Inconsistent messaging will damage your team's reputation
Who's on first?
Recently I needed to order some electronic equipment online. I went to the site, put in my order, and waited. After the initial order acknowledgment email, I got nothing but silence from the vendor. Two weeks later, when I was beginning to wonder whether the order had even gone through, I received a support email from their team.
We regret to inform you that due to unforeseen circumstances, there has been a delay in the inventory shipment for your recent purchase [Order XXXXXX]. […] Please accept our sincerest apologies for this inconvenience. […] at this moment, we cannot commit to a specific delivery date, but we are expecting to be shipping orders within the next 2 weeks.
To show our appreciation for your patience, we would like to offer you a 10% discount on your current order. If you prefer, we completely understand if you decide to cancel your order at this time, and we will provide a full refund.
So far, so good. While I could certainly complain about how long it took for them to acknowledge the delay, this communication was clear, apologetic, and offered alternative paths forward. I wrote back to accept the discount, and figured I’d hear back once the item was on its way to me. Instead, two days later, I received an automated email from their e-commerce system confirming that my order was canceled and I had been refunded in full.
WTF, I thought to myself, and shot off a response to the open support issue.
I just received this message—was my order fully canceled or is this related to the delay/discount?
Shortly I got a reply:
The email you have received is related to the discount. I would like to confirm with you that we have applied the 10% discount as promised. and you should expect a refund of $XX to show up on the card ending with XXXX within 5-7 business days at the most.
And that’s where things stand. I’m optimistic I’ll eventually receive my order, but my confidence in this brand is shaken. Before this incident I’d have considered myself a lifelong customer, but not anymore. When I next need to buy or replace some of the same kind of gear, I’m going to consider alternatives.
What went wrong?
While this vendor’s communications with me were polite and informative, there were two major places they fell down:
Long initial delay: The fact that it took the vendor two weeks to acknowledge that the item in question was delayed was not great. I’d have expected a message to that effect within a few days. After two weeks of silence I had been on the verge of opening a support issue to ask, so at least they were able to beat me to it. But that’s a pretty low bar.
Inconsistent messaging: This is the one that really frustrated me. The offered discount had already gone a long way towards soothing my irritation about the delayed order, but all of that annoyance and concern came rushing back when I received the (automated) email confirming that my order had been ‘canceled’. In the space of reading that one message, my thoughts went from ‘Well, it’s late, but at least I got a break on the price’ to ‘Now what, am I going to have to try ordering it again? Should I just give up and try a competitor? I guess I need to reach out to them to clarify.’ This was not something I wanted to be thinking about on a lazy weekend.
Either one on its own would have been bad enough, but in conjunction they raise serious questions in my mind whether this vendor’s quality is slipping. Perhaps this impression is inaccurate—perhaps the hardware quality is as good as ever—but if they can’t get their customer communications together, it’s reasonable to wonder.
Lessons for customer engineers
Now, this particular example of bad support experience isn’t likely to occur in the B2B SaaS world—the customer type is different, the problems are different, the automated systems are different—but the overarching lesson is the same: don’t do anything that makes your customer say WTF.
This point is related to something we’ve discussed before: established standards for regularly updating customers. Just as it’s important to keep customers up to date on open issues, it’s critical to make sure you’re consistent in what you’re telling them.
If something changes, you need to explain that change to the customer and share the reasoning behind it, rather than presenting it as a fait accompli. For example, if you told the customer last week to expect a bug fix this week, don’t go back to them this week and announce that the fix will be delayed three more months without a full explanation and probably an apology. Worse still, don’t delay the fix and not bother to notify the customer until three months later. When things change, be proactive in explaining why.
If you have automated systems sending messages to the customer (email, app notifications, etc…) make sure that you are not giving the customer contradictory information. For instance, if your customer asks whether there’s currently an outage in your API component, of course you should be checking it yourself before responding. But at the same time, make absolutely sure that your product’s status page doesn’t say something different. If it does, make it a priority to find out why, and explain the apparent discrepancy to the customer.
Similarly to the above point, if you need to tell the customer something that contradicts your documentation or in-app text, you’d better have a good reason for it and explain it to the customer. If the documentation is out of date, explain to the customer where and why it is incorrect, and open an internal issue to update that document as soon as possible.
The common thread here is that wherever customers are hearing different things from different sources, trust in your team is the first thing to go. If your team tells the customer one thing, but they read something different in the documentation or receive an automated status email that says the exact opposite, they won’t be sure which to believe. And if they can’t rely on you to provide accurate information, they are going to be more resistant to your suggestions and the overall troubleshooting process will get slower and more cumbersome. Make sure that doesn’t happen by emphasizing to your team that they must be aware of all the information a customer has about your product. If they’re going to tell the customer something that doesn’t match that information, they should thoroughly explain why. This will go a long way towards maintaining, and even increasing, the customer’s estimation of your reliability and expertise.
Thanks for reading Andy's Support Notes 💻💥📝!