Service Untitled

Twitter has gotten really good at responding to issues. As a rapidly growing, high profile startup, they seem to have some sort of issue they need to address publicly every few months or so.

The last major response that I blogged about was back in June when Twitter was responding to criticism surrounding their less than perfect uptime and reliability. Yesterday, Twitter responded publicly in regards to 33 high-profile Twitter accounts being “hacked”.

Admitting that some of your highest profile users (including the future president!) have had their accounts compromised is no easy task. It is something the company realized they had to approach quickly and correctly, especially given the high profile nature of the company and the accounts that were compromised. Tens of thousands of people probably saw it happen, so Twitter had to respond. Responding quickly and publicly was the first thing Twitter did right.

Twitter did another thing right by responding with a terrific blog post. They provided a concise explanation of what happened (why and how the accounts were compromised, when they noticed it, and what they did) followed by an explanation of what they did to fix the immediate problem and what they are doing in the future. Additionally, they answered a question they were sure was going to be asked about the possibility of another technology preventing the sort of problem that occurred (it wouldn’t help, but they addressed the question regardless).

In less than 400 words, Twitter provided an excellent response that probably went a long way with most of the people who read it. When something happens that you know people will notice, make it a point to respond publicly. Do so quickly and sincerely. Let people know that you have addressed the immediate problem and that you’re working on making sure it doesn’t happen again and won’t affect them (again).

If you do make it a point to admit and then respond, your customers are likely going to respect your honesty and value your company’s transparency.

Thanks to Dan from Shoeboxed for sending me the link to the article earlier today.

I’ve said plenty of good things about Chick-fil-A in the past, which was why I was surprised when I had a negative experience with one of the fast food company’s franchises last week.

The experience actually started as a positive experience. I had been mailed a page of coupons from Chick-fil-A. A few them appealed to me and I knew I went to the Chick-fil-A near me every so often, so I kept one for a free milkshake in my wallet. When I went to the Chick-fil-A near me the following week, I used the coupon and got my free chocolate milkshake. The woman who helped me then handed me a very similar coupon that also said “free handspun milkshake with any lunch or dinner meal.” Simple enough - I put the new (identical) coupon in my wallet.

The following week, I was back at Chick-fil-A and tried to order the milkshake and was told I had to get a peppermint milkshake because “that was what the coupon was promoting.” I asked the person to show me where it said I had to order a peppermint milkshake (the only criteria I could see was “handspun,” which they all are) and was again told that the picture of the peppermint milkshake on the front negated what the text said. The “fine print” only covered copyright issues, not issues relating to the promotion. I told the person that I had used successfully a similar coupon with the same picture on the front the week before and received no response.

In no mood to argue at length over a free milkshake, I took my peppermint milkshake and a comment card and left. I called the number on the comment card and got the local store’s answering machine. I left a message explaining the situation and my contact information. A week later, I still haven’t heard a word from Chick-fil-A, which is almost as annoying as having an advertisement that misrepresents what you can actually get.

What surprised me most, though, was Chick-fil-A unwillingness to give me the benefit of the doubt, even after I explained I had used the same coupon a week earlier. The cost of the milkshakes is probably the same and would have avoided the issue all together.

Good customer service companies give customers that “misunderstand” a policy the benefit of the doubt. I had a similar experience with Amazon.com over a year ago in the past, but unlike Chick-fil-a, they decided to give me the benefit of the doubt (even though the policy was clearly spelled out on Amazon’s web site).

When a customer is really upset, it really helps when a manager or other supervisor takes a few minutes to reach out to that customer. The manager can give the upset customer a call or send them a personal email - just something to let them know what they heard about the issue and offer their assistance.

Just like the representative that only needs to take a few minutes a day to reach out, this is all about taking the extra time to work with customers who have expressed they are frustrated. They may not being posting about the issue publicly (yet), but they are upset and they are frustrated. If a manager who is empowered to make things happens can get in touch with them, it can make a big difference. Instead of a negative post the next day, they might post something overwhelmingly positive.

The upset customers tend to appreciate simple gestures like a manager reaching out because they are relatively uncommon. The only time customers usually talk to managers is when they are extremely persisent and refuse to get off the phone without talking to a manager. Imagine how impressed a customer would be if he or she received a call or an email from a manager or a supervisor that started off with a statement like “I heard that you were frustrated with your resolution from our customer service department the other day. How may I help you?” Chances are, they would be grateful for the manager reaching out and happy to hear from someone.
The best call centers make this a normal practice. In the best call centers, managers and supervisors are easily available and regularly talk to customers. And it helps. If customer service representatives are able to resolve most of the issues, they really don’t have to elevate calls very often. However, chances are that every representative will have to escalate a call sooner or later and having managers that care and that are available make the process a lot more effective.

When a customer calls reporting or complaining about an outage, service interruption, or anything similar, my advice to customer service representatives is simple: give lots of details. From my experience, the more details the customers get, the better.

