You Never Get a Second Chance at a First Impression

This post really should have a subtitle of “What should you be doing when it comes to customer service?” because it's one of the most crucial ways that a company can screw it up. Mistakes happen, and it's often overwhelming dealing with unhappy or unsatisfied customers. But meeting at least a bare minimum expectation can go a long way toward increasing a user base, and going the extra mile goes even farther.

I can think of several instances where companies have gone out of their way to respond to customer issues. Twice I've used Twitter to vent frustrations when testing an application for review and had amazingly quick responses from Socialthing as well as Toluu about the issues I was having. (Although my Toluu issues haven't been resolved yet.) FriendFeed has had similar reactions, implementing features that users were begging for faster than I've seen most companies respond. SheGeeks reports a similar experience with Disqus, who not only replied to a request, but also took the time to check out her blog and notice an issue with her WordPress install that created an issue with Disqus. You can't beat that kind of free advertising. When start-ups are sitting there discussing how to get their product on TechCrunch, maybe they should instead be doing things like this and creating that word-of-mouth goodwill that may take them farther in the long term.

When it comes to less-than-stellar customer service and response, I've actually seen two similar examples in the past 24 hours. The first was my own response from b5media after I talked about them in a post yesterday, and mentioned in my disclosure that I had, on occasion, applied to the network but never received a response. I generally only apply for writing positions when it's something totally different than what I write about here at Profy, and it's also something I feel passionate about, because I'm not very good at writing about things I don't care about. So if I've seen a blog opening at b5 that speaks to a passion, I've applied. Jeremy Wright responded to my blog post, and not long after his comment appeared, I received my rejection letter for my application to blog about green business on his network. I'll apologize in advance for the giant eye roll, but the excuse “we get too many applicants” doesn't fly with me. In this age of electronic communications, it's not that difficult to cull the email addresses of those who apply and send out a bulk email (or gosh, even an automated email using the person's name) thanking them for their application and letting them know that the position has been filled. By the time someone has blogged about it, and you reply in the comments, it's already out there.

Scribd is probably learning that same lesson today. A rant about the lack of a response when a user discovered a bug was featured on Hacker News, which results in a decent amount of traffic to the post, I'd assume. It doesn't matter whether you think the rant was off-base, or the date of the piece is old, or you see that one of the founders commented back; you've already seen the complaint and it registers somewhere in your perception of a company. Everyone is busy, but sometimes taking that 5 minutes at the outset will save all the effort it takes to smooth things over afterward.