I got a message from my step-dad this morning with the subject “Happy Birthday Ex-Wife’s Son”. In addition to his birthday greeting he’d forwarded me a birthday reminder email he’d received from Genie, the viral geneology site that I encouraged my whole family to join. It read:
Dear Thomas Muller,
Thor Muller, your ex-wife’s son, has a birthday coming up on Apr 17th.
Click the link below to enter a birthday greeting for Thor and we’ll deliver it on Apr 17th.
- The Geni Team
I was wondering how Genie, a slick though narrowly focused web app, would suck us back in after the initial novelty wore off. I wasn’t expecting them to use their knowledge of my parents’ ongoing divorce to promote online greeting cards. This is what happens when you don’t bother to proofread your robot’s marketing copy.
5 Comments
Wow, sorry about that. I’m the developer that created that feature. Your blog post was passed to me and has me a bit concerned. You are only supposed to be emailed birthday reminders for your blood relatives and current spouses blood relatives. After seeing your post I checked the logic again and it seems to be doing the right thing. I made a tree where I had an ex wife with a child that wasn’t my own and tried it out and it worked as expected.
Maybe you can email me directly or post to our forum (http://forum.geni.com) so we can get more information about your tree and investigate it further.
No problem, Adam. We had a laugh about it, and understand how these things can happen, given that we’re software people ourselves.
I really appreciate that you took the time to pop over to our blog to answer directly. We talk a lot about what makes for excellent customer service in our increasingly transparent society, and you’ve embodied it here.
Thanks!
Ditto on Thor’s comment. This is one of the best blog replies I’ve seen in some time. Go Geni Go!
It could have been a lot worse. Something like this:
Thor,
I’m still concerned about that issue you had though, so if you could contact me directly (you should have my email from the post) so I can look at your specific situation, it would be greatly appreciated.
adam
-geni
One Trackback
[…] It’s sad to see this behavior on a day when I had an overwhelmingly positive customer experience on this blog. Mere hours after describing an accidentally offensive automated email from Geni, an uber-cool genealogy app, the company had responded apologetically. They saw my public airing of the misfire as an opportunity to show they cared enough about my experience to reply personally. Now that’s a company that gets it. […]