If you purchased something for $100 last week, you did so because you believed that it was worth $100 to you. If it wasn't, you would not have spent the money.

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I've always been a firm believer in supporting companies and brands based not on the mistakes they make, but on the way they rectify those mistakes. That in my opinion has always delivered that lasting impression which gets my brand loyalty & commitment going.

Well-known publisher, GigaOM, had a case of e-mail blues today as they sent out truckloads of the same newsletter to subscribers (or in some cases, non-subscribers). I got 40-odd copies of the same newsletter.

It turns out that MailChimp is their newsletter provider and the issues GigaOM were experiencing was a result of a deployment issue on MailChimp's side. It would be easy for MailChimp to hide in a situation like this; if they didn't put up their hand and claimed responsibility, then nobody - except them - would've known that they were at fault. Instead they post a very public apology, pulling no punches in acknowledging their mistake and also rectifying the underlying issue ASAP.

That in my opinion is the magic stuff that great companies & brands are made of: transparency, honesty & accountability. I'm not a MailChimp customer today, but if I were ever to switch away from CampaignMonitor, MailChimp's actions in this regard would've greatly influenced that move. Kudo's to MailChimp for impeccable customer service.

Part of our massive overhaul of the WooThemes Dashboard last month, was to improve our support structures. Our aim is to deliver customer happiness & we felt that beyond the obvious willingness to do so, our structures needed to be better.

So we improved a major flaw in our old system: our notifications. We now send out a bunch of notifications to our users for different interactions within the WooThemes Dashboard and the one that is being used the most is the notification that a WooTeam Support Member has responded to a support ticket.

Perfect, right? Not quite.

We didn't realize this before, but by adding proper notifications to our system we essentially increased the velocity of our support. Greatly. So what happens now, is that as soon as an user is notified that there's been a response on their ticket, they come back to check on it and then in most cases posts a follow-up response. This means that users are not necessarily creating more tickets, but they're posting to existing tickets much faster, which in turn means that the number of unresolved tickets are growing significantly.

No good deed goes unpunished they say... By adding something to improve customer support, we've strained our own support structure & capacity. End-result... We're hiring. Again. :)

I don't really believe in titles within company context much and to this extent we've avoided using titles over at WooThemes. But I recently realized that sometimes a title of sorts does become valuable.

In the last couple of weeks, I've been speaking to loads of WooThemes customers (an extraordinary amount compared to a general weekly average) due to vulnerabilities in our products or issues with user accounts relating to our new user dashboard. Chaos management basically.

During this time, I took it on myself - as co-founder - to handle most of the incoming mail, because I wanted to know exactly what was going on. So I also started doing something different and started to sign my e-mails as "Adii (Co-founder)" instead of simply "Adii" like I used to do. I did so, because I wanted to reassure our customers that their issues were important & significant enough that one of the co-founders of the business took the time to help them out, explain the issues and clarify what we were doing to fix.

What I found was that even the most vehement e-mail could be diffused with a kind response and due partly to the fact that I, as co-founder, answered the e-mail. Many users actually noted this specifically and expressed their surprise that they got an e-mail from a senior member of the company. So by adding my "title" to the e-mail, I was also adding weight to the response.

I don't propose the widespread usage of titles in a company now, because I still think that they're mostly useless. When dealing with customers though - especially difficult customers - I think a title communicates a certain level of reassurance & trust to the customer, which greatly influences the outcome of that conversation.

 

If there's one thing that I've been tolerating less & less in recent years, it's the bullshit excuses that companies sometimes offer up, disguised as customer service. Let me explain with a recent experience:

Two days ago, I quickly stop at the little shopping center on my way home after work to pick up some flowers for my wife (I know, so romantic). I'm in & out within 5 minutes, only to find that I lost my parking ticket (the center has paid parking, but the first 30 minutes is free). I go to the management office, where I'm told that I will need to pay a penalty fee for my lost ticket, which is the equivalent of being parked there for 24 hours. Not only that, but I need to complete an "application" form of sorts and they need a copy of my ID.

Trying to determine the rationale behind this, I was told repeatedly that he - as manager - can't do anything about it and that he was only applying the "rules". I thought it was daylight robbery of course.

So here's my issue with that: why have a manager in the first place if he is not allowed to manage the situation correctly. Surely common sense should prevail here and good customer service would dictate that they should've helped me, instead of man-handling the whole situation.

In fact, I was being a good customer. I go there often and I went there again to spend more money there. Why should I be punished for a silly mistake? I understand that rules exist for a reason, but business owners & managers need to be able to bend those rules from time to time; especially if that means you're delivering happiness to your customers. In my opinion, there's just no excuse for this bullshit handling of such situations.

By offering bullshit reasons for your even more bullshit actions, you are only alienating your customers.