Don’t Make These Stupid Customer Service Mistakes

If you want to lose business, check out today’s podcast (and/or read the blog post). Yes folks, this really happened. Please don’t make these mistakes!

On July 31 I bought a product that was supposed to automate the process of finding email addresses for people who have reviewed books similar to yours, so you can offer them a review copy in the hopes they might want to review yours.

I’d already done that manually with a couple of reviewers I’d spotted, and they’d given excellent honest reviews of PeopleShock (for example, the PeopleShock review by Amazon Top Reviewer, Robert Morris),  so the idea of not having to hunt for their contact info sounded great.

The product came with a 30 money back guarantee, so I decided to give it a try.

When you sign up it gives you an introductory video on how to use it, which I watched, and then went to test it out.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work.

Now I really wanted it to work, so I emailed the company to ask what could be done about the problem.

Here’s what happened. At each step, I want you to think about what the customer was likely thinking and feeling, and what the owner of the small business that offered the software was probably thinking and feeling. You’ll watch the whole thing go off the rails.

July 31

Hi,

I’m just trying out your software. A couple of things:

1. The Export to CSV doesn’t work. It returns this in the spreadsheet:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 84 bytes) in /home/breview/public_html/software/db.php on line 82

2. It would be wonderful if your lists would also return info on what star rating they gave the book, and how many people voted their review helpful.

Thanks.

(When I checked back, I saw that it was, in fact, supposed to provide that information, as well as their actual review.)

A bit later, I wrote back:

Hi again,

I noticed that many (most) of them are website urls rather than emails.

Two days later, on Aug 2, I got this:

Hi Tema

Please watch the first video: Main Overview of The Entire Process

On this page

http://[link to video]

This will help out a lot.

Thanks,

D

I replied:

Hi D,

I had watched that. I still have the problems noted. See screenshot [attached]. Even for those that do have an email address (and most of them are websites rather than emails, it does not show the review stars, or text nor link to the review. And the Export to CSV doesn’t work.

Aug 2 reply from her:

This has been addressed and fixed