO did not. It's deception, plain and simple. Not big, evil, Theranos-level deception, but deception still.
To put it another way, how do you think customers would respond if, along with each email, you included some text saying "this video was automatically generated"? I'd assume pretty poorly. The difference between that response and the actual response is the value of the deception here. I think that "if we were honest about this, customers wouldn't like it" is a good litmus test for whether you're doing an ethical thing or not.
Really, I think this is doing a sort of trust arbitrage. The tech exists to fake personal videos now, but customers aren't widely aware of it. You can take advantage of that difference with stunts like this. In a few years, people will know this can easily be done and the value of personal videos will drop. At some point it'll be no different to the average customer than an email with "Hi !" or a letter with faux-handwriting on it.
Re: I sent over 10k personal thank you videos to my customers
#10This seems at least a little unethical. At the very least, I would think worse of a company that sent a video to me that seemed personalized, but later turned out to be mass-produced. He has an ethics section in the article, but doesn't doesn't go very deep and (unsurprisingly) concludes that his own actions were perfectly fine. The root of the problem is why customers respond well to these videos: they're surprised…
> And the fact is: the CEO did not. It's deception, plain and simple. Not big, evil, Theranos-level deception, but deception still.
If you think the blog post is bad, just watch the video on windsor's website: https://www.windsor.io/#video
The CEO plainly says he has time to work on other important things. Jesus, even creating the video in the first place, requires you to say Hey First Name