theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

How to Respond to Service Problems: How Typepad Builds Loyalty

Typepad, the provider of the platform that this blog is written on, must have a high percentage of raving fans (aka high net promoter score).  I'm one of them.   

When performance slipped for an extended period recently, here's what Typepad did:

• Apologized
• Accepted responsibility
• Provided a minimum 15 day refund/subscription extension to everyone
• Offered customers the option of asking for more compensation, if they felt this was not sufficient

This is amazing.  I've reproduced their communication at the end, which should win an award.  I'd love to know what the response data looks like for this -- but I'm guessing most people were happy with the offered two weeks. Or perhaps, like me, they just didn't get around to making a decision before the deadline.  [If you know how the data breaks down, send me a confidential e-mail!]

Key Learning
1) You're not fooling your customers when you pretend everything is fine.   They know better.  About two days before this message came out, I had a pleasant reply to my support enquiry telling me that my pages were slow to load because I had too much text formatting in them.  D'oh?  I didn't buy that for a second, actually, and thought I was being fed a load of you-know-what.

2) Coming clean in an authentic way can win you tremendous points.  As I re-read their message, it does trumpet the company a lot -- but it more than makes up for it with the refund. 

3) Suck it up and pay up.  Without the refund, this would not have worked.

4) Don't expect this to work twice. People expect slick technology to work well first time and every time.  Nobody cares about the company's problems. 

Subscriber Reaction
A quick search on Technorati reveals that this move did indeed inspire devotion, but also some other interesting reactions.  Here are some of the remarks I found:

Actions like this one renew my faith in the people who make up the often faceless corporations that tend to get away with more than any individual would in the same situation. Thank you Barak Berkowitz for making my week a little brighter. [Theoblogia]

i asked for the 45 days and told them that i'm leaving typepad when my billing cycle ends next june unless some serious changes are made. i already have a wordpress blog set up for the foodie stuff and i'd be more than happy to set up another one to host my main blog. wordpress is also free. mmmm free  [a comment posted on The Long Cut]

Genius. And a far cry from the way companies such as Sony have handled recent difficulties... Of course, an apology like the one offered by Typepad only goes so far. If problems persist, then consumers will likely decide that being respected isn't the only thing they require from a blog hosting company. [On Message]

I would say that the extent of the offer to customers will exceed everyone's expectations. It certainly exceeded mine. [Neville Hobson's blog]

That's fair as far as I'm concerned, and I have little interest in "gaming" a service that is so openly showing respect for me.   To Typepad, I express my deepest appreciation... It's also  a classic example an "operational" decision that generates positive word-of-mouth or CGM. [Consumer Generated Media]

My Conclusion?  I think this represents a high-water-mark in good service recovery. 

The Hall-of-Fame Communication

Dear Susan,  

Two weeks ago I wrote you to explain the problems that some of our users experienced last month and what we were doing to fix them. Today I want to tell you about the work we've done and our plans to compensate you for the inconvenience and frustration we may have caused you.

The progress we've made

Over the last two weeks we have made great strides. As we recently posted on Mena's Corner, we have made a number of significant technical changes. We have upgraded hardware throughout the service, we are about to finish installation of a new enterprise-grade data storage device and the move to our new data center is nearly complete. All of this has led to improved performance.

We are not yet perfect. One incident on Tuesday November 8th between approximately 9:00 am and noon Pacific Time caused limited access to the TypePad application. Even with that problem the performance of TypePad, as reported by our customers, our internal systems and the independent Keynote monitoring service, has improved greatly over the last 12 days.

While we are not done with our work, and there is always the chance of outages on any web service, we believe that the worst performance is behind us, and it is now time to focus on how we can make these problems up to you.

Compensation for this less than stellar performance

We are all aware that you pay for TypePad and expect to receive superior service and performance in return. At times last month, we did not provide that type of experience to all our customers and apologies are not good enough.

We also know that some customers have been more heavily impacted than others. If you often use the service on weekdays between 7:00 am and 1:00 pm Pacific Time you may have experienced one or even many periods when you had problems with TypePad's speed and responsiveness. If you use the service at other times, you may not have experienced any problems at all. After wrestling with these facts and wanting to be fair to all our users we have decided that the only option is to allow you to choose how Six Apart should compensate you.

