Michele’s Freeminding

Since early December, I’ve experienced three situations which made me lost a bit of faith in three brands.
One will go unnamed since I don’t really want to be bad at them since they fixed the issue meanwhile.

The first company that acted so and so is Apple.
I’d never thought I could lose faith in Apple, and not that I don’t trust it anymore, but I’m a bit upset with it.
Here’s what happened: we ran a contest over at Unilife and the winner got himself an iPod Shuffle.
So I phoned the Apple Store — in Italy, business customers can only order via phone — and ordered a personalized Shuffle which I was guaranteed to receive by a certain date, which was good for me because I was going to see the winner one day after that date.

A few days later, UPS called me to tell me my box was empty. Phoned Apple and the gal at customer support told me she would have called me back in one day. She didn’t and it took me three days to talk with her again.
After that, Apple wants me to wait for a few days because it’s trying to understand what happened. After a while, Apple phoned me again to tell me it would ship a new iPod in a matter of hours and I asked to send the iPod directly to the winner. “No problem,” the gal replied.

After a couple of days, I got back home and found a UPS notice: “We’ve been here, but nobody was available”
What? why is UPS trying to give the iPod to me? Immediately called Apple the next morning: “No problem, I will send another notification to the courier immediately.”
Just to be sure, I phoned again in the afternoon to make sure everything was fine and the girl at customer support answered me in a very rude tone: “If you called this morning, then I don’t see why you’re calling again!”
Guess what? a couple of hours later, the iPod arrived at my door.

Called Apple again, and I’m said it’s not their business anymore since I’ve already received it. Very nice!
I’ve managed to fix the issue myself, still Apple wasn’t very good this time and didn’t care for one of its customers.

The other company which I used to lov and don’t know if I will ever buy anything from again is Threadless.
I’m still waiting for my last two orders to arrive: one was sent early November and the other one early December.
Registered mail is not provided for international orders, so I sent an email to Threadless to know what should I do: well, they initially answered my first email, but then stopped replying.
During the past two weeks I’ve sent a few emails, but never got a reply. Needless to say I’m pretty disappointed.

Finally, the last experience was with a small software company which will go unnamed.
I was evaluating an OS X app and really loved it, I was actually ready to buy it, but when I opened it to buy a license — you know, it’s the kind of app that has the store inside the app itself — I was asked to upgrade to a newer version. No problem, upgraded. The app started crashing and one of its main functionality stopped working — the app would still do it’s work, but in a much less useful manner.
The crashings were soon fixed, but the developers continued saying the broken functionality wasn’t actually broken and it was me doing something wrong and go read the manual and so on. Like they couldn’t write bad code!

A couple weeks later, other users started complaining. Guess what? there actually was a problem with the app!
In a few days they managed to fix it and now it’s working great like it used to and I’m almost ready to buy. Even though I’m a bit weary about buying an app from someone who doesn’t feel like he can make an error.

See what these episodes have in common? Yes, bad customer support.
Customer support, IMHO, is at the very heart of a business, and those companies clearly have a huge issue if they can’t pull together a good customer support team. I mean, we were on the edge between arrogance and incompetence here.

That’s why, for example, I really care about my customers at 16bugs. I don’t think there was ever an email which went unanswered for more than 1 day, heck, maybe not even 12 hours, and there’s no big support team: I’m support team.

If you want to have a happy customer, then you must care about her/him not only before she/he buys your product, but after, too. IMHO, it’s even more important to care about existing customers first and wannabe customers later. Isn’t it?

This post was written 1 year, 7 months ago on January 11th, 2007 the wee hours.