Mike Krigsman reports that some guy tries to download software and has a bad user experience. He sends out email to someone at Microsoft and gets advice that doesn't properly work. Why is this news. Because the frustrated customer was Bill Gates, now in his last week inside Microsoft.
Scoble was banned last night from Facebook and all his data was taken down. The company has accused him of using a script to scrape user data a violation of customer security. Over at Twitter, there is a firestorm of pissed off former customers.
In fact, ror reasons other than this, I'm likely to become a pissed off former customer. The problem is I'm addicted to Scrabulous.
Now, any of the million or so folk who regularly follow Scoble know that he is just about the last person who would scrape user data and use it for evil purposes. The situation is as he claims it is. He was playing with a geek tool to show what a bad guy could do.
Many of us have been talking, no shouting about the dangers of Facebook and how suspicious we have come with what is happening to our data. So, it actually comes as a pleasant surprise that Facebook responded at all to Robert's experiment.
I have a hunch, once the Facebook people are down with their long winter's sleep, they yawn, stretch, have their coffee and do the usual check on what is being said about Facebook, they will actually restore Robert, with apologies for a very bad misunderstanding.
That's what they should do. I for one, would prefer to see Facebook over react and make a fool of itself, then to see it have under reacted and confirmed that bad guys could use the service to make fools of us users.
First off, I prefer Naked Conversations, so when there's a customer support group, called "Genius Bar," who requires I make an appointment, even in an emergency, I get bristly and suspicious. That being said, I am a new Apple customer, and have had good support from the Palo Alto Apple Store. If the people behind the counter were geniuses, they wouldn't be behind the counter, but that has to do with marketing, not support.
Dave Winer tells a story today, that I have heard twice before. He experience a hard disk crash and went to see his local geniuses. They quote him a disk replacement price of about double what you would pay elsewhere. He says what-the-hell, signs a sheet and the repair is done. But when the computer is returned Apple keeps the old hard disk. He asks for it and they inform him that he just signed an agreement to let them keep the disk.
Now this sucks on lots of counts. First, most f us have confidential information on our hard disks. I had a crash and took the disk, knowing that if I really needed something I could pay one arm and two legs to a group in Petaluma who can pull the data off a crashed disk. I did it at the only othe Mac repair place I know--also in Palo Alto. My new hard disk was twice the size Dave paid for precisely the same price.
But that's not the point. We all own our own data. We have the right to keep or destroy our own data. What is Apple doing with it? Why is Apple getting customers to sign in such a squirrelly fashion? I can think of no customer benefit derived from Apple's policy and behavior.
Which brings me back to my first point. May the Geniuses are doing something that benefits Apple more than it benefits Apple customers. Of course, if they had a company blog, they could explain. We could have an open conversation. Perhaps they have good reason for their policy. Perhaps they should listen to their customers.
Like Dave Winer, I own Apple stock. Policies like this make me nervous as an investor.
CAPTCHA is the Typepad feature that requires you to copy a string of six hard-to-read characters before you can post a comment. I have to do it on this blog even though I am the author. Most people find it annoying. I know I do. We use such things to stop robots from leaving nasty spam on our sites.
Last December, I told Michael Sippey, Six Apart's top Tyepad guy that I really wish that visitors could get something simpler to prove they were human, such as a simple arithmetic problem like Josh Hallett uses. I also think they should be able to eliminate challenges to the post authors as well and finally, I'd like people who leave comments the option of being notified when someone else joins the conversation.
While Typepad is getting a lot better, it has not done any of these three burning wishes from this user's list. So today, after flunking a test to post a comment on my own site, I have disabled CAPTCHA. I'll see how it goes. Hopefully I will be able to manage the little maggots when they come with their spray paints and graffitti, but if I cannot, I'll just have to reinstate the annoying defense feature.
It's been nearly 60 days since Jet Blue conducted a Valentine's near-massacre to its reputation. Much was written about how they would come out of it. I'm not sure what the answer to that is, so I thought I'd ask you folks out there in our studio audience.
Do you feel better or worse about Jet Blue today than you did before the incident occurred 60 days ago? Post your answer in comments below.
The other Shel, Mr. Holtz, has a great post about Jet Blue's disdainful attitude toward PR folk who wanted to give them advice on how to handle the problem caused by customers stranded on runways in Valentine Day blizzards. They ignored them. Not only did they ignore them, they have put the name of people contacting them on a list that they will share with others on who not to use in a crisis.
