Tag Archives: Customer experience

September 12, 2016 · 11:04 am

Football First Day Fails

Yesterday was the first full day of the NFL season, and just as many teams found out that their pre-season prep was nothing like the real thing, so too did a couple of very high-profile companies. The challenges they faced and how they handled them are instructive.

The two companies I mean are ESPN and DirecTV. Both had very prominent fails yesterday. In ESPN’s case, it was their fantasy football site. Yesterday around kickoff time (1pm ET / 10am PT) ESPN’s fantasy sports platform crashed and became unreachable on the web and in their mobile app. If you’re a fantasy football player, that is about the worst possible time for a crash since not only can’t you follow your team and league in real-time (frustrating) but you also couldn’t make last-minute changes to your lineup (angering and potentially expensive!). By the start of the late games several hours later, it was still down, leaving 7+million unhappy players.

At least ESPN’s service is free. In DirecTV’s case what failed costs $50 a month. Also starting at 1pm ET, people noticed buffering and quality issues on the streaming service, with some not being able to access a stream at all. The rage was palpable and between the two failures, Twitter exploded (with some of the responses being pretty funny).

What’s instructive are a couple of things. First, no matter how good a product or service is as an idea or in a marketing campaign if you can’t execute it’s garbage. Execution is more important in many cases than the product itself. Second, how you deal with the customers who are inconvenienced by your faulty execution can either save you or dig the hole to grave-depth. ESPN was totally transparent, admitting the outage, apologizing, and posting updates throughout. When things were fixed, they said:

“ESPN Fantasy is restored and we will continue to monitor. We identified a backend data access issue and resolved as quickly as possible. The issue did not impact data for teams, leagues or rosters. We sincerely apologize to all ESPN fantasy users.”

Transparent and sincerely apologetic. DirecTV, on the other hand, was at first not replying to customer service tweets at all. Once they did, replied to a number of complainers suggesting they check their computer settings or that they call a help line. Needless to say, that line was not in service at first. Other people were given a link to a page that helped you fix account access issues which were clearly not the problem. At no point did DirecTV acknowledge a system wide problem nor did they apologize. I imagine they didn’t however, have any issues cashing the $50 payments from all users.

Clearly, the best solution to a major problem at a critical time is to assure it doesn’t happen in the first place. That said, stuff happens. There are no secrets anymore, and your service and support problems become very visible very quickly. These two companies took two different paths after the issues arose. Which will you take?

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October 13, 2015 · 12:27 pm

I’ll Take Bad Ads

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of going into a store where the staff is charming and can’t do enough for you, but you left without buying anything.  You’ve also probably seen a wonderful product description in some online store, only to get to the customer reviews and find out that the product wasn’t nearly as good as the advertising.  That is a truism in marketing:  good ads can’t sell a bad product.  Conversely, even the worst marketing can’t keep a great product out of consumers’ hands.   Give me the bad ads every time and a great product.

I put customer experience right in there as part of product.  That experience isn’t just customer service.  It’s any engagement your product and brand has with a customer – social media, email, etc.   Since the product is more important than advertising, improving those engagements can yield a significant competitive advantage.  Having an ongoing, transparent, truthful series of interactions with your customers as well as consumers at large will probably have a larger effect on your business than doubling the ad budget.  You want to improve your product without retooling, repackaging, or developing a better formula?  Improve the customer experience and you’ve done so.

So why aren’t brands spending more to improve those engagements and the products they support?  Beats me.  Maybe it’s because they didn’t have it in last year’s plan.  Maybe it’s because you can’t run that on TV.  Maybe because we tend to emphasize creativity over basic blocking and tackling. Whatever the root, it’s something to think about.

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October 1, 2015 · 11:12 am

Rusty Tanks And Being Ripped Off

20 or so years ago, we installed two large propane tanks to power our cooktop and a new furnace. Since they have an expected lifespan of about 15 years, we asked someone from our propane company to come take a look at them. We had noticed they were rusting a little, so better safe than sorry, right? Sure enough, they need replacing. How this leads to us replacing the propane supplier as well is a tale from which any business can learn.

English: 2 larger propane tanks, one with a re...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We have been very happy with this company. Service has always been prompt, they deliver on a regular schedule and we’ve never run out of propane. That was the case when we called this time to come have a look at the tanks – they were there the next day and came back to us with a proposal to replace the tanks. We made an appointment for later this week to have the work done.

Just out of curiosity, we made a couple of phone calls to other suppliers. What we found out enraged us. Not only was what our supplier proposing to charge us to remove and dispose of the tanks way out of line with the market, but what they had been charging us for propane over the last decade was substantially higher as well. I’m talking about higher to the tune of over $1 a gallon, and when you’re using several hundred gallons a year, that’s a big difference.

In addition, these guys never offered us the ability to “lock in” a price for a heating season. Our oil supplier, as an example, sends us a letter every year with three different lock in options. It shouldn’t surprise you that when our supplier called to confirm the appointment, we cancelled it, informing them that we’re talking to other suppliers and had discovered that we were being ripped off for years.

10 minutes later, the phone rang. Suddenly, the cost to remove the tanks had vanished. Our rate for propane had dropped a lot, and we could lock it in for the year if we so chose.  While we still might stay with them, our opinion of them has changed substantially.  Customer service isn’t just about answering the phone and handling issues when they arise.  It is caring for your customer even when they don’t know that they need care.  Would we pay a little more for great service?  Probably.  The propane is a commodity so the difference is service.  That needs to have transparency, and now that we see what that service has been costing us, we are angry.

There are no secrets anymore.  Yes, it’s our fault for not asking about pricing and plans, I suppose.  That, however, demonstrates the value in keeping customers happy.  We didn’t ask because we were happy with them.  Now that we have asked and have realized that this has meant the overpayment of thousands of dollars over the years, we are far less content.  If you’re keeping customers happy by keeping them in the dark, you had better be damn sure there isn’t a rusty tank out there waiting to expose the issue.  Is there?

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