Wednesday 27 May 2009

Twitter spam=FAIL (UPDATE Customer Service=WIN)

Update Nov-09: It's been a few months since I 'let off steam' with the post below. It sounds a bit over-the-top reading it now. Anyway, as you can see in the comments I was recently contact by the company directly and I couldn't be more impressed with how they handled my 'complaint'. That sort of honesty in customer service deserves another look. The remainder of the post reads 'as it was'.

In the normal course of tweeting today, I happened to post
Argh - moving an ASP.NET app that requires Crystal Reports for VS 2003... oh the humanity
Nothing special about that - I often complain about stuff on Twitter... but mostly programming and stuff, not specific products or companies (see When Word of Mouth Got a Permalink) so I was unprepared for what happened next...



W.T.F.!? Okay so Twitter is totally open and there are all sorts of search-bots BUT give-me-a-break with the crappy marketing line and unattended twitter account.



Phew now I feel better :-)
at

2 comments:

  1. DavidThi80809/11/2009, 19:42

    Craig;

    My name is David Thielen and I am the CTO and founder at Windward. I am also the person who approved trying the twitter-bot. First off, I apologize for this.

    I have always encouraged my employees to try new approaches - to programming, to marketing, to sales, etc. And I understand that pushing the envelope means sometimes we make mistakes. But I figure better that then we rarely do anything new because we are so careful.

    As with everything new, we tracked the twitter-bot and after a month dropped it. We got some positive responses, but the percentage was so low we decided that we were probably annoying a lot more people than we were helping.

    Next to speak to your point about suggesting us as an alternative when you were having problems. Two products we live on, IntelliJ and ZenDesk, I learned about because I was asking for help on other products and these were suggested as alternatives (two different sets of posts). I'm very glad both were suggested as the real solution to my problem.

    We'll never make everyone happy with our marketing efforts. Even the video Cubicle War we paid to produce just to get some name recognition had some people upset because our intent was to increase our name recognition and as such, was impure.

    I understand that you were upset. And I am sorry that we upset you. I take full responsibility for this. If you would like to discuss firther, you can contact me directly at david@windward.net or 303-499-2544 x1185 and I am happy to discuss this with you.

    Thank You
    David Thielen

    ReplyDelete
  2. Craig Dunn15/11/2009, 01:23

    David, thanks for taking the time to respond to my 'rant'. I take it back - I would be a customer of yours in future based on that sort of personalized support.
    Thanks
    Craig

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.