By default, you will receive a credit for 15 free days of TypePad service. To get this credit you don't have to do anything; we will just credit your account.

That said, we recognize that customers have had different experiences with the service, so we want to give you the opportunity to choose more, or even less compensation. If you click the link below, you'll get a screen that offers you the following choices:

• While the performance issues caused me some inconvenience I mainly found the service acceptable last month.
  Give me 15 free days of TypePad.

• The performance issues made it very difficult for me to use the service on multiple occasions during the month.
  Give me 30 free days of TypePad.

• The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month.
  Give me 45 free days of TypePad.

• I really wasn't affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month.
  Thank you for the offer, but please don't credit my account.

 

Make your choice now.

If you want to elect for more or less compensation you have until Sunday, November 27th to go to the web address above. By Monday December 5th we will apply either 15 free days or your stated compensation preference to your account. If you are billed monthly, you will notice a gap in charges to your credit card for the number of days you select. If you are billed annually, we will extend your billing cycle by the number of days you select.

The future

I must say that one of the most rewarding aspects of these last three frustrating weeks have been the emails I have received from many of you. A large number of the messages I received were very kind and supportive, and some of you were understandably angry, but you all expressed that you just wanted the service you loved back. Rest assured that we are working night and day to do just that and more.

We are committed to making the service faster and more reliable than it has ever been. With our new data center we now have room to add the capacity we will need to continue our growth while improving performance and adding often requested features.

We will soon roll out a new release of TypePad that will include more controls for comment and TrackBack spam as well more performance improvements. By year end we will do even more to improve TypePad and add the features you have asked for. We are excited to get back to building a great product for you.

Thank you for your patience over the past several weeks and I hope you accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience we may have caused you.

Sincerely,

Barak Berkowitz
Chairman and CEO
Six Apart, Ltd.
barakb@sixapart.com

The makers of of TypePad, LiveJournal and Movable Type.

PS: As always, we appreciate and value your feedback. Feel free to reply to this message, file a support ticket in TypePad, or email me at BarakB@sixapart.com. We will continue to update status.sixapart.com to keep informed of the status of the service and to provide advance notice of scheduled maintenance.

 

 

Beta Testers Needed for Self-Directed Educational Product

A colleague is pre-testing a self-directed educational product targeted at adults seeking career development.  Before he goes to formal marketing testing, he is looking for some less formal feedback.
What's in it for you?  You get to keep the materials.
If you are interested in this, please send me an e-mail stating your name, location, age, gender and current occupation.  If you are selected for the pre-test, we will contact you again to arrange delivery of the materials and the questionnaire.
If this doesn't sound like something you would do, but might be of interest to a younger colleague or mentee, please pass this opportunity along to them.
Many thanks!

Americans worried about many things, including price of housing, political climate, job losses -- BIG Survey

This item came in from the Centre for Media Research today:

According to a recent BIGresearch survey, 8900 consumers were asked to respond to "issues that are on their minds". Some of the key responses are:

• I don t know how people on fixed income or living paycheck-to-paycheck are going to keep their heads above water.

• What will happen to all these people with adjustable rate mortgages that can not afford for their payment to go up?

• We cannot continue to be the world police and leave our own people to suffer.

• There is too much financial instability right now with the effects of these major hurricanes on the U.S. economy.

• Tired of the political bashing. Everything from the economy to natural disasters. People are placing blame depending on the political party they are associated with.

• The price of housing is excluding young families and seniors from owning homes and beginning to concentrate home ownership in the hands of landlords and the wealthy. The American Dream is in grave danger.

• When is the country going to act like a country that is at war?

• Our judges are trying to change what our constitution says by using their power to change laws. Which is not their job.

• With the economy the way it is, gas prices out the roof and grocery prices outrageous, it's getting very hard to get by!

• The world wide oil reserves are about to peak and we have no viable alternatives.

• The ready willingness of the media to present everything as if it is either the fault of the United States or the fault of our President.

• I am very concerned with the state of world affairs and the high number of natural disasters in recent months.

• Terrorist threats being made and carried out in the US. And the upcoming possible outbreak of Avian Flu world wide.

• Gas prices, homeland security, and lack of morality in our country and the world.

• Border security and our nations security... taking care of the US citizens needs instead of taking care of the world.

