Happy holidays to all my Suddenly Frugal readers. I’ll keep looking out for Freebie Friday finds to bring to you in 2011. Next week I’ll be running a series of “best of” posts from the past year, based on popularity and readership. I hope you’ll enjoy this stroll down frugal memory lane.

I’ve been eligible to upgrade to a free Smartphone since December 9th, and I just can’t make up my mind on which one I want. I know that with a “smarter” phone I need to take better care of my equipment, because of the inherent bells and whistles that can go flat should I drop the phone or leave it in a damaging environment, such as my freezing cold or boiling hot car. Even with my current, frugal cell phone, which my teenage daughter handed down to me, I try to treat it right so that it keeps working for me for as long as I need it.

With the freezing cold weather we’ve been having in the Northeast lately, a tip sheet from Verizon Wireless (my own cell phone company) caught my eye. It’s got some pretty good information in it on protecting your phone, so I thought I’d share it with you here:

• Keep your phone fully charged. Cold temperatures can run down the phone’s battery charge more quickly.  Use a car charger to keep the phone’s charge if you get stranded or stuck in traffic on icy or snowy roads.  Think about an extra battery as backup.
• Handle your phone with care. The display screen can become brittle when exposed to cold temperatures for long periods of time.
• Keep your phone in a warm place. Avoid leaving your phone in an outside pocket or backpack or in the car overnight. When outside in the cold weather, carry your phone in an inside jacket pocket, keeping it close to your body for warmth. (I just discovered that my LL Bean down coat has a special pocket inside for a cell phone. Why I never noticed this before is beyond me!)
• Don’t use a touch screen with gloves on. While this won’t “hurt” your phone, it could leave you frustrated. That’s because gloves prevent the phone from “recognizing” your touch, so consider adding finger flip gloves to your winter holiday wish list.

What are some of your tricks for using a cell phone safely in extreme weather?

“Customer” comes first in customer service. Somewhere along the way I think your company has forgotten this.

Four days ago good friends of ours lost a parent. My husband and I decided to send them some comfort in the form of food, and I logged on to your website Sunday afternoon to place my order. Given my frugal nature it takes a lot for me to spend money on mail-ordered food that costs as much as what I was ordering–with expedited shipping, more than $100–but these are close friends that we care about deeply. Also, I’ve had a decade-long relationship with your products so I knew what we would be sending them would be good and much appreciated.

That is, if my order had arrived. Not even on time but at all.

Let’s just say that in the past four days, I have experienced a perfect storm of awful Harry & David customer service. It all started when I discovered that not only did my order not arrive on Tuesday as promised, it never even got processed. And my attempts to get to the bottom of what had happened left me on hold with your customer service people for more than one hour. An hour!

As someone who writes about customer service for magazines and websites, I know how companies can use technology to their advantage and how they can resolve customer service problems that leave their customers loving them even more, not bad mouthing them to every Tom, Dick or Harry they meet. Here now is my advice to you on how you should have handled my problem and how you should improve your customer service going forward.