Customers like to hear what’s going on - even if it’s bad news. They would much rather hear honest updates than the stock response of “we have no additional information” or the even worse stock response of “we’re investigating.”

They really like to hear what you’re doing to fix the problem, too.If you can tell a particular customer three or four things that have been done in the last 15 or 20 minutes to help resolve the problem, they’ll appreciate it. Of course, you also need to keep employees in the loop in order for customers to be kept in the loop.

While you tell the customer about these updates, you want to tell them that an end is in sight (hopefully you know the general timeline of when a fix will happen) and that you apologize for the inconvenience. If possible, back that apology up with something like a service credit.

Studies have shown that customers who experience an outage or some sort of negative experience that is well handled by the company actually end up more loyal than before. In other words, if you mess up (which everyone inevitably does) and handle it well, it won’t hurt you. In fact, it could actually make the affected customers even more loyal.

One of my favorite quotes is “the road to success is paved with well handled mistakes” (see this post for more). How you handle your mistakes is just as (if not more) important as working towards not making them in the first place.

Technorati Tags: Outages, Angry Customers, Updates

Twitter is the poster child of Web 2.0. It’s pretty hip, it’s innovative, it’s grown exponentially, and despite having no clear business model, is considered to be extremely successful. I don’t use Twitter personally, but I know plenty of people that do, and most of them like the service a lot. One of the biggest criticisms of the product, though, is that its reliability is shaky at best.

Critics and the company itself have blamed the relibality issues on different things. Some say its because the site uses Ruby (a programming framework), others say it is because the site’s infastructure isn’t well designed, and others just say the site has been growing too fast for any team to keep up with. All of the issues have their respective truths, but what is more interesting to me as a customer service person is how they’ve responded and handled their issues of downtime.

The word is that Twitter used to be okay at best when it came to responding to feedback and criticism. However, the company has recently gotten a lot better. They’ve gotten so good that journalists and users have been openly applauding the company for being so responsive. Even, the often negative TechCrunch said in a recent post that Twitter “continues to be annoyingly and constructively responsive to criticism.”

If you read Twitter’s response to TechCrunch’s questions, the commentary makes sense; Twitter has been very responsive and they’ve been doing a great job at it.

First of all, Twitter admits their faults and says positive changes are coming soon. By saying “we know it is not correct and we’re changing that,” and explaining how they are changing that (by bringing on quite a experienced engineers to their team), they’re covering a major issue right there. Once they address those important issues, they answer TechCrunch’s specific questions with pretty good answers. They don’t get too technical (they got a little more technical in another post), but they do answer the questions and address how they’re going to move forward.

Twitter also has a status web site that shows the company is serious about their uptime as well as about being open and transparent. The status page contains updates and useful links (including a link to a third-party uptime monitoring service). It is just an additional level of transparency that makes the company seem even more open and responsive to downtime.

Twitter has done a great job at responding to feedback and keeping a positive image. A lot of companies can learn a lot from Twitter’s actions when dealing with these issues.

Technorati Tags: Communication, Customer Service, Outage, Twitter

The web hosting industry is a tough industry. There an infinite number of potential technical problems that can occur, ruthless competition, somewhat low margins, and then to top it off, trucks and explosions.

San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace dealt with a truck knocking its power out (and subsequently quite a few servers). Most recently, though, The Planet (another large dedicated hosting company and an indirect competitor of Rackspace), had a portion of their datacenter explode.

The cause of The Planet’s issues are fairly simple: an electrical system shorted and caught on fire. The fire caused an explosion that “knocked down three walls” that surrounded the datanceter’s electrical equipment room. The power for most of the datacenter then went out. The fire department, after inspection the damage, told The Planet that they were not allowed to turn on their backup generators for safety concerns. 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers were affected. Needless to say, it was a large outage.

The company started responding and posting updates almost immediately on their forums. The first significant update came about four hours after the incident was first mentioned. An hour after the incident was first reported, employees promised to post updates every 15 minutes on the forums (a promise they kept for the most part).

Something The Planet did really well was keep up with the updates. Even if they had to post “there are no additional updates at this time,” they still kept their customers in the loop. The company then developed a plan of action and reminded customers that they fully intended to keep to their SLA promises and commitments. As it got later into the night, the company started posting updates less frequently, but they never stopped posting updates. They brought in additional teams and support technicians to help fix the problems and man the phones. 28 hours after the issue first occurred, the company’s CEO posted an update on the forums that briefly and effectively communicated what was going on and what was going to happen.

I really liked how The Planet communicated their priorities (restoring service) very clearly. I also like how they provided updates every 15 minutes while they were learning about the issue and what it meant for customers. Their temporary web site was effective at providing updates as well.

While still keeping what they did do well in mind, The Planet also did some things I did not particularly care for. Posting about sales and promotions while a good portion of a large datacenter is down is inappropriate. That has the potential to annoy a lot of customers and I’m sure the company can afford to hold off for a day or two on the promotions. The company’s official blog has yet to mention the outage. Their web site doesn’t talk about it, either. More importantly, neither of them mentioned the outage while it was still happening (all services were fully restored as of a few hours ago).

