Blogging About Blogging

Customer Service: The Way To My Heart

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• Author: admin
• July 21, 2007
• Category: Opinions and Reviews

Customer Service, or rather bad Customer Service, is my ultimate peeve. I can not STAND IT when a company treats it’s users as if they were disposable. I had this frustration come to a puss-filled head this week with Verizon…they’ve been our cell provider for two years and we’ve been stuck in a crazy, ill-fitting contract for the duration. I use the phone even though my husband opened the account. They will talk nastily to me on the phone, they will take money from our joint account, but they will not let me address any account issues. When David has called them at different times, even to authorize me as a decision maker on the phone, they “have no record” of it later.

Now tell me….how many cell service providers out there are there? Why in the world do I need to be loyal to a company that treats me as if I’m a pain in their wireless behind?

When our son racked up a bill four times the usual amount, David set up a plan with them to pay every two weeks to spread our payments out. That meant TWO payments in a month. When we missed one, they shut off the phone. No warning. Just off. Hours of more-patient-than-I’d-be (David is a Customer Service Manager and is king at keeping hot situations calm) in the middle of his work day, and a reconnection fee later, it was back on. Could it all have been avoided? Yes, by talking to ME. Because the day before the shut off, Verizon called MY phone but would not speak to me, nor leave a message for David as to what the call regarded. Just, “Tell ‘im we called”. For all I knew, it could have been a stupid sales call (pet peeve number 2: sales people who come into my space rather than let me come to them) and our last payment had been just TEN DAYS earlier. We got no email, no mail correspondence. That is bad service. That is service that says, “we don’t care who you are…we’ve got thousands more where you came from.”

Oh really? Well you’ll likely soon be down one. And don’t even get me started on Dell. Their product is serving me just fine (as my Verizon phone does), but their CUSTOMER SERVICE is crap. Beyond crap. It’s agony. Okay, okay…I’ll not get started. Besides, I’ve said it before….

Today though, I had the experience a Customer Service peever loves to have. The kind of time that makes one loyal and promotive and enthusiastic for a long, long time. (You should hear trickling water and little birds singing in the background because, ah…all is right with the world and my previously ruffled feathers are smooth and lying down.) I’m not sure it can even be called “Customer Service” because I didn’t buy this product, which is a web news service. All I did was register to use it, which was incredibly easy, and saw a quick video explaining how to use it. So am I customer? I don’t know…user? client?

The company is Thoof.com. On the website it’s described as, “Thoof will show you interesting news, websites, videos, and other links, personalized to your individual tastes. Just click on the stories that interest you, and let Thoof do the rest. ” I am a professional blogger with clients who both need outlets for their writing and need material that applies to their site content. For myself, I need to stay current on what is in the news but some internet sites are a bit too gunked with ads, too young and banal for either my taste or that of my clients, or are full of stuff I can find elsewhere with a less manipulated feel to them. I tend to stay away from the mainstream media biggies and like to know what’s going on in peoples’ real world, the underground, the grassroots, and in their own words. Sites that make it easy for the individual to submit to are ripe with that kind of material and so thoof.com had my interest. That was the day paula blogged about it and within minutes, I had too.

The first thing that got my attention was that the site’s creator, Ian Clarke, replied to my post. That told me two things: first, he pays attention to who is linking to the site and second, it’s worth it to him to communicate and connect with his site’s users. I was already impressed.

Over the next few days I submitted many articles to thoof.com and many of my client’s, as I watched how the service worked. Submitting was very, very easy and user friendly; I’ve got the link in my toolbar and it takes literally less than 60 seconds to get an article into thoof’s system. Several stories on the home page were interesting and indeed, it learns what I like. As I am looking for things that apply to multiple people’s interest, this was ideal. No more sifting through the junk! If I don’t like it, I just don’t click on it. If I do, it learns and sends me more like that!