• Upgrade your call center procedures. It took three calls to your toll-free line to finally get someone on the phone. I had followed your recorded prompts to press #3 to speak with someone about an already-placed ordered, and then waited on hold for nearly 30 minutes, listening to peppy Christmas tunes. Not once did a recording kick in to let me know that you were experiencing, I’m guessing, heavy call volume, or to tell me what number I was in the queue so I had a sense of how long I would have to wait. It was just music, music, and more music.
• Treat your existing customers better than your new ones. Continuing on the notion of your call center procedures, eventually I hung up, called back and pressed #1, which is the option to place a new order. After two rings, a real-life person picked up. Someone should have picked up for #3 that quickly as well. Also, once we finally resolved the problem of getting my gift shipped, you offered me three options: send something different, send me a gift card instead, or cancel my order and refund my money. In my opinion in order to keep me happy as an existing customer, you should have offered to do at least two of those things–send the order (natch) and then give me a little something for my time and trouble.
• Train your employees to handle all situations. When I spoke with the person on the “new order” line, I explained my situation, gave her my order number, and she told me that she needed to transfer me to customer service because only they could handle it. Unfortunately, she discovered her transfer button was broken (!), and so she ended up working with me for 47 minutes, intermittently putting me on hold to speak with customer service on her other line, and then coming back to me. This person should have been trained to handle any situation that came in through her line. The notion that we had to play a game of literal telephone to find out why my order hadn’t shipped was borderline surreal.
• Invest in your technology infrastructure. My only “immediate” customer service option was to call your toll-free number, where I ended up on hold. Nearly every company I do business with on the web these days–from Comcast, my cable company, to Lands’ End, the clothing cataloger–offers live chat. You should, too. Also, while you do have a form that I was able to fill out and send, I was told it would take at least 24 hours to get an answer. A recent survey showed that American consumers like me expect an email response within two hours from a business. Even a Jupiter Research survey from from a few years ago showed that Americans expect an answer within six hours. Additionally, I was told today that an email confirmation for my updated order would take between 24 and 36 hours to arrive, because emails were backlogged. In this day and age of technological solutions, that is simply an unacceptable turnaround time. (Addendum: Five days after I’d emailed Harry & David about this problem the company finally wrote back to apologize for everything that had gone wrong and to credit me fully for my purchase. I appreciate their doing the right thing in this instance.)
• Commit to your social media program 100 percent. When I discovered that you have a Twitter feed, I figured that would be my best way to get to someone immediately to solve my problem. So I tweeted about my problem late last night (after spending 20 minutes on hold during my second failed call to you), went to bed, and expected to wake up to a Direct Message reply. Nope. There was nothing. A recent USA Today article said that half of all Fortune 100 companies are using social media not only for marketing but also for solving customer problems, and 58 percent of Americans who tweet a problem expect a reply. Even if you don’t have the budget to hire a social media person full-time, there are free services you can use so that an email can go to the head of your marketing or customer service every time someone posts something mentioning @HarryandDavid. (I use Puly.) But to leave my tweet hanging out there in nothingness does nothing to help your online reputation–or me to solve my problem.
• Stock up on your personnel and your inventory. If your company is being thrifty about increasing your ranks for the holiday season to save money–and that’s why my phone calls were never picked up in a timely manner–then shame on you. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Also, eventually I found out that the reason my order never shipped was that the sympathy basket I’d chosen was sold out. (Why you never got in touch with me to alert me to this is another issue entirely.) I understand how supply and demand works, but at the holidays, when people are likely sending food products, it’s hard to fathom that a food company would run out of, well, food. Also, why hasn’t someone updated your website to show that this item is no longer available? Deaths don’t stop during the holidays, and I’m guessing I’m not the only one who may need to send a sympathy basket of baked goods in the near future.

I could have ordered from 1-800-FLOWERS, which would have been cheaper. Also, because of their network of local florists, the basket would have gotten to my friends on Monday, even though there was no guarantee on the quality of the food they would have sent. Because of my relationship with Harry & David and my firsthand knowledge of your delicious food, I accepted that I would pay more for a  gift that would arrive one day later. I trusted Harry & David to treat me right. I don’t anymore.

As I mentioned in a post last week, I’ve partnered with Chase to offer tips for maximizing your holiday spending–and saving–this holiday season. This partnership has included radio and TV interviews that either have broadcast live or will broadcast at some point before Christmas.

If you’re curious to hear what I have to say, here is a link to one of those radio interviews. Not only do I offer tips on holiday shopping in this radio interview on KMOX in St. Louis, but also I talk a bit about my new book Toss, Keep, Sell!: The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In.

Speaking of that new book, I’ll post some excerpts from the book in December posts here, leading up to its pub date (though it’s already available online).

There are always small ways to save a little bit of money. Bringing lunch to work or skipping the morning latte may not feel significant, but the cost savings add up over the long run. A number of Americans have done or considered doing these things and have cut back in other small ways to save money.

Over the past six months, three in five U.S. adults (62%) have purchased more generic brands and over two in five (45%) are brown-bagging lunch instead of purchasing it. In June, similar numbers of Americans said they were buying generic (65%) and brown-bagging it (48%).

