Customer Service 101 -- Part 1
Two incidents this weekend drive home the importance of customer culture and service. If you start to displease your customers on a consistent basis, viral effects make customer acquisition exponentially expensive.
Two incidents this weekend drive home the importance of customer culture and service. If you start to displease your customers on a consistent basis, viral effects make customer acquisition exponentially expensive.
On the first front, my Vonage saga continues. We have requested to switch our primary number back to AT&T. AT&T says it is all Vonage's responsibility and Vonage says they have given the request and number to the "third party" carrier who now controls the process. Both are losing serious points here. This has been going on for five weeks and our services keeps fading in and out. I hope my marriage survives this.
Vonage now has someone who is poisoning the waters whenever and wherever. it is a personal mission to prevent other unfortunate victims from this fate. I think this company is toast...I don't know of anyone who has had a truly exceptional Vonage experience and a lot who hate this firm.
In their race to get big, they forgot the first two tenants of business...make a product that works and give the customer a rewarding experience. They have the unfortunate antithesis which is throw it out there even if doesn't work and pound the channel with marketing dollars. Each new customer (who inevitably has a bad experience), actually weakens the brand/company versus strengthening.
Lesson to all: while it is critical to get your product out in the market early, make it simple and bullet-proof (think iPod) and let your customers evangelize. If you put out crap, you will have to spend 2-3x on sales & marketing to overcome the bad references and noise from your customer. This cost grows exponentially (network effect) as more and more affected customers hit the market...this is true flu-like viral marketing at its worst.
(BTW, don't get Vonage!!!)