Cutting Your Own Throat
September 10, 2008 · Print This Article
It was the best of customer service times, it was the worst of customer service times.
In the last two months I have observed companies that are polar opposites in handle their customer enquiries and issues.
The Good (In fact I Would Say GREAT)
The team over at Noble Samurai offer the very pinnacle of customer service. Their product is new, it was launched at the same time that Google made some hefty changes to their data serving (that Market Samurai the application uses) and the user base the product was being offered to was 90% complete and utter newbies in using the tool (and in some cases the INTERNET).
Brent, Eugene and Andrew have a mature outlook when it comes to dealing with customer frustrations. They recognise that the frustration that users are showing when they vent is a “good” thing. It means that their customers are passionate people who really, really want their product.
The Samurai guys do not get flustered or angry at a user who is being less than civil (which by the way was 99.9% of the time is user error in the first place), respond in calm and measured ways. They go out of their way to not only service, but delight their customers with the response they get. It is very obvious that Noble Samurai has a great customer service policy that they ensure is front and centre with any transaction with their customers.
The Bad
In chatting with some of my IM colleagues a conversation came up regarding the affiliate commissions being paid by a membership site. They suddenly said something that rang a bell with me, although they KNEW they were referring new members who were signing up, no commission was being recorded or paid.
Me being me, had not said anything about that because I had automatically assumed I had done something wrong with linking (after all 99,9% of faults are user error), popped it in the too hard basket and went off to do soemthing else. Yet my colleagues HAD done something and placed help desk tickets (no answer), PMd people who ran the course (no answer) and in the end started fuming behind closed doors that they were being ripped off by something they felt was a worthwhile course to recommend.
The Ugly (or You Gotta Be Kidding me?!?!)
One of my IM girl friends had signed up during the 30DC with one of the recommended services. Where there was the opportunity to take a “free” option, she actually took advantage of one of the special discount monthly continuity plans. While she doesn’t have much cash, she recognised the benefit of the product and the value of the offer.
Come her first bill she realises that she is being billed for $10 a month more (the non-special amount). Like I said, money is tight so she gets onto customer service to ask what is going on and her account to be adjusted. The customer service response to her was, NO, you signed up for the higher amount.
This comapny has just cut its own throat for the sake of $120 a year.
Not only that, the referrals that would have come from my friend would have made them a bucketload MORE money than the $120 they just chose to quibble over.
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Moral of the story here: Great customer service should be the FIRST thing you think of when setting up a business, not the last…
Thanks Allison
Noble Samurai is only as good as our team - and we have some fantastic technical and support staff - Warwick, Nick, Mark, David, Andrew, Levi, Eugene - plus about a dozen more staff who have worked on the Market Samurai project.
It means that when I send an email out to all users, I get to stand on the shoulders of giants and look good because of all of their hard work.
Brent
I suspect the company not mentioned in the “ugly” bit did the same thing to me - I signed up for an offer of $1 for 1 month then $37 but my paypal recurring billing has been set up for $47 - needless to say I will cancel before that.
What a way to waste the boost the 30DC could have given them!
Allison,
Why not mention wordpressdirect by name? Then others will know to avoid them too.
George because there is a chance for redemption, and the product and the deal is not a bad one. The issue here is the customer service.
I have hopes it will be fixed, same as the “bad” as well.
Hey Allison,
I am really sorry that someone got a raw deal with a well know business. It really does hurt both the consumer and the company for reasons that could have been avoided.
I know way back in the day, if a business tried to cheat you or treated you ill in any way all you could do was tell your neighbors or write a letter to your local paper and many big businesses could not have cared less. Now with the internet in so many homes it only takes 1 tweet to spread the ‘bad’ word from your house in Australia to mine in Nevada (USA).
I would think a company, that makes it living online, would be the last to push that issue enough to start a complaint.
No, I do not believe that the customer is always right but, a company does need to make sure they hold tight to their end of any agreements that they have made. They also need to have a trained and competent customer service staff that has the ability to work with an individual to come to a happy ending for all. I think most times it is the company policy to have their customer service people treat everyone with a standard answer for every problem. This leads to unhappy users if each person’s complaint is not looked at but, rather thrown in a general pile.
As for your GREAT example of customer service – wooohooo to the Market Samurai group!!
I was just on skype with my friend that bought his Samurai yesterday, on my recommendation. He was having an issue with some stats that I could not figure out how to help him. I told him to send in a support ticket & I assured him it would be handled ASAP. He was excited to say the least when he had a reply within a short while.
I will say that from watching Brent on the 30DC forum, I am amazed at his patients!
I do hope that the other company will take a look at what companies like Market Samurai do and learn how to build a great customer relationship.
Same thing happened here with WordPressDirect, but I realized it was no great loss. At the rate they are building out Market Samurai we’ll have the automatic posting features (which were the only real thing WPD brought to the table) before long…or as much of them as any quality blogger would want.
There are many other plugins out there that do a lot of the same things as well. Once you have set up one or two WP blogs, you realize you don’t need the “autoinstaller” pieces. Yes, it takes about an hour to activate and set your preferred plugins into place, but once they’re there, you’re set. I see no value in a recurring monthly membership in that, do you?
Thanks for the comments everyone!
@Brent - you might be standing on the shoulders of some awesome people, but you look good because of those awesome genes (lol). I agree and I do hope that the whole team understands how awesome we think they actually are!
@Liz re “I see no value in a recurring monthly membership in that, do you?” Actually I do and there will be a later post about it (and I think Ed and Dan will also be tackling the subject in the Immediate Edge).
So let’s just be clear that you are talking about my company, WordPressDirect.com.
First off, I don’t think any company would knowingly “cut its own throat” as you say for $120 a year. It would be a stupid thing to do, obviously.
It was through the support tickets being filed that we discovered the issue of Immediate Edgers mistakenly using the wrong signup link and getting charge $10 more.
In all these cases we are retroactively extending the previous Silver subscription offer.
Sometimes in real life, things are not as clear as you would paint them to be. In this case, we were dealing with Paypal receipts clearly showing one thing, while the customer was telling us another thing. And it took a while to see a pattern in the tickets since they are mixed with other issues being filed by customers.
We eventually figured it out. I think it took us about 6 hours, and again, in all these cases we are retroactively extending the previous subscription offer.
You received an answer in the early stages of diagnosing a subtle problem - and the actual answer is now different than what you so hastily posted. While it appears to you that this is some great ‘conspiracy’ to defraud the customer on our part, nothing is further from the truth - and it shouldn’t be generalized or presented as such.
We love our customers as much as Brent loves his. And we try to do the right thing in all cases when we can.
Marty great to hear that the issue has been sorted and I hope all who queried the issue have been notified which is why I did not name you as a company. I am a gold customer of yours and I did not write this post in haste.
A bad customer experience will always be communicated to 100x more people than a good one. Until this response my customer experience with WPD had been a good one.
Like I said, many of us see the product and the deal as worthwhile. Your customer service still needs some work though, and that is constructive criticism and not an attack.
edit: on re-reading your response, I am going to withdraw my business and my recommendations of your business (which was mentioned in the video on my site … the Ed Dale one).
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