Tag Archives: Customer service

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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August 24, 2016 · 10:59 am

How To Stay Engaged With Your Consumers

OK, so you buy into my thinking on the need to stay engaged with your customers and potential customers in a meaningful way. Now what? That’s a question my clients and I face all the time so let me share a few things we’ve done to promote that engagement. Feel free to borrow!

The first and most obvious thing you can do is to support listening via social media channels. If you haven’t set up a listening dashboard, I’d make that a top priority. Hootsuite is a good place to start, and it can also be useful in populating those channels with content. There are plenty of other tools out there for listening, but listening and responding when appropriate is what we’re after.

Part of what we’re after is to become a friendly subject matter expert in the eyes of consumers. There are plenty of channels in which to do so, but what’s important is that you not try to be in every single one. Unless you have a support staff of a dozen people, you’re going to have to pick the channel that is most meaningful to your customers and focus your efforts there. My guess is that it will be Twitter since it’s the most interactive.

Next would be a decision about some longer form content. This might be on your own website, a blog, maybe a post on LinkedIn or Medium. Try them all and see which drives traffic and engagement. Remember, there is no garbage can on the Internet so whatever you write for one platform is probably reusable on another.

What do you write about? Start with thinking about how many questions do customers ask you in a week. The answers to each one of those questions can serve as the basis for a post. Unless you’re a masochist like me, you needn’t write every day either. A couple of times a week is a lot for most folks. Write about your customers. Featuring a long-time purchaser rewards them and shows all the others that you’re grateful. Explain a common problem your customers have and how you’re solving it for them.

Ask yourself how you keep in touch with your best friends. Don’t treat consumers any differently and you’ll be on the road to a productive, engaged relationship. Make sense?

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July 8, 2016 · 8:52 am

Expecting A Cobb And Getting A Dud

I want us to ruminate on a Cobb Salad this Foodie Friday.  It’s one of my favorite dishes and if I see it on a menu while I’m out for lunch there is a reasonably good chance that will be what I order. That’s exactly what I did yesterday and the “cobb salad” that showed up raised a business point in my mind. 

Unless they’re designated by some special qualifier such as “Crab Cobb”, any Cobb Salad has the same basic components.  The “EAT COBB” mnemonic can be used to remember them – egg, avocado, tomato, chicken, onion, bacon, and blue cheese. These items are generally diced and placed on a bed of greens. The dressing is usually a basic vinaigrette but I’ve had great versions with other dressings. The point is that when I order a Cobb, my expectation is that I will get the aforementioned pieces combined into a delicious whole. As I read the description of yesterday’s Cobb on the menu, there was nothing that dissuaded me from that opinion.

What showed up, however, bore little resemblance to what was described or to my expectations. Black olives? Well, that’s an infrequent variation. Half a chicken breast pretty much in one piece? Two red onion rings? No, my friends, this impostor in Cobb clothing was NOT at all what I expected, which is the business point. Every customer interaction comes with expectations. They might be very specific as was the case with the salad or they might be more general – attentive, responsive service, for example. Part of our job in providing value as we solve customer problems is to understand and to exceed whatever those expectations might be. Ignoring those expectations can result in a bad customer experience.

Yesterday’s lunch was perfectly pleasant and had the thing I ordered been just called something other than a Cobb there wouldn’t have been an issue in my mind (nor would I have ordered it). Setting expectations that go unmet is bad business. Like my salad yesterday, it leaves customers unfulfilled, which is not a formula for repeat business.

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