Customers are tricky creatures. Treat them well and you're likely to reap benefits of a long-term relationship. Treat them poorly and you're likely to lose them. We all know this, but sometimes we have lapses of judgment that result in treating a customer poorly.
I was put in an awkward position last week. I am a customer of Podbean, the web hosting service that hosts hundreds or thousands of podcasts. Our Selling to Consumers Podcast is hosted on Podbean. I think Podbean made us "bend over" and I hope you and your company never does anything likewise to your customers. Let me explain...
Last week, I started receiving emails and messages through our main website that our podcast site was down or not working properly. I investigated and found that I was unable to access our sales podcast site. I tried ten minutes later and got the same results.
I went to the Podbean bad podcast hosting site. They had a message posted at the top of their home page that one of their servers was being serviced or upgraded.
Podbean bendover #1: If Podbean was going to upgrade or service their servers, and this activity would cause customers' sites to be down, they should have notified customers in advance. If the server issue was something that was an emergency, they should have sent an email to all accounts affected by the emergency to notify them their sites were down, and inform them what was being done to handle it.
When I tried to access our site a few hours later, it was still down. I went to Podbean's home page again and noticed the server maintenance message was gone. So I decided it was time to contact Podbean.
Podbean bendover #2: No phone number on their site. I had to fill out an online contact form.
I inquired about the problem with our site. I hadn't heard anything a few hours later (the site was still down), so I went into my email archives and found an email I had received from Podbean when we first set up our account. I sent them an email asking (again) what was wrong with our site and when it would be up.
24 hours later, I still hadn't received a response, so went to the Podbean site again to fill out the contact form a second time. Eventually, I heard back from Podbean via email: "We are sorry about this issue. One server is down. It is expected to be fixed in 24 hours."
Podbean bend over #3: Our site was down 3 days.
To Podbean's credit, they did send an email after the site was back up to let me know they had installed new servers ("to better serve" us they said). They also told me my site might not work properly and the podcast episodes might not play on the site and what I had to do to fix it. (That's Podbean bend over #4)
Podbean bend over #5: It would have been great for Podbean to have offered to credit our account for a month or a week or three days of service, but no such offer was included. Our company paid them to host a website for the entire month, not just 28 days of the month. It's not a large amount, but proactively offering a credit would have let us know Podbean is a class act.
In the site hosting business, having customers' sites up and running is everything. It's the reason they're in business. I'll never know how many potential visitors in cyberspace had trouble visiting our podcast site during the outage, but I do know that Podbean made me, the customer, feel unimportant. I had to bend over backwards to get information, and in the process, felt like Podbean had bent me over.
Lessons we can all learn from this incident:
1. When there's a problem, be proactive. Don't wait for your customer to contact you.
2. Communicate profusely. Communicate more than you think you need to. Problems increase the need for communication.
3. Make it easy for your customers to contact you. Old fashioned phone numbers are still the contact contact medium of choice for customers with problems.
4. Compensate your customer when compensation is the right thing to do.
If you like this post (or don't) please click on "comments" below and share your comment. Skip Anderson is the Founder and President of Selling to Consumers Sales Training. He works with companies and individuals who sell to consumers in B2C, retail, in-home selling, in the financial, real estate, and insurance markets, and other consumer-selling industries.
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