MBA Geek

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!