• All the recent tragedies that have been occurring world wide.

"Uncertainty about the future in this holiday climate of giving creates a paradox of self sacrifice; consumers told us in this survey that they will be spending less for themselves and co-workers while spending more on family and friends," said Joe Pilotta, VP of Research at BIGresearch, sponsor of the study.

[Ed. note: we're classifying this as Marketing Research, however it really is an opinion poll.]

Buy cell-phone minutes at an ATM - Can a bank make your life easier with value added services?

Qatar National Bank has an interesting service that permits a user to top-up their cellphone account using a "secret code" issued at an ATM.  Very nifty idea. 

They are also providing free alert services, something available in many smaller banks with new technology platforms.  The free alerts are automated notifications on a variety of topics (e.g. account status, salary deposit) specified by customers. 

Perhaps someday these services will be available from 1st world banks??

Engaging Your Team - Start with Better Meetings

Becoming more customer centric always involves people and change.  A lot of clients tell me "we don't do change management well".   If this describes your organization, you're in a big club.  But the key to change management is not all about the giant project plan for change management.  It's much more about doing the small things well, to engage people and start conversations.

Because where change is concerned, conversation is action.

You can start to shift in a more positive direction by taking small steps.  You might be surprised how well they work.  Here's a fresh example from yesterday.

I was having lunch with a client who was holding a large meeting later in the day around their CRM initiative.  She asked me for some ideas about energizing the meeting, which I was glad to provide.  Judging by her e-mail this morning, the meeting was a success:

My meeting yesterday went really well!! People commented on how great the session was at the close and afterwards. In addition to our group notes, we also now have a written record of their ideas in their words.

Here were a couple of the things which worked so well for my client, (a clever individual and a fast learner): 

1. Ask everyone in the group to fill in a simple mind map to do a brain dump on the topic to get things rolling (Download SimpleMindMap.pdf )
2. Post the mind maps on the wall, and get everyone to walk around the room in pairs to read the other maps. 
3. Start the discussion by asking people for the common themes they saw

This approach gives everyone a chance to be heard.  It clears up all the brain clutter on the topic and gets it down on paper before you even start.  It's a much faster way to share a lot of information quickly than by going around the table for everyone's input.  It quickly helps people see where there is common ground.  And it surfaces fresh ideas and issues in a non-threatening manner. 

Now my client is a pretty capable individual, and I bet her regular meetings are usually pretty good.  But she took a couple of simple ideas and leveraged them to make a potentially painful discussion about CRM implementation challenges an energizing meeting that got people excited about the project. 

To close the meeting, she asked everyone for their personal action steps to take towards the vision.  So people left the room talking, having made a personal commitment to take some small step. 

If your meetings are full of telling and selling, you might try a couple of these techniques to get things moving in a fresh direction. 

Acknowledgements:
Suzanne Bergeron, who taught me the gallery walk technique
Pat Sabena, who taught me this simplified approach to mind-mapping

Checking Out: Trends in Self-Service Technology

NCR/Teradata has released results of research conducted for them on acceptance of self-serve checkout technology. 

Canadians are pretty keen, with a quarter saying they are interested in this option.  A familiar pattern emerges in what people expect to gain for this trade-off in taking on some of the work:

• having a choice in how they check out
• speed of checkout
• shorter lines
• control
• privacy

Those surveyed are also interested in having greater access to price-checking kiosks, kiosks for additional product information, and kiosks for pre-ordering deli items to be prepared while they shop elsewhere in the store.

Canadian study:  http://www.ncr.com/media_information/2005/jul/pr073105.htm
US study: http://www.ncr.com/en/media_information/2004/oct/pr100704.htm

Copies of additional white-papers on this topic are available at: http://www.ncr.com/en/products/hardware/sa_selfchk.htm

It is worth noting that speed and convenience, not price, was what drove adoption of self-serve gas pumping.  And the same thing for automated banking in all its forms. 

Making this work as a retailer is still going to entail thinking through where customers will feel uncertainty or risk, as well as providing friendly education and inducements to trial. 

Every time I look at these kiosks in Loblaws, I wonder what will happen when I can't find the right code for miniature artichokes.  So I guess I'm part of the 25% who is interested, but hasn't yet taken the leap.