Archive for the ‘pr’ Category

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.

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.

Finding the Pieces without the Puzzle

Saturday, August 5th, 2006

This is perhaps the best company motto I’ve ever seen. It belongs to online dating site Online Booty Call (definitely NSFW). From their latest press release:

Reaching the one million member mark with only a single reported marriage is a tremendous accomplishment. We don’t ask for your life story because we don’t care. We think online dating should be easy and fun and not a lot of work. We want members to party and have fun. Our motto is: ‘Finding the pieces without the puzzle.’

I would never have found this if not for the efforts of Dave Evans. Thanks.