It seems to me that this is yet another disturbing shard of evidence that Jet Blue, America's favorite airline, according to many surveys, has developed an auditory problem that is going to do it damage in the long run.But maybe, what the company spokeperson meant to say, was that this
referred only to the ambulance chasers, not to everyone.
Debbie Weil,
author of the Corporate Blogging Book, was the first person I know of
who pointed out the company had a blog and should be using it. Since
the blog is very corporate and pretty lame and doesn't allow comments,
I'm not so certain it would unstick Jet Blue's plugged ears to the
public. Debbie has sent them a copy of her book and received a nice call saying that it will be passed along and someone will call her if they are interested.
We shall see.
I am watching all this as a Jet Blue fan. I am planning to write about this seven year old company in Global Neighborhoods as an example of a low-cost network that is changing lives by letting people who could not previously apport it, go places and meet others face to face. Now, the story I was planning is getting complicated.
Evidence is starting to stack up that Jet Blue is starting to become guilty of the first lethal sin of large organizations. They don't want to listen. Yesterday I wrote how a Jet Blue service representative had a justifiably distraught customer and her child removed by police from a claim office. Today we hear implications of a Jet Blue enemies list.
Sooner or later it adds up.
I think Debbie Weil had a good idea. A blog would be a great tool to use in a crisis. Seems to me there's another book that wrote about it as well. But the issue here is not to blog or not to blog.
The issue is whether or not a company listens.
This is the key issue between large organizations and there markets. They don't want to listen to customers.
We buy a product or service from a branded company and a problem develops. We go to the web site and after a difficult search we find that if we want to contact a human we should email "support@company.com." We call the 800-line and get lost in a voice processing system that is essentially telling you that the human you have called is no longer available. If you need further assistance, too bad. We really don't care."
Blogging is a great tool to use, because it is a highly efficient way to listen to your customers. The most valuable part of a corporate blog is that you hear-pro or con- from your most passionate customers. Instead of being handed a filtered and sanitized report from a mid-level underling, a CEO can very quickly see a realtime sample of what customers are thinking.
Right now, as a customer, I'm beginning to think that maybe Jet Blue says the right thing. But it doesn't listen so well.
To that degree, they should be humiliated and mortified.
Responding to my previous post complimenting Jet Blue on its transparency, Don Raimondi has left a long and painful comment about how he, his wife, his child and father-in-law, not to mention his luggage were all recently abused by at least one Jet Blue employee--Jessica of the company's West Palm Beach Claims office.
Having recently gone through my share of lost luggage, I feel Don's pain. I don't know him and recent experience has taught me to assume nothing is true until I hear from the others side, but his story rings true to my ears.
Oh Jet Blue Jessica, you are invited to chime in with your version of this story, but I think you need to go some distance to drag in a police officer to threaten a customer and reduce a child to tears when all it appears she wanted was what Jet Blue should have provided--the luggage they were traveling with.
As for Jet Blue in general, I would also be grateful to hear an explanation of why this family was treated the way it apparently was.
Technorati Tags: jetblue,
I have previously written in glowing terms of how pleased I am with my
Lenovo Typepad and remarkably high quality of support I received when I
needed it. Apparently, this is not the experience of all users as someone named suyog writes in the December issue of BlogCritics Magazine.
The article
names of the some of the same people I worked with and reads very
credibly. If this is true, I'm sorry to have to report it. I would be
more comfortable reporting it however, if I knew Suyog's real name and
the source of some of the expertise he seems to have.
I also welcome any rebuttal comments from Lenovo. Dave?
A few weeks back, I commented that I was becoming increasingly frustrated with Typepad. A few hours later, Six Apart's Mike Sippey who is in charge of the Typepad product, pinged me and invited me to lunch. We got together yesterday, chatting for over two hours.
After spending some time discussing, industry and personal niceties, I let loose with a 20-minute barrage of why I was considering a divorce fromTypepad. Fueled by excessive coffee and a frustrating morning, I was pretty aggressive.
Mike did what I think any company representative should do when confronting an upset customer: He listened. He really listened. He jotted notes, asked drill down questions, that got into specific details.
