Get Response – A Lesson in How to Kill a Company
July 19th, 2009 by Ingrid Cliff
Get Response is an autoresponder company – a very successful one. Previously many businesses chose to use them due to their reliable delivery, great pricing structure and useful features. They were rapidly closing on some of the big companies such as Aweber. But then …
… things turned sour. They undertook a massive overhaul of their system. This overhaul was announced to subscribers as a brilliant event that would give even more functionality and features. They explained that there may be the odd one or two glitches on changeover but to rest assured that within 24 hours all would be ironed out.
Hopes and expectations were high. The IT community waited and watched. Changeover day. One by one web forms failed through their 93,000 customers. Emails were sent multiple times or not at all. RSS feeds failed, attachments disappeared and newsletters no longer were delivered. Basic features such as unsubscribe or change my details no longer worked. A litany of errors created a massive train wreck.
Aside from the techincal failures, they also had business failures. Pricing – one of the main USPs of the company was jacked up to the same level as Aweber, removing that competitive advantage. So people now were paying the same fees for a bug riddled system.
Throughout it all the customer support people wrote warm reassuring “your feedback is important to us … send us a ticket and we will get back to you” comments on the forum. Meanwhile tickets were never answered, Live-Chat timed out, forum posts only recieved the standard response and the phones rang out.
The CEO disappeared into hiding – throwing in the odd comment about how “the majority of customers were happy” without realising that the majority of his customers probably had no idea that their autoresponder system no longer worked. His big clients – the ones who made thousands of dollars per day or who simply were IT aware and tested things were not happy … And more importantly were telling all and sundry about their unhappiness on forums, Twitter & blogs.
Yes, errors are slowly being resolved day by day (it is now nearly 3 weeks since the changeover), but clients have to totally recode all of their webforms, and in many cases rewrite each and every email campaign. People are defecting in droves and it is a PR disaster of monumental proportions for Get Response.
What could they have done differently?
In the testing phase they could have listened to the feedback they were given. Reading the forum posts, people who were involved in the testing had advised GR of the problems that resulted. Do not ask for feedback from your customers unless you are going to action it.
Test on all major platforms and browsers. Looking at the forum posts people are being advised that GR works in Firefox. That’s lovely but the majority of the world still uses Internet Explorer. In addition WordPress is the market leading blogging platform – it would have been useful to test the changeover on a test WordPress site.
If a program you launch generates the online equivalent of the Exxon Oil Spill – you need to hire a disaster recover PR company and get cracking on providing a highly visible, co-ordinated response. The CEO needs to be seen everywhere, explaining the situation and the steps to resolve it.
Rolling back to the previous version (similar to the Facebook debacle and New Coke launch) is a definite option that shouldn’t be discounted in the early days when it becomes apparent your launch has bombed.
Get back to people - if people complain with an issue, then the least that can be done is an acknowledgement of some form. Ideally there should be an ongoing list of bugs and the status of the fixes.
Hire people who can speak English and who can spell. The new website (aside from all the technical bugs) is full of spelling errors, typos and is very poorly written in parts. This is totally unacceptable for a major company. At the very least hire an editor to proof everything before going live.
Compensate loss – at the very least offer some compensation such as waiving of fees in acknowledgement of your error.
It will be interesting to watch over the coming months whether Get Response works its way out of the mess it has created, or whether the huge weight of public opinion and bad press will crash the company.
In the meantime – my apologies to each and every one of my clients. Please let me know of any further or continuing problems that you may encounter with my emails, newsletters, product delivery thanks. I will find a workaround wherever I can.
Until next time
Ingrid Cliff
We put your business into words
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 8:09 am and is filed under Customer Service Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 19th, 2009 at 11:13 am
This is great information Ingrid. I can’t believe that in this day and age, people are still inhospitable in terms of helping others with problems. If you caused something to go wrong, fix it as soon as possible. Or better yet, prevent the problem before it becomes one.