These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 3,084 adults surveyed online between October 11 and 18, 2010 by Harris Interactive .

Some of the other findings of this Harris Poll include:

• Just over one-third of Americans are going to the hairstylist or barber less often (37%) and have switched to refillable water bottles instead of purchasing bottles of water (37%);

• In not so good news for the print industry, over one-quarter of adults (27%) have cancelled one or more magazine subscriptions while 17% have cancelled a newspaper subscription. In addition, one in ten Americans have considered cancelling a newspaper subscription (11%) or a magazine subscription (8%);

• One in five Americans have stopped purchasing coffee in the morning (22%) and cut down on dry cleaning (21%) while 14% have begun carpooling or using mass transit;

• Media, entertainment and communication may also have taken a hit in these economic times—one in five U.S. adults have cancelled or cut back on cable television service (22%), just under one in five have changed or cancelled cell phone service (17%) or cancelled their landline service and are only using their cell phone (17%);

Breaking this down by generation, Gen Xers (those 34-45) are most likely to purchase generic brands (70%), brown bag their lunch (62%), go to the hair dresser less often (45%) and to have stopped purchasing coffee in the morning (35%); and, Echo Boomers (those 18-33) are much less likely to have cancelled a magazine subscription (18%) compared to at least three in ten of all the other generations who say they have done this, although Echo Boomers are more likely to have cancelled their landline phone service (22%).

How does this describe your attempts at living more frugally?

I hope that not too many Suddenly Frugal readers are out of work and looking for a job. But in case you are, I thought that you might find these 6 tips to speed up your job search helpful. They are courtesy of SET, a personal marketing firm working with professionals and executives seeking jobs paying $100,000 or more.

1. Don’t restrict yourself to just passive approaches. If all you do is answer ads and contact recruiters, you are limiting yourself to jobs that employers have tightly defined and made public. Instead, take the initiative to contact employers you think are ideal targets for you, even if they haven’t advertised. Also, put a “news filter” in your mind (or set up a Google Alert for your target employment field) so you scan business news for clues to jobs in the making – new plants, promotions, new products, etc.
2. Don’t sell just experience–sell your skills. Your skills, knowledge, and contacts could be valuable to employers in your industry and many other industries. Be sure to play these up.
3. Develop more than one resume. If you have achievements in both operations and sales, for example, you might increase your appeal if you have a separate resume for each.
4. Use compelling cover letters if you want to change careers. Let’s say you have experience in purchasing and want to switch to sales. It’s hard to make your case in a resume, but in a letter that emphasizes you’ve sat at the sales table many times, know what buyers are looking for and how to reach them, you can make a compelling case.
5. Target employers in growth industries. These companies need to hire people from other industries, since theirs is new. Research the industry and the company before your interviews, and show a lot of enthusiasm.
6. Neutralize your liabilities. If you have problems, like employment gaps or poor titles, figure out strategies to minimize their impact, so you don’t get ruled out.

Leah again here: I find that as a self-employed writer, spokesperson-for-hire and book author, I get most of my work through personal referrals, not by answering ads. So I guess my additional tip to add to this list is always talk up to everyone you know that you are looking for work. You never know who they know who might know someone who might need someone with exactly your background!

I’m getting ready to finish the proposal for the third book in the Suddenly Frugal series. This one is likely to be geared more towards family and parenting, thus giving the book a natural fit in the parenting section of a bookstore (as opposed to business and finance, where the titles are now).

So I was wondering: what would you, dear readers, like to see covered in this newest book? I’m curious to hear about things that I didn’t cover in the first two books (Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier and Healthier for Less and Toss, Keep, Sell!: The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Cleaning Out the Clutter and Cashing In, though I realize this book won’t be out until next month), or topics that I did touch upon but that you would like to see expanded.

If you’re interested in parenting topics with a frugal bent, what would those be? I know that I’m thinking about preparing for college costs and whatnot but people with little kids likely have their frugal radar on something different. And empty nesters with grandkids are thinking even differently.

I look forward to your feedback.