Mike told me that new human resources had been added to the Typepad team and in January users will start seeing a steady flow of extensive improvements just about everywhere in the product and its deteriorating support service. I agreed not to post specifics.
I believed what I heard. if it happens as he says, then I will likely find myself once again a happy customer. If I don't, then it's nice to know there are other options open to us end users.
Stay tuned.
My friend and former client Gibu Thomas over at Sharpcast has been in start up launch mode and has invested a fair portion of his company's resources in presenting at some of the major tech conferences. Most of us know that people pay to go to these top tier industry schmoozes and companies pay to present.
Wat most people do not realize is the chasm of difference that goes into the production. Some producers, such as DEMO, go through agony to select the best possible companies and guide them toward making the best possible presentations. Others, apparently including Web 2.0, seem more intent in getting the money and letting the companies flounder through an experience that would make Kafka wince.
Gibu has a long and passionate post of the differences in his personal experience. Any tech entrepreneur should read it. Any conference attendee should read it and keep it in mind while watching some company founder struggle against the demon of shoddy production at their own financial expense. Mostly, producers should read this and be called upon the carpet for it.
I spent years covering conferences for Conferenza, one of the best resources on the topic. This was among our hot buttons, getting us on the dirt list with many producers for pointing out their shoddy preparation of presenting companies and we lauded Chris Shipley and DEMO for precisely the same reason.
For producers, there is not that significant a cost for building quality in. All three of your communities deserve it.
Scoble has a few good things to say about the Masked Apple Blogger as well as Richard@Dell who has been joining the conversation in several places including my recent post on the subject.
Well, I seem to have stirred up a bit of stuff with my earlier post on Shel Holtz' Hell with Apple Computer. I also botched the link, which is corrected here as in the earlier post.
First off, I triggered not one, but two, anonymous bloggers, both who left comments supporting Apple overall. One of them, a masked blogger claims to be an Apple employee and makes a good point that Apple is a product-driven companies with a terrific track record of retaining loyal customers. He also wonders how you can provide great customer support when junior people interface with customers. Most recently, he wonders what's wrong with being anonymous and further wants to know how blogging has improved support anywhere.
All good issues. But, as he has learned, being anonymous itself creates a distraction from even the issues he raises. Another blog has started a guessing game of who the masked blogger is and yet another blogger speculates that the culprit is Keith Collins, a London blogger . As it turns out, Rick and I are having dinner in London with Keith Saturday night and he flatly denies the charge pointing out that he is not now, nor has he ever been a member of the Apple Computer team. He says the smoking gun was tracked into his hand because Keith's blog is the only Masked Blogger site link, and the erstwhile detective followed the wrong trail and made a bad assumption.
To me, the mystery search is just an unfortunate distraction. To me there are two key issues, neither of which have been fully explained:
(1) Has Apple delivered a faulty product in the Mac Pro? There is some evidence that this is the case and that it's support has botched the very real problems of trusting customers. There is also pretty good evidence that Apple has a long history of providing superior support, which makes the case even more disturbing.
It seems to me that the best way to resolve this is for Apple to step forward and have real person tell the real story and answer all the questions that are being raised. The best place to do this is on a blog where a dialog can be public ally held and legitimate questions can be answered.
(2) Why do loyal employees have to blog anonymously. Masked is obviously intelligent, cares about the products, cares about the tarnish that is appearing on Apple's shiny image and given the chance might champion Apple successfully in the blogosphere.
Masked, until you show yourself, you will lack credibility. Just look at the comments you are receiving. Until you show yourself, you will make finding you a game. Meanwhile, people are buying the Mac Pro every day and I'm curious to know what percentage of them are going to end up frustrated and angry as did Shel Holtz who is hardly the hot-tempered type. As did Marc Orchant, who has been a Mac enthusiast for more than a decade.
As far as the rest of the issues, you raise, Masked, I feel like being a bit tart and say that either my book or Shel Holtz' book would answer a great many of the questions you raise. Dell Computer is a poster child for a blog improving the company support and public perception of it. Transparency is an old saw on the blogosphere because people who hide their identity often turn out to not be who they say they are. Companies provide great support through junior people by having company leadership demand great support and by training your team to be great at it.