On day three I was looking around for buzz about thoof and came across this article from Techcrunch.com. In all honesty, I almost left as soon as I got there because pet peeve #3: animated movement to the side of where my focus is distracts and frustrates me and I will usually LEAVE. It’s too closely tied to peeve #2…get out of my space please. If I need you, I know where to find you. I stuck my right hand over the flashing on the right side though (ha! Take that you ads! I thumb you out…I can not see you) and hung in there. I read the following:

I have my own reasons for explaining why, so far, these sites haven’t succeeded. I think people usually want to read news and then discuss it with friends. So what is considered “interesting” is influenced by what everyone else is consuming that day. People flock to the big news sites because everyone else flocks there, too, and the niche audiences that really want personalized news aren’t enough to sustain these startups.

Maybe it’s just the red-headed, go-against-the-flow streak in me….the one that gets weary quickly of bubble-gum “what fill-in-the-blank fad” the so-called everyone else is consuming that day….this would be the one that gets nauseated over theme-chat rooms, the one who thinks highschoolers can be funny in their universal desire to be unique and rebellious in such a uniform fashion… but the idea that “everyone” wants chewed up news regurgitated ad nauseum by the mainstream press for us to hang around forums and water coolers talking about feels so… well, manufactured.

Am I then, part of a “niche audience” that will ultimately not be large enough to sustain a start up like thoof.com? I doubt that. And not too shockingly I found myself nodding enthusiastically over Ian Clarke’s idea:

Historically, news has been delivered in a one-to-many manner, meaning that lots of people tend to get the same news at the same time, but I think this is more of a bug than a feature. People don’t necessarily *want* to be shown the same stuff that everyone else is seeing, but the limitations of the technology somewhat required that this be the case. They would much rather see things that are specifically tailored to their interests, its just that either that option hasn’t existed, or it has been poorly executed.

He’s thinking outside the box here. Just because something always has been does not mean a bit that we all want it that way. It’s that kind of openness to creativity and ideas that brings us the best in this generation. It’s inventive. And, it perfectly co-incided with another box-breaker I was fixated on this week, Dr. Ron paul and his grassroots momentum. I like change. And I like those who live deliberately and are willing to try something a bit different, just to see if it can improve on what left some wanting.

So wait…this is an article about Customer Service right? And warm fuzzies from the excellent manifestation of it? Well, I’m getting there. Right around day 4 of my work with thoof.com, I started to wish I had some way to see how my submissions were doing. I send them out to the thoof universe and then what? Other than to check that my links are working well, I don’t click on my own submissions. What if others are not as well? What kind of articles are preferred by other thoof users/clients/customers?

And lo and behold, the universe heard my little thoughts I think, because voila! The thoof rank button has been born! Handy, dandy little thing that lets you know the percentage of stories yours is better than. The code is copy and paste into the bottom of the blog post; sounds every bit as simple as the registration had been, story submissions, and the entire learning curve.

And I was excited to see the feedback! One of my clients had a story with a thoofrank of 91%! Several others, my own included were over 50%. This is really good information to have in the choosing of story, title, and tag words. I got to work installing thoof rank buttons.

(snag like a needle across an old lp). Not. so. fast. I use several different wordpress templates and some of them were not liking this code at all. Whole sidebars were disappearing, and comment forms, and basically any content that was below the link. Everything was going wonky.

A removal of the code fixed things and I fired off a little question on the thoof blog. Within minutes I heard directly from Ian with concern and simple instructions.

I tried again. And again. We emailed back and forth several times and eventually I worked my way around the problem, explaining to him how I did so. They simultaneously had a wordpress expert working on it and the issue was resolved.

It’s Saturday folks. I am rare among my friends and family to be working on a balmy, 75 degree Saturday after a draining week. I doubted Ian Clarke was on the clock today. Not only was he, but so was enough of his staff to have this issue listened to, worked on, and resolved with open and available communication. I imagined rays of golden sunlight falling on his head and hordes of traffic coming his way. Does anyone think I’d have gotten that level of stellar attention from a site that sees it’s users as a homogeneous mass of mouths waiting to be fed whatever “everyone else is having”?

I think not. I heart thoof. Your golden customer service just earned you your biggest fan.

Tia Graham, blogsultant, builds, manages, and empowers business blogs that can help you generate income, improve publicity, and interact with your audience. See bloggingwithflair.com for more information.

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