I often rant about poor customer service. It seems to me that companies address the subject from the wrong perspective. They see it as a non-recoverable expense when they should view it as a marketing opportunity. They make it difficult and frustrating to email or call them with problems. Some of the people you reach make you think they’d finish behind a Neanderthal in an intelligence contest.
To me, this strategy is trickle-down short-sightedness. In these times of isolation between vendor and customer, where hosted software manages customer relationships and ad nauseum FAQs discourage customers from even emailing inquires, support offers a rare chance to directly interact with a customer. If you believe marketing is about conversations, then marketing should run support, and they should treat it as a low-cost opportunity to build relationships, trust and incremental sales.
I’ve recently been going through a technology-challenging period. Everything has been breaking down in sequence--my PC, cell phone, DSL, a car and even my TV have glitched or died in rapid sequence. This has subjected me to endless email loops and infinitely redundant rounds of voice recordings telling me that my call was important and I should please stay on the line until Hell freezes over.
I recently posted a special award to SBC for outstanding awfulness in customer support and they remain, in my view, supremely the worst-- although they have had competition. For example, Intuit has a befuddling support page that ends up telling me to pay them by the minute for information on how to transfer my checkbook records from my old PC to the new, a deal I find particularly unappealing. Option 2 is to join their hosted chat at a given time, which I find even less appealing.
Both my Feedster and NewsGator also had some problems on the switchover—probably caused by user error, and both companies failed to answer my first emails to them. I waited a full week then sent both companies a second request. That’s when I got my first pleasant surprise in an area of increasing frustration. News Gator www.newsgator.com got back to me this time promptly and politely and after a couple of rounds, some guy named “Greg” solved my problem. It happens that I know a guy over there slightly with that name--Greg Reinacker, founder and president. When I asked, he confessed it was indeed he who was handling my problem. Was this because I’m a press guy? Not at all, Greg wrote me. “We're in the middle of transitioning to a new support tracking system (hence the "case 4" in the subject line), so I'm trying to learn how to use it along with my team. But I do get involved with support fairly often, especially now as the team is getting up to speed with the common issues, etc.”
This impresses me. This was not show boating but simply company leader paying attention to user experience and interaction. These days this is an unusual form of business as usual. It makes me as loyal to NewsGator as I remain hostile to SBC. I also like the simplicity by which the NewsGator site lets me find the right email route to getting to a human when I want and need to.
I believe there will be an inevitable consolidation between the 5-10 companies like NewsGator who are currently driving the blogging revolution. I think Reinacker understands the strategic advantages of engaging customers in dialog and that improves NewsGator’s chances of becoming a larger player on the next Darwinian rung of blogging’s evolutionary ladder.
I never did hear back from Feedster, by the way, so Scott I'll be waiting to hear from you.
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