SitePoint: Don’t forget that I’m a Customer
Text has the lowest communication channel richness – text is usually asynchronous, it lacks non-verbal cues, gestures and tonal inflection, and it falls 90+ percent short of the richness of face-to-face conversation. Therefore, business should be careful how they train, empower and support social networking behaviour around their brand. Don’t overlook Customer Relationship Management (CRM) values.
The Twitter 140 Character Constraint
Twitter is a strange beast in many ways – the opportunity to converse (almost) synchronously in short tweets allows for a shoot-from-the-hip style of business communication. On the positive side it provides a massive reach but on the negative side it has to be weighed against the magnification of potential damage to a brand that can occur when those empowered within the business confuse the lines between forum style cut-and-thrust with real-time social networking.
A recent interaction with SitePoint is worth reveiw. The backstory is that my RSS update for the SitePoint podcast informed me about an episode 100 broadcast live on Valentine’s Day. The web page does not inform the reader (who may have listened to 99 previous episodes) that podcast number 100 will be made available later. So last night, tired… as a customer (note it wasn’t a message directly to SitePoint at this stage)… I tweeted:
So Sitepoint’s 100th podcast was only available LIVE? Srsly? No mp3 to download? On Valentine’s Day? #FAILSteven Clark aka nortypig
Enter the Indignant SitePoint Employee Volunteer on Twitter
While helpful with the answer to this question it does appear one of the regular hosts of the SitePoint podcast, Patrick O’Keefe, was personally offended by my dissatisfaction and he sent a reply from his personal Twitter account. The following tweet arrived in my Twitter stream in the morning.
@nortypig People use #FAIL so much these days, it’s meaningless. Instead of making assumptions, I try to push people to ask questions.Patrick O’Keefe
This was followed by a slightly more helpful tweet:
@nortypig Or treat people how they’d like to be treated. We release new shows every Thurs/Fri. It’ll be out then. Thanks for listening.Patrick O’Keefe
So a SitePoint employee volunteer sends me two tweets… a SitePoint customer… a consumer of SitePoint products. However, those tweets deconstruct as a moderate level indignant personal flame on behalf of SitePoint. Unfortunately, I’ve had similar incidents with SitePoint employees over the years and the impact on that relationship is that it makes me less inclined to purchase SitePoint products or consume their content or contribute as a web author.
Deconstructing the Patrick O’Keefe Tweets
The first part of Patrick’s first tweet is irrelevant information – “@nortypig People use #FAIL so much these days, it’s meaningless.”
As an opening CRM line on behalf of SitePoint to its customer this is BAD – it is purely response to the personal slight Patrick perceived from my original tweet. An unhappy customer is still a customer with long-term revenue and brand influence potential for SitePoint. The person who uses #FAIL determines it’s relevance, context and economy not the business the customer feels failed them. All businesses fail occasionally… it’s not whether you’ll fail as a business but how you respond and manage that failure when it happens (refer to CRM values and business objectives). Never blame the customer for not knowing something.
The second part of Patrick’s tweet was equally as CRM ambivalent on behalf of SitePoint’s business objectives – he wrote, “Instead of making assumptions, I try to push people to ask questions.”
The problem with that sentence is that it blatantly states that the customer is wrong to voice dissatisfaction. It’s a negative aimed back at the customer in a statement that the false assumption is the customer’s fault… the question shouldn’t be whether the customer was ignorant of the context but HOW and WHY they were ignorant of the context in the first place. Patrick wasn’t flaming me back in a forum… he was (in CRM reality) speaking directly to me as a representative of SitePoint via the social networking tool of Twitter.
At my original Tweet the logical step should have been for Patrick to ask why I didn’t understand… how did I come to that assumption… and that would have led SitePoint back to the page that failed to provide the information.
The second tweet began with the same indignant rush – “@nortypig Or treat people how they’d like to be treated.”
Again, an overly personal response to my original tweet about SitePoint and the #FAIL hashtag. This comment has little relationship to SitePoint’s business objectives.
Finally, the relevant information arrived in the second half of the second tweet – “We release new shows every Thurs/Fri. It’ll be out then. Thanks for listening.”
That information should have been provided on the webpage linked in my RSS stream for the live Episode 100 on Valentine’s Day. As a customer it’s not my role to look for that answer… and as customers do, I will make assumptions if not provided relevant information (Marketing 101).
The Correct Response from Patrick O’Keefe on behalf of SitePoint
So what would have been the correct CRM business response, if any, to my disparaging tweet about SitePoint with the #FAIL hashtag?
Patrick O’Keefe should simply have responded from a SitePoint Twitter account – “We release new shows every Thurs/Fri. It’ll be out then. Thanks for listening.”
Nothing more. Simple. The first three parts of Patrick’s Twitter response simply translated into “You’re rubbish, we don’t value you as a customer and how dare you offend us at SitePoint.”
Later, SitePoint’s official Twitter stream replied:
@nortypig What page would you expect it to be on? We do tweet notifications well ahead of time… ^hawk”
I replied that it should have been on the page that their RSS podcast stream sent me to on Valentine’s day. And they didn’t take it personally. But I should add that you should never assume that someone who listens to your podcast and receives your RSS actually subscribes to your Twitter stream. Something that might be noted on the usability side of things at SitePoint.
Agree or disagree with my commentary of this situation or your perception of Twitter as a CRM business tool. The customer is the guts and gravy of your business. It’s not the customer’s job to fill in the gaps of your information stream.
Most of all understand that every interaction with every customer by every single employee is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to your brand.
Update: 17 February, 2011
I received a tweet from the official @sitepointdotcom account this morning with a request to amend the statement that Patrick O’Keefe is a SitePoint employee. I have updated the above post to reflect that Patrick is a SitePoint volunteer (which is an unpaid employee). I also informed SitePoint that were they to request that I alter or delete this article under legal threat I would without a doubt bend to their request.
At that point @sitepointdotcom deleted all @nortypig mentions on the subject. I don’t follow them so who cares if they chose to block me or not.
Seriously, how hard is it to just admit that a usability issue existed on the page the RSS sent visitors to that led to a very small misunderstanding that could have easily been rectified through adept CRM values. Every person impacts your brand, every situation contributes to their imprint on your bottom line sales… accept criticism and move on. As it stands I no longer consume SitePoint content – newsletters, podcasts, books – due to a thick bile taste in my mouth from this experience. It may only be $30 they miss out on… but what about next year? Five years? How many sales come through informal recommendation and positive word of mouth?
They simply forgot I was a customer.
