Archive for the ‘customer service’ Category

Another iPhone 3GS

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

The Apple Store verified my iPhone was dead. They said it was likely a battery issue. They gave me a new phone (refurb?). And I went home that night to spend hours setting it back up the way it was – downloading apps, syncing music, and configuring settings.

They certainly took care of me well, but I’ll never get that time back. From what I can tell, you can’t back up your apps, so I’m going to have to go through this again the next time it dies. And based on the battery problems that iPhones have, it probably will happen again. I’m really glad I bought Apple Care to extend my warranty. Now I should probably write down all my apps.

Posted in Apple, Randy Weber, World Wide Weber, customer service, gadgets, iPhone, mobile, worldwideweber | No Comments »

Customer Service Disaster

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

We talked about excellent customer service on 1/17. Here’s the flip-side.

We all make mistakes but doing things that are plainly unethical, that’s different. I found this on CrunchGear. Here’s what happened:

A site called The Daily Background found evidence that Belkin Bizdev guy, Michael Bayard, is paying folks 65 cents to write good things about Belkin routers.

Here’s Belkin’s response (also from CrunchGear):

We’ve acted swiftly to remove all associated postings from the Mechanical Turk system.

We’re working closely with our online channel partners to ensure that any reviews that may have been placed due to these postings have been removed.

I wouldn’t say that they fixed the problem. Yeah, they got rid of the reviews but they didn’t mention firing the employee (which I think should be a given for something this stupid and blatantly unethical), nor did they mention refunds for customers that may have purchased the products based on the false reviews.

The moral of the story – be careful what you do on the Internet.

Posted in Belkin, Internet biz, amazon.com, customer service, ethics, gadgets, marketing, pr, reviews | No Comments »

Customer Service Excellence

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you admit it, apologize for it, and fix it. This is a great example from Hulu on doing just that found at 37signals:

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ’’It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’’ were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ’’Sunny’’ episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball…

Well done.

Posted in Hulu, Internet biz, customer service, leadership, marketing, pr, video | No Comments »

Way To Go Netflix!

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Looks like Netflix has done some thinking. Profiles feature NOT going away. Nice to see that companies can get it right sometimes.

Posted in Internet biz, customer service, gadgets, video | No Comments »

What Was NetFlix Thinking?

Friday, June 20th, 2008

This is the worst customer service move I’ve seen this year. Netflix has eliminated the ability to have multiple queues and reviewers per account. Here’s the details for Ars Technica:

According to an e-mail sent out to subscribers last night, Netflix is eliminating the convenient feature and removing all additional account profiles in September. And to add insult to injury, the additional profiles cannot be migrated to a new account. So all the effort you may have put in to rating hundreds, if not thousands, of movies and carefully crafting the perfect queue will be obliterated. The rental history will be merged with the main account owner, so your recommendations could suddenly change to reflect other profile users’ tastes.

I’d be really pissed if I had to recreate my queue. Maybe they want people to go back to Blockbuster.

Posted in customer service, gadgets, video | No Comments »