Overall, the company handled the issue well. What The Planet does over the next few days will determine what a lot of customers and a lot of the web hosting industry thinks of the company.

Technorati Tags: Communication, Customer Service, Outage, Updates, Rackspace, The Planet

I’ve written about firing your customers before. It is a topic that interests a lot of companies, especially smaller ones that don’t have the time to deal with really annoying customers on a constant basis. A reader made an interesting suggestion about how to deal with the problem, though. He suggested using what he described as a star system; essentially, you rate customers on some sort of fairly objective basis (i. e. 1 to 5 stars). The rating is based on their value as a customer - how often they buy, what they buy, who they’re referred, how often the company has screwed up with them in the past, if they are an active customer (i. e. lots of feedback, etc.). Customers that meet certain criteria are given a star rating.

Say I am a customer of company X and I’m a good customer - I buy their most expensive products, I visit their store and buy something at least once a week, I refer others, I have a store credit card, they have screwed up one or two times and I am still a customer, I talk to the store manager every now and then, etc. Basically, I am a good customer who helps the company / store. I would be a 5 star customer. If, on the other hand, I was a customer of a services company and used their lowest end plan, called them 3 times a day, never referred anyone, and have canceled twice before, that would make a 1 star customer.

The idea behind the system is that no one is ever really fired. However, the 1 star customer is not given any extra attention when he threatens to cancel. To that 1 star customer, the company offers little to no rebates, credits, future discounts, etc. When that 1 star customer calls and complains that his hosted service was unavailable for two hours, he gets an apology. The 5 star customer gets an apology, plus two months of free service. They may even get a call from their account manager offering a second apology. As the reader who emailed me suggested, they “get the red carpet rolled out every time they call, visit, etc.”

This motivates the less profitable (and/or more annoying customers) to take their business elsewhere, but encourages the more profitable (and/or less annoying) customers to stay with your company. The general idea is good and I think it is something that a lot of companies use and keep in mind when they are deciding what to do for a particular customer. It is more formalized at some companies than it is at others, but the general idea is very similar.

Something that you have to be careful about, though, is how your algorithm works. It should be fairly objective (though I think you should be able to add some subjective points to it as well), but you have to keep certain situations in mind. Say I am a 5 star customer and I refer my neighbor or best friend to your company. He turns out to be cheap and annoying (a 1 star customer). If you don’t give him the same great service that I’m used to, that could be a problem and reflect negatively upon your company. You may have to tweak the algorithm to be setup so that if a 4 star customer refers someone, the new customer will never go below 2 stars, etc.

Technorati Tags: Customer Service, Customer Service Experience, Firing Customers, Operations

In its most recent issue, Wired told us why customer service sucks (their words, not mine). They blamed:

- Some call centers’ focus on getting customers off the phone versus resolving issues.
- Outsourcing and offshoring to places like Bangalore, India and Manila, Philippines.
- Unmotivated and untalented customer service representatives.
- Customer service representatives that are distracted when serving customers.

The best customer service companies don’t run into these issues: they focus on resolving issues and customer satisfaction; they rarely outsource and if they do, they outsource to quality companies; they hired motivated and talented representatives; and they don’t force representatives to help more than one customer at once.

The issues that Wired pointed out are interesting because none of them are difficult to fix. It’s really easy to change policies to measure customer satisfaction and stop outsourcing. The most complicated one is the issue with unmotivated and untalented representatives and by the way Wired words the paragraph, the companies could just tweak their personality tests and avoid that problem.

The short article (part of a series of explanations about why things like traffic, batteries, and customer service suck) also cites some interesting statistics that I had never read before (no source is listed):

1. Employees in Bangalore will work for 85 percent less than equally qualified US employee.
2. One out of three call centers don’t measure customer satisfaction. One in two don’t measure employee satisfaction.
3. The ideal customer service rep (according to personality inventory tests) is uncreative, has low incentive, and demonstrates limited empathy.
4. Half of all service reps are talking, emailing, or IMing with another customer at the same time. One quarter handle up to four people at once.

I’m curious as to where Wired got these statistics. They seem like customer service hyperbole to me, but they’re interesting nonetheless. My thoughts:

1. I’m not an outsourcing expert by any definition, but I don’t think the cost savings are that dramatic, especially not in Bangalore. The wages that Indians are getting are only going up. The Philippines is looking like it’ll be the next India.
2. I would say that most measure customer satisfaction. How much they care about it is likely a another story. Only 50% measure employee satisfaction seems believable, but I think HR would put more of a effort into that than the survey shows.
3. These aren’t ideal qualities for a customer service representative. Tests are relatively easy to tweak to look for ideal qualities, so this is surprising and doubtful.
4. For email or live chat support, I might believe this. For phone support, I seriously doubt it. 

What are your thoughts about the Wired article? Were they right on or did they miss it totally?

Illustration credit: Wired’s Martin Woodtli (full size here)