Last week, a customer of a client called me and started ranting about how unresponsive we were when they had questions about our soccer tournament SaaS product. The thing is, though, I had responded to his original email with detailed instructions on his questions, also cc:ing the tournament director. Not having heard back after two days, I emailed him again with no response. I checked the admin user logs and saw the event was very active managing teams, so I assumed my email had given him the appropriate answers and pointed him to the correct help documents.
Apparently, I was wrong.
Perhaps my email had gone into his spam folder. Maybe he received the email and deleted it with the hundreds of others he didn’t recognize or flagged as important. I have no way of knowing, other than I now had a frustrated customer on the phone, telling me how unresponsive I was.
It kinda hurt. One of the main service differentiators we pride ourselves on is accessibility. Soccer folks work on their events in the early mornings, lunch hour, in the evenings, on weekends and especially holidays. For over twenty years, we have made it a point to be there for them when they needed us the most.
Only it doesn’t seem to matter.
Eventually, I was able to calm him, explain what was going on at my end and posit why, perhaps, he did not get my emails. I was able to quickly guide him through what he needed to know and orient him to the modules — as well as the volumes of organized help documents. But I fear the harm to our carefully cultivated brand had already been done. We’ll see if they re-up for next year.
This past weekend, I had five events going on, each with a different event director and referee assignor. When the event gets down to its weekend, very little goes wrong—teams play games, the scores get entered and the standings update. If the event director has been paying attention to the schedule and standings, it’s just a matter of space, time and math.
But if they haven’t been paying attention, assumptions start playing out. We assumed the standings would calculate 10pt instead of 3pt wins. We assumed the maximum goal differential (GD) allowed would be 4 instead of 3. We assumed that the tie-breaker would be on wins instead of GD. We write some pretty extensive software to handle any of these assumptions, but the event director needs to change the settings, all easily accessed in their admin modules.
And then assumptions become who can we blame for us not paying attention and doing our jobs.
Four of the events went along just fine. The event director was paying attention prior to starting the games. They were checking the standings math to make sure everything was good. But one event did not.
Saturday morning call at 9:32am. “How do you enter scores?” Oh, dear.
Saturday evening call at 5:42pm. “None of the standings are updating! Help! *panic, panic, panic* Turns out they didn’t set their standings definitions. Once I did, it all snapped into place. But they had gone an entire day not noticing.
Now, my stress levels are off the chart because I have to be “on call” throughout the night and early morning. What else did they fail to do?
Sunday morning, no calls, no emails. Scores were being entered, standings updating on score entry, final games advancing, yet I could not relax or leave my wifi connection. This event — through their unwillingness to prepare properly for their event — essentially trapped me at my desk. By about 3:00pm, all the pool games were over, the finals mostly done and I figured it was safe to walk my dog, Zoey, in the park. They would not be calling.
But ten minutes into the walk,. my phone started to go off. Ring… and ring… then a text… then another… I finally stopped walking and called them back. They had decided to change a pool game to a final, but couldn’t delete the game and somehow this was an emergency that couldn’t wait. I was livid at this point. I may have said a few words I sorta regret today, but this software is SaaS and they were treating me like a full-time, on-call employee. Moreover, it was their failure to prepare that was causing their emergency.
Turns out, they had the “do not allow a game delete” toggle on; ironically, a feature they had requested a couple years back. Yet, they will blithely go about their day today, unaware of the carnage they have created in their wake. When they recount the weekend, they will most likely say something like, “…it went well, except the software people were unresponsive…”
After another couple walks with Zoey, I’ve concluded that what this past year has revealed is how much a toll being “on call” all the time has taken on me. The global pandemic basically brought soccer tournaments to a dead halt, and with them, the need to be on-call 24/7/365. I hadn’t realized how much tension I was retaining with my readiness at level eleven every hour of every day.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit gerardmclean.substack.com
