Customer Service Snafu

[Crothian]

Okay, I'm rather surprised that the majority consensus is that his tone was fine and I was reading more into it than there is. Personally I disagree with the majority, but I know when to leave well enough alone. I'm still pleased as punch that my wife actually spoke her peace though. That's progress.

Your wife usually doesn't speak?

 

[twofalls]

Your wife usually doesn't speak?

Katy is the perfect hostess of any party. She knows how to put anyone at ease and is amazing at bringing people out of themselves in small groups or individually. She doesn't do confrontation though, in fact she activly avoids it. She used to be very shy, she is long over that. I adore this lady, and am glad to see her facing folks, even in this small way.

 

[DrNilesCrane]

As for your 'civil' discussion. You're a customer, which means who knows what you are complaining about. You do say you buy his product however, and have a 'review' of his website.

His respones, while not out of line, is, to be polite, brash. If he's going to take the time to personally respond to your comments with such a long e-mail, he's got too much time on his hands. A simple, 'Thank you for your comments', 'We value all our customers opinions'; anthing that said 'thanks for taking time out of your day to tell me what you thought of my website' would have sufficed.

To get all huffy about it is in poor taste. To basically tell a customer "Nope, you the only yahoo to think there is something wrong" is a BAD way to treat customers. If he always acts this way, he'll always be a small game company.

Not some much rude, as a wierd way to spend 10 minutes responding to what (the seller) clearly thought was a lone voice of dissension. Companies spend billions each year on market research & customer feedback. Belittleing them isn't usually the goal.


Well, I tooled around their website & everything worked fine. Of course I'm using Internet Explorer with my resoultion kicked up way high. As someone whose worked on websites before:

If it looks good at resoultion X using Web Browser Y, doesn't mean it doesn't look like Picasso using resoultion W & Web Browser H. I mean trying to get some of those websites to look identical in Explorer & Netscape made we want to kill something.

Maybe you are the first person to bitch. Of course maybe you are the first person to use Firefox to see his site.

Just poor manners/stubborness on his part, I'd say.

Having worked in sales for 10+ years and had to deal with angry customers on occasion (thankfully not too often), I'm in 100% agreement - the person who responded (perhaps the website designer with a thin skin?) absolutely should have given a better response to a customer, whether current or potential. The last paragraph of the first response in which he's whining to the customer in particular is bad form; his replies as attempts to "get the last word" and win the argument rather than deal politely and positively with the situation were terrible, IMHO. I'd give his customer service skills an F if I were grading him; if he were an employee of mine, either he or the person who supposedly trained him would be looking for a new job.

 

[twofalls]

Thanks guys (Vraille and DrNilesCrane). Glad that I'm not the only one who sees this. I could have framed the original email with more soothing words I suppose, but I was trying to let him know that I wasn't just hacking him by using the opening I did. I find it really interesting that so many believe that his response was ordinary and acceptable business practice.

 

[DrNilesCrane]

Thanks guys (Vraille and DrNilesCrane). Glad that I'm not the only one who sees this. I could have framed the original email with more soothing words I suppose, but I was trying to let him know that I wasn't just hacking him by using the opening I did. I find it really interesting that so many believe that his response was ordinary and acceptable business practice.

My pleasure. Possible your audience here is a little more use to email interactions and a little more forgiving than the typical consumer would be (just my opinion), but I thought your initial email was respectful. Even if someone on the other end took it as a criticism (rather than constructive criticism), a better reply was definitely warranted.

I'm something of a stickler for good customer service myself as a customer, particularly when it takes just a little common sense and respect to turn an irate customer into a purchasing customer 99% of the time.

 

[Yancey_Slide]

Wow! I have to say that I'm amazed by the tolerance of bad customer service here. I read the responses and could only think that this is a person that really could care less what his buying customer thinks of his business and in reality was quite flippant about the entire exchange. I also saw someone that had an overt desire to be "right" with a customer and no matter how right you, it's a losing battle to pick a fight with your customer. I’m not saying that customers are always right, but you don’t go about telling them so blatantly. It just makes for bad business.



I’ve been running customer service operations for large companies for many years and I can tell you that I wouldn’t for a moment stand for that kind of response to any sort of customer from anyone on my staff. Maybe my experiences make me a little more sensitive to quality of service, or lack thereof. I don’t consider myself an overly demanding customer but responses similar to that one drive me to do something about it whether it is to write an executive of the company or simply choose to no longer do business with them. In this case since it is the owner of the company that was made the response I’d have to consider whether or not my enjoyment of the game was worth giving someone like that my hard earned dollars.



And Nifft, I’m not suggesting that the proper response would have been to blow smoke up someone’s backside but it would have been far more appropriate to acknowledge the response with something more civil like “thank you for the feedback.” Instead, it came across as a “how dare you question our site design. Something is obviously wrong with you because EVEYRONE else likes it BUT you.” No, not his words but certainly what I took from the comments. And then to continue trying to justify the original response! The guy didn’t even have the common sense to just let it go, smile and move on.



Yes, I’m a new poster here but I felt compelled to respond here simply because I was shocked at how willing a number of folks here were just willing to accept that as a decent response.



Good luck and good hunting…

 

[Coredump]

I didn't see sarcasm....but I did think he was being a butt-head.

He was not at the level of flaming that happens on BBS's all over, but he was snide as a matter of course.

The real key was that your initial 'review' was met with 'no, you are wrong, everyone else likes it.' As opposed to 'I tried the scenarios you refered to and didn't have a problem, maybe it is a browser issue.' or even 'sorry it doesn't work for you, we had been getting lots of compliments. I will try and look into that.'

The point being, his(?) response was defensive, no attempt to verify your assertions. he spent a lot of words trying to 'prove' you wrong, and no effort to try and discover a problem. If you found problems with one of my sites, the *first* thing I would do is try and duplicate the problem.


BTW, do you have kids? If not, careful when you do. Your wife sounds like the 'come after me, fine. Come after my husband/kids, I will take you out.' Enjoy.

 

[Henry]

Moved to Off-topic discussion.

I found his tone defensive, but not necessarily rude. However, I also found his tone not really the best for somebody in a Custserv position, either.

It reminds me of when Anthony Valterra back in 2000 came here reading responses to the Monster Manual 3E, recently released. After the hundreds of hours he and the WotC crew had poured into the usability, aesthetics, and accuracy of the product, when some people had less than stellar things to say, his replies were to describe them more exasperated than anything else. It's a "Frankenstein" effect -- when you pour that much love into your baby, the fact that anything could be wrong can be taken as an affront. To paraphrase Rangerwickett's recent thread, it's more than just authors who need to learn to "kill their babies."

 

[Teflon Billy]

I really fail to seea probelm with any of his e-mail, and I was looking for something to be there. Sorry.....

Me too. I didn't even really see much in the way of unpleasantness.

 

[wingsandsword]

I didn't see a problem with the e-mails.

So it wasn't the letter-perfect customer service reply. To be honest, I'd be glad to get that tone and type of reply instead of a phony, practiced "Thank you for e-mailing blah-blah-blah" CorpSpeak that is just practiced non-answer answers and boilerplate replies.

It was honest, conversational, a shade defensive (but not excessively so), and it is a small business that is probably used to a fairly close relationship with its fans. Also, since it is a small company, a big website overhaul is probably a big deal to them.