What can we learn from our worst customer experience ever?
Sometimes you’re faced with a customer experience so mind-bogglingly bad that the only thing you can do to stop your brain melting with anger is turn it into a learning experience to make sure that your own customers have a great experience.
So here’s the background. At ProWritingAid, we’ve participated in a couple of great webinars with several thousand participants. Here’s one we did with author Jerry Jenkins. We had a lot of fun interacting directly with our customers, and they enjoyed it as well.
These webinars went so well that we decided to organise one ourselves with the President of one of our favorite self-publishing platforms: BookBaby. After some research into various hosting platforms, we settled on one (who I won’t name).
We sent out emails allowing our users to sign up, and nearly 3,000 people did. We had a practice run and ironed out a few issues. And then we went live. The numbers went up — 200, 300, 400, 500 — and then that’s where it all went wrong. Suddenly the software said that we’d hit our limit of 500 users. No problem, right? Just click the link to upgrade our account, problem sorted. Wrong. There was no link. And no apparent way of increasing the limit. So we’ve maxed out at 500 people. Not a great start!
Learning Point 1: If your customers hit the limit of their package, give them an easy way to instantly upgrade. Increasing their spend is your goal, right? So make it simple.
Learning Point 2: Try to foresee when your customers will hit the limit of their package and forewarn them. If 3,000 people sign up for a webinar and your customer’s package has a limit of 500 then that’s a pretty obvious indication that your customer is going to hit a problem. You could easily send them an email advising them to upgrade their account.
Anyway, we carry on with 500 people and although we’re thrown a bit, we get through to the end. We have some great questions from those who did manage to join and overall it seems like a positive experience. The people who couldn’t access the webinar will still get sent an email with a link to watch it. No problem, right? Wrong.
We contact customer support and complain about the issue. We ask them to stop our recurring monthly payment. What do they do? They refund all our payments (maybe in a spirit of generosity) which then cancels our whole account. The users that have been sent the email with a link to a replay of the video are taken to the homepage of the webinar software when they click the link.
Outcome: lots of angry customers asking if this is some spammy trick to promote the webinar software. See below:
Learning Point 3: Refunding an upset customer is not always the right thing to do, especially if it automatically cancels their account. In this case, refunding the customer made a bad situation worse. Instead, think about what the customer’s issue is to determine the best course of action.
After much time with the platform’s support team, they finally agreed to reinstate the video — but only for 48 hours. Great work, guys. Thanks!
In all honesty, they probably could have saved this relationship if they had shown better support. At ProWritingAid, we are excited about providing more free online training and webinar content and we need a platform to do so. At minimum they should have given us access for the full term that we had initially paid for, which would have given people an additional two weeks to access the replay. Instead, it feels like they are holding our content ransom until we pay them again, despite the fact that we never asked for a refund in the first place and this is their error.
Learning Point 4: If you’ve messed up so totally and utterly that you’ve blown any chance of rescuing your relationship with the customer, don’t be half-hearted. People love to share a bad customer experience, and not everyone will shy away from naming the culprit.
And a learning experience as a customer: never trust a website that doesn’t have clear pricing. I’m going to make a bold statement here, but the only reason not to have clear pricing is because you want to trick your customers. That might be by having hidden limits, or wanting to put the hard sell on them in a demo. A good product should sell itself. Its value proposition should be obvious. If it’s not, then spend money on UX experts, not salespeople. Atlassian have shown that you don’t even need a salesteam to sell enterprise products.
We ended up spending hours individually responding to upset customers and apologizing for their frustration. For most of them, this was their first encounter with our company and there is a good chance that their confidence in our brand will be lost forever.
Learning point 5: If you take responsibility when you screw up and apologise, people are surprisingly forgiving.
We didn’t want anyone to come away from this experience with a bad taste , so we sent the following email to everyone that had registered for the webinar:
Hi Everyone,
We just wanted to apologize for yesterday’s webinar. This is one of the first times we have dipped our toe into the world of online webinars and it did not go as well as we had hoped. We ran into some technical issues that meant many people were locked out of the webinar room, and many of those who did manage to make it in had video and audio issues. Because of this, Steven and I were both a bit flustered and didn’t feel we were on top form.
We really appreciate that you took time out of your day to come join us. To thank you for that, we want to give you free access to all the books in our Writing Resource Library (worth over $50).
In case you didn’t receive the follow-up email, the discount codes we promised are XXXX for 40% off ProWritingAid Premium, and XXXX to save on BookBaby’s Copy or Line Editing services.
If you are still looking for some great self-editing training, check out this video we did with bestselling author Jerry Jenkins: Aggressive Self Editing: How To Become Happy with Every Word You Write
We remain excited about the prospect of free online training. We will learn from this experience and come back with some more excellent guests and topics.
Thanks again for all your patience and see you again soon,
Chris Banks
Founder of ProWritingAid
Our inbox then filled up again, but to our amazement, this time people were full of positivity and support.
Talk about “over-delivering” and for “making it right” in such a fabulous way. I look forward to reading all your books (and trying ProWritingAid, of course).
and
You are not responsible for technical glitches. I believe you gave a fantastic presentation. As a result, I signed up for the lifetime plan this morning! Hooray!
and
Thank you for your email and for your generosity! Almost no one does things perfectly the first time of course. I’m just sorry that it had to happen to you while you had an audience. But things often go wrong through no fault of our own and we sometimes have to learn the hard, painful way. I’m sure everything will turn out better next time.
In the end, we turned a potential problem into an opportunity to connect on a personal level with a new community of users.
All of this could have been avoided, however, if the company had anticipated our needs and then acted in our best interests when a problem arose. It’s a good lesson that we will pass on to our own customer service team.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +439,678 people.
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