Last summer we sent out a mass email telling a few thousand customers about a new private Web site we’d created for them to manage their accounts. We’d sent out the email in the middle of the night, and promptly went to bed.
The problem was that the link to the site got mangled by the email software which made it all but useless. Customers tried to click the link and got the dreaded 404 Page Not Found error. Hundreds of people in Europe were just coming online as we were losing consciousness, and the fatal bug stopped them in their tracks.
Here’s the story we pieced together in the morning:
- 12:28 a.m. The email message is sent.
- 12:35 a.m. We hit the sack.
- 12:55 a.m. The first few European users report the issue to us via email
- 12:58 a.m. User JNetty reports the problem in a comment on our blog
- 1:04 a.m. User Dennisc responds to JNetty in a comment on our blog, providing the complete solution
- 1:07 a.m. Other users provide additional advice in our blog’s comments for solving the problem
As you can see, something magic happened as the sun came up in London and Paris. Left completely to their own devices, customers identified our screw-up and published a fix without us ever lifting a finger. We didn’t even provide a proper discussion forum for them to engage in topical conversations. They made do with the terribly ill-fitting blog comments.
Of course, most people never read the blog comments to find such answers. They just emailed us again and again with the same problem, forcing us to answer the same question dozens of times.
What’s wrong with this picture?
All posts
2 Comments
Valid email address required for posting
What’s wrong with this picture?
The fact that you never tested the e-mail, perhaps? Don’t you guys add yourselves to the distribution list?
Actually, the real url worked fine and was well tested, the problem occurred when the mass emailer script we’d written and tested locally was moved to the production server with different global variables (apologies for the geek speak). Still, it was a regrettable error that we only had to make once. My point of telling the story above is to demonstrate that though companies inevitably make mistakes, customers are often eager to help each other fill in the gaps.
It’s not realistic to expect a company to be perfect, but it is fair to expect it to be honest and open to customer sharing.