Unmissed reconnections
Rob Long
I have an expensive pen I got as a gift, and five years ago, I needed to get the twisty thing inside it repaired. I took it to a shop in downtown Manhattan that specializes in fancy pens that break easily. They repaired it on the spot, and that was that.
As I said, that was five years ago. This morning, I received the following email: “Happy New Year from all of your friends at Downtown Pen Repair! May 2023 be blessed with Joy and Peace for you and your Loved Ones.” I spent the next few minutes searching my email archives to see if the same pen people sent me a Happy New Year email in 2022. They didn’t. They also forgot about wishing me Joy and Peace in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 — when, to be honest, I really could have used some nice wishes as I recovered from a nasty round of COVID.
This was not the only heartfelt New Year greeting I received from a business this year.
I got a “Happiest of New Years! May 2023 Be Sweet and Savory” from a bakery in Palo Alto where I used my ATM card to buy (if I recall correctly) an almond croissant in 2017. I heard from the old Express Lube on Washington Boulevard in Venice Beach that serviced my 2012 Subaru Outback in 2014. I got a funny “Hope the New Year is Framed Up Right!” from an art framer, from a company that will come to your house with a giant document shredder, a camera repair place, an online food delivery company, and a real estate agent in Saint Augustine, Florida, who I foolishly connected to on LinkedIn without thinking it through.
I appreciate the sentiments. No one enjoys a clever New Year pun more than I do. And, of course, I realize that there’s also a promotional angle to these emails. That’s fine. I don’t begrudge a business using whatever excuse it can find to drum up a bit more profit. We’re all just tryin’ to catch a dime out here.
Still, what’s strange is that in each one of these instances, and the many more that went directly to my spam folder, I had never heard from the businesses before. This is the first New Year’s greeting they’ve sent me. In the case of the Express Lube, it’s been seven years since I paid $49.95 for an oil change and a tire rotation. Surely, by now, they’ve realized that our relationship has run its course.
So why the sudden spate of New Year’s wishes from obscure and forgotten (by me, anyway) shops? The best explanation I can come up with is that even the smallest businesses utilize customer relationship management software, probably from the sales and marketing utilities behemoth Salesforce. It doesn’t matter how small your business or how old your email data set — with the right CRM tools, you can suddenly pop up in the email inbox of someone whose financial records you shredded in 2009.
CRM software is designed for businesses, but it would probably work for people, too. At a family gathering during the Christmas holiday, a young relative told me that what she dreads about this time of year are what she calls the “Thinking About Us” texts she receives from certain ex-boyfriends. “Hey there. Was just sitting here thinking about you, and us, and wondering if maybe you’d be down to grab a coffee or something and catch up? Hit me back if so, but no worries if not. Just wanted to send good vibes and love your way.”
In every instance, she told me, these texts come from boys she dated for a few weeks at most. And in each case, the relationship ended abruptly when he told her, often via text, that he just “wasn’t in the relationship space right now” and “needed to take a break from dating.”
“They broke up with me,” she said. “And now they’re acting wounded?” She showed me one or two of the most recent ones, and they all had the same plaintive tone, the same poor-me vibe. Each one contained a weasel-worded suggestion to “grab coffee” or “catch up over a drink” or “hang out and talk.”
“These guys need to get a life,” she said. On the contrary, I thought, what they need is to get the right software.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.