Customer feedback. It can bite you in the…donkey.
eriksr on July 30th, 2008
I have a secret. My secret is that I love to read about companies making asses of themselves. Not because I suffer from a severe case of schadenfreude, but because there’s just so darn much you can learn from these situations.
And, yeah, they sometimes make me laugh.
Case in point: One of my favorite blogs, Consumerist (a veritable font of best practices or case studies for anyone dealing with consumers), recently wrote about how Eforcity Eforcity bribed a customer to remove a negative Amazon.com review she had given one of their products with a refund.
A copy of their letter is below. But stay with me here.
Your first lesson today, class . . .
First off, credit goes to Eforcity for being proactive about the things people are saying about it online. Way to go! If every business was this proactive we might have a veritable consumer utopia on our hands! So I award you 4 million points.
But wait. I am now about to penalize you those 4 million points, plus 12 million more for being such an, well, I don’t want to use the “ass” word.
So let’s say donkey.
The value of feedback
Customer feedback is an open and honest dialogue between a customer and a company and one customer and other customers.
The key here is “open and honest.”
But if that feedback is manipulated by the company, then you lose the “open and honest” part. And not only does it make the feedback pointless (which is why Eforcity loses 4 million points), but even worse (and this is why Eforcity loses an addition 12 million points) it makes the company look like a manipulative bully.