Masked, I'd be happy to give you greater detail, but we would have to go offline. I pledge Here and now in front of all these people that I will not reveal your identity, but I'll be very happy to answer any ten of your challenging questions, if you will answer ten of mine, letting me publish them on this blog, while keeping your name private.
It's ironic. Despite my publicly proclaimed faith in my Lenovo Thinkpad, I've been feeling this angst in my belly as one, techcentric CEO after another these days shows off their new Mac Pros. When using the Parallel Software, it runs OSX and Windows pretty close to seamlessly.
But two events have occurred today that will stop me from straying from my Thinkpad monogamy. First, Manish Hira left a comment here, showing that he too received a new computer after registering complaints about the one he had and the support that at first he was not getting.
Then Shel Holtz, my friend and namesake described how Apple has lost him as a customer because their ludicrous efforts to not support him in a crisis put him through Shel Hell.
Both of these incidents reminded me that the hardware and software, the OS and security issues are really no longer the issue. It took them long enough, but Windows and Office work pretty well for most of Microsoft's hundreds of millions of customers most of the time. The same can be said for Apple Computer whose customers have remained the most passionately positive for as long as I can recall.
Where the rubber meets the road is in those rare times when things don't work well. Shel was in a crisis. His disk went dormant, if not dead. He was traveling. He had deadlines. Lots of us feel the pain.
Apple responded with disdain, with inconsistency on what to do, with no appreciation for the urgency of a customer's problems. This is enough to keep me away from becoming more than an iPod customer in the foreseeable future. I want to do business with companies who will be there for me when their products let me down. I just got a case of someone I trust getting helped by Lenovo and screwed by Apple. That's all I need to know to decide.
BTW, anyone from Apple Computer wishing to join this conversation is free to do so.
My friend Ernie the Attorney writes about why he loves Apple Computer Customer Service and compares it sharply with a bad three-year-old experience he had with a Dell. Apple service has had it's own controversies, but overall seems to be one of the reasons why its rising numbers of users are so passionately loyal to the company.
Ernie is not the first critic of Dell, nor will he be the last. I have vented much personal frustration to the company who seemed to have ruined its own reputation for value by squeezing quality out of its boxes and reputation out of its support hotline. But I think Dell-kicking may be inching to an outdated habit. It's invested $100 million into improving support. It's blog is becoming both useful and interesting to it's user base, and last week the respected reviewers at CNET gave Dell's new Core 2 Duo computer the highest ranking against four competitors. As I've recently written, I thought they did a pretty good job handling the exploding battery fiasco as well.
It's out of fashion to say nice things about Dell. But I am motivated in this blog to shout at companies when it becomes clear they won't listen to their own customers. I feel that the #1 problem people feel about large organizations is that the organizations want all communications to be one-way. In short, they don't listen. I think the evidence is starting to stack up that Dell is trying to listen. Personally, I think this is a survival issue for them.
But I also think that the user wins, if Dell can reverse the course of its long-plummeting downward spiral and I think its worthy of mention.
We used to shout at our TV sets, but no one on the other side could possibly hear us. Most of us have found ourselves shouting--or wanting to--because of a nearly universal sense of frustration that large corporations were doing everything the could not to listen to customers like us.
I've been reading the Church of the Customer blog by co-authors Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell for well over a year and find their views and passion for customer evangelism to be valuable. I sometimes envy the great stories they either find or amplify. The case of a customer so angry with T-Mobile to post this message on his or her back window is a sign of the frustration we all sometimes feel.
Now, I've heard very little bad about T-Mobile and when they were my carrier I liked their service but their signal just didn't work in my area. But don't you just want to know what this car owner went through before going through the car customization effort?
This is the power of word of mouth. At least two bloggers have now posted this photo. If you are about to make a decision on a new mobile carrier, you now have a data point of an extremely unhappy customer.
If T-Mobile blogged, this customer may have posted a comment there. The customer may have been irate, but I'll wager you the dialog would be less damaging than this photo will prove to be. People are more polite when they think you are listening. The blog is just the best current tool in letting customers offset rage and teaching a company where they need to improve if they wish to serve their community.
In the same post, Jackie and Ben mentioned Dell who earlier this year announced a $100 million plan to improve customer service, then acted commendably, in my opinion, a couple of week's back when the battery issue, er... exploded. These two announcements have moved me from a certified Dell hater to a cautious, slightly suspicious Dell watcher. In short, they are starting to turn me around. Their blog has evolved from corpspeak to not so bad and continues to unevenly improve.
