What do you think is a best way to disappoint a customer? I’m sure you can come up with a big list, but right there at the top is promising something and not delivering. I arrived at the airport this morning nice and early because I knew they had free Wifi here, fired up my laptop … and no Wifi. It wasn’t all bad though, because when I tried 30 mins later the network was there, so it could well have been undergoing maintenance, but it did set me thinking all about promises and expectations. In the meantime, FlyBe announced that the earlier Gatwick flight had been delayed because of “technical issues” and that the flight to Birmingham and the flight I was on were delayed because of an “aircraft change”. Now don’t get me wrong, I do expect operational problems to creep in from time to time, but delaying three flights (out of the three on the board with that airline) is shocking!
Anyway, way to my Wifi incident. The reason I was upset was because something was promised to me (by way of a hanging advert and prior experience) and was not delivered. If there had been no prior expectation, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it. It’s like like Wifi is so ubiquitous that you expect to find it everywhere (yet); so spending an hour waiting in a location without Wifi wouldn’t have been a problem for me. However, the expectation that something was supposed to be there and wasn’t was a totally different ball game.
I expect some industries are also harder to deal with than others. Airlines and trains in particular have a reputation for missing their schedules, but you can imagine that with all those moving parts, problem are bound to happen. I don’t envy companies who provide satellite internet services for example, as there are physical factors that can prevent proper delivery of their services. Wifi is another matter. Everyone with a wireless router at home will know that once it’s set up and running, it can run for months without needing any attention. That’s one reason why this morning was so “interesting”.
I came across a great post on Andrew Chen’s blog today that lists 25 reasons why customers stop using your product. The list originally came from the gaming community and Andrew has converted it to the online social media markets, but the points he outlines can apply to many other industries. Here are his reasons behing customer churn:
- First experience
- “I don’t get what this site is about”
- “This site is not for people like me”
- “The colors/design/icons look weird”
- “I already use X for that”
- “I don’t want to register”
- Soloing and single user value
- “I don’t have time to get involved in a site like this”
- “I’m lonely, not enough happens”
- “I forgot my password”
- “I don’t know how to talk or meet people”
- “I’ll just check on this account every couple months in case something happens”
- Encountering some friends(?)
- “People on this site are mean”
- “People I don’t know keep messaging me, WTF?”
- “I want my friends to use this, but none of them are sticking”
- “I’m getting too much mail from this site”
- “I only have 3 friends, this site is still boring”
- Hitting critical mass for social
- “This site takes up too much of my time”
- “Too many people are friending me that I only sorta know”
- “People are stalking me based on my pics and events!”
- “This Top Friends thing causes too much drama”
- “I’m getting flooded by e-mails for everything that anybody does”
- Becoming a site elder
- “The guys who run this site aren’t building feature X that we really need!”
- “The guys who run this site build feature Y that’s going to destroy this site!”
- “I’m doing a lot of work but I’m not getting anything for it”
- “I’m bored because there’s nothing left to do”
- “Newbies are fun to pick on :)” (wait, maybe that’s a benefit!)
Make sure you read the complete post, and the article that inspired it.
A website can be a great shopfront for your organisation and every day, new companies join the foray of offering online goods for clamouring online customers. But an online store front needs to be robust, it needs to be designed to run 24×7 .. and it sets new expectations for your organisation to aspire to.
The last few hours have been pretty eventful for the web delivery team down at Sainsbury’s for example. The online store “died” yesterday, and any orders that were booked for today will not be arriving. Instead, customers are being presented with a picture of some lemons and an apology; customers who are missing their deliveries have been contacted and promised a £10 voucher for the trouble.
There are rumours that the problem was caused by a fire in a nearby building, but there’s been no official confirmation of that. The bottom line is that someone screwed up. Whether it was because there were no DR facilities planned that could come into effect, or no backups of the data for orders to be re-instated, the truth of the matter is that Sainsbury’s has been left with a number of disappointed customers who will certainly rethink their positions before placing their trust in the company’s website once again.
I think the damage control probably wasn’t handled too badly. offering customers compensation is a smart move that can help contain the story and reduce the impact of the damage; but I’d be curious to find out what sort of risk profiling had been carried out on their online facility, how much lost revenue this downtime translates into and the overall impact on their customer retention figures. One thing I can say, I’m glad I’m not the person responsible for the outage!
24
May
Posted in consumer relationships by Owen |
I’m having a pretty frustrating time at the moment, with a service I used to be happy enough with in the past. Most of my websites are hosted with a hosting provider called ServerGrid. We’ve had a pretty good relationship over the last few years, no outages that stuck in my mind, no major complaints, I was pretty happy to recommend them to anyone who asked me for a hosting recommendation on a Windows service.
All this changed a few months ago. Service has been intermittent. I wake up most days to find my sites not responding, giving lots of PHP timeouts or just generally slow. (I know most of my sites are heavy, but a 110 second load time, just isn’t acceptable to me). Today, same problem, AskOwen.info was giving timeout errors when I woke up, so I raised a high priority ticket. Three hours later, the site is still down, and there has been no response to my ticket. The provider prides itself on their 24/7 service, but I don’t seem to be getting any of it.
Two days ago, I sent a complaint letter when I reported a fault and CCed their sales department. Haven’t heard anything back.
Now, as a consumer, the only signals I’m getting from this company is that either they’re not interested in my business, or that they don’t have the resources to cope with my issues. Both these are not the signs of a happy and fruitful relationship. The only reason I’m still hosted there is that I pay a yearly fee for my hosting, and well, I still have a few months left. However, I have already started looking for alternatives. This website for example, is hosted on Tubu.net. It’s a much smaller outfit, but when I asked for this site to be set up, it took them all of 3 minutes to open an account for me and give me access to it. This site is much faster than all my other blogs, so I think I’ll start moving other WordPress installations over and see how I get on.
Now, I don’t know if ServerGrid are making the mistake of ignoring my complaints, emails, chats etc. However, my perception is that they are, and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. Business is all about relationships and if a supplier jilts me, well, I’m perfectly happy to find a different supplier to take my business to.
