The Personal Touch: Making bad experiences work for you.
This is a story about how to react when your customers contact you because your product isn’t quite up to the quality you’ve promised. Quality, or rather the expectation of quality, is a funny thing. Seth Godin explains it best: Underpromise, Overdeliver. This principle extends very well to ‘customer support’ - it’s a great opportunity to overdeliver.
The thing is, as a rule people expect bad treatment and hardly any solutions when they call technical support. This is great; the ‘underpromise’ aspect is already taken care of. Thus, the only thing you need to do is overdeliver: Blow people away with generosity and helpfulness. If you run a web startup, allow people to contact you. Yes, this costs money, but it’s a great opportunity to generate viral marketing. A pleasant experience with technical support is great smalltalk, after all.
The paradox is: If you expect a certain experience, and you get it, that’s great, but that’s where the story ends. On the other hand, if you need to place a few calls to tech support, but those calls get you back to the experience you expected without hassle, you end up with the same result - except it took you more time. Sounds like a worse deal compared to getting something that just works, but paradoxically the tech support experience actually strengthens your emotional binding to the product, and makes you talk about it a lot more.
A real evil genius would ship products that are broken and have excellent tech support!
To make that a bit more tangible, here’s a personal story about my runin with Apple technical support. Mostly, apple got it wrong.
I bought a macbook within a month of their original release, about a year ago. Unfortunately, it was riddled with annoying problems which all surfaced in the months to come. From broken harddrives to two separate ‘random shutdown’ incidents, to broken optical drives, and more. After 8 separate repair incidents in a period of 10 months, I lost faith in the unit entirely.
Hence, I decided to write a letter to ask for a new one, or at least a free extension on the warranty.
This sparked off a long long rollercoaster ride.
At first I received a phonecall which virtually guaranteed a new macbook. After hearing nothing new for a while, I phoned them up again, to hear that I wouldn’t receive a new one, nor would the warranty be extended; I’d just have to buy applecare same as everyone else.
A day later, I received another phonecall apologizing and offering me a replacement macbook, again.
At some point I was instructed to hand over the unit at the door to a courier, and I’d receive a new macbook 4 days later.
That process ended up taking a full month as there were no more macbooks to give. I had to figure this out myself when Think Secret reported on an update to the macbook line. (When a line gets updated at apple, usually stock has run out well before the update, but news of the update is secret until a day or two before. Then after the update, there’s a shortage).
I went through a similar promise/retraction/apology/shipping problems cycle in regards to getting the 2GB I accidentally left in the unit I shipped to apple back, but I’ll spare you the details.
I got a new macbook out of the ordeal and I’m grateful. The new notebook hasn’t broken down yet, and it works great. Yet, the customer experience in getting it replaced wasn’t an experience I’ll be converting people into apple afficionados with in the future; it wasn’t all that great. They didn’t overdeliver; they barely delivered.
Contrast to how this sort of thing should have been done:
A long time ago my external Maxtor harddrive failed. I could still read bits and pieces of the data, but it was making very scary noises and the disk timed out frequently. Maxtor offered me a choice: Either send back the defective unit now, and they’d send me a replacement when it arrived at the service center, or, give them my credit card details, and they’d ship a replacement unit immediately, allowing me to get as much data as I could onto the new drive. The caveat: If I didn’t send the old unit back within 2 weeks after receiving the new one, they’d bill my credit card for the full cost of the new unit. That’s a great solution and I gladly took it.
Apple doesn’t offer this choice. For a company that is notoriously secretive about releasing updates, that’s a big mistake. In this case, the apple rep told me that the unit would ‘likely ship within a day or two’ for an entire month, probably because the service rep wasn’t in the loop about the model update either.
More examples of positive tech support experiences over at the getSatisfaction blog.