All they need to really turn me around is to hear real users--perhaps people I know and trust--to tell me about good experiences they have personally had. Perhaps that day will come soon, perhaps not.
It may surprise you to know that I'm rooting for them.
I have not always had the kindest words for Dell and Apple Computer companies, but in the case of the serious issue of laptop batteries bursting into flames, the two companies have behaved in first-rate fashion. They responded to customer complaints. They listened and responded. They explained the source of the problem--Sony in both cases. They warned customers. They are exchanging potentially dangerous batteries for safer ones.
Sony, however has me feeling a bit dubiously. As far as I can tell, they have not issues a press release on the subject. Their is an inconsistency to the state,ments they have issued through Dell and Apple. As CNET reports, Rick Clancy, 'an official company spokesperson' stated in Dell's press releases that Dell had the highest incidents that Sony knew about and that Sony anticipated no more problems. There were six incidents and the first time the two companies discussed the issue was way back in October 2005.
A week later, Apple reported nine incidents had occurred. This time Clancy did not talk about the issue, but once again stated that Sony anticipated no other computer maker anticipates a recall.
We shall see. For me, I cannot help suspect that Sony knew there was a problem and that more incidents had occurred over at Apple when it made its comments. Therefore, i wonder what surprises will come out next week.
I also wonder just what we will learn about how Sony's quality control system went so amiss for a specific period, we are told, to ship 15 exploding batteries and the potential for others among about six million laptop owners. They also have not made clear what they have done to ensure this will not happen again.
In fact, what little I know comes from an apparently candid interview by the US Computer Product Safety Commission, which made the determination of the danger, its source and the recommendation of the two recalls. Two days after Clancy was saying there were no additional recalls anticipated, a commission spokesperson was on NPR hinting strongly that more could be expected.
Even if Clancy was intentionally lying then, I do hope he was telling the truth the second time with Apple. Laptop batteries that go boom on the lap--or on an airplane are anything but funny, and the world is scary enough without further incidents such as these.
The Wall Street Journal Online says AOL has fired three people including Maureen Govern, it's CTO over the recent revelation of data showing what 650,000 of its customers have been looking at online.
To read the full article online, you have to be a paid subscriber, but I'm sure you can find the full story elsewhere online.
Dell, earlier today announced the recall of more than four million notebook computer batteries because of fabled overheating problems, which in at least two cases, can burst into flames. The Wall Street Journal said it was the largest recall in computer history.
Direct2Dell, the company's corpspeak-laden blog said that the recall was decided after a lengthy investigation during which the decision to "err on the side of safety was never in doubt."
This is an expensive recall. Perhaps not as expensive as the potential litigation that could come from not making it. But that is not the key point.
The key point is that in this particular case, the company has done the right thing and they are to be applauded for it.
[NOTE: This post was fixed because of an error pointed out by Marc Orchant in the comment section below.]
... are the flames shooting out of yet another Dell. This from Gizmodo . Maybe, next year, instead of a Burning Man event, we could have a Burning Dell somewhere out in the desert.
I would almost feel sorry for those Dell folk until I remember all the people sitting and waiting, and waiting for help on the Dell support lines. Dell Hell has no flames. It is actually more like limbo, where you wait and wait for the help that never comes.
This is only the second burning Dell, at least to be photographically captured. There are many more burned customers.
Well, it's Day Four and finally Comments have been finally repaired. I never figured out just went wrong or why it started or whether or not it will return. I did manage to get attention from the good folks at Typepad, but only after a I became a wheel squeaky enough to be heard fairly high up.
Most people could not have done what I did. I happen to know some senior Six Apart players and we get along pretty well. This is unfortunate and is not the way it should be. In the past, Six Apart response speed and quality support has been first rate, after I just filled out one of their Help tickets. I would not characterize my experience of the last four days in that manner. I hope that it was a mere speed bump for a company growing in the fast lane but I must admit the my confidence is a bit bruised.
That being said, I received about a dozen enotes from Naked readers who had tried to leave legitimate comments here only to be blocked and told they were spammers. I hope that some of you circle back and post them now.
I missed the cnversation. I really did.
I apologize again for the frustration some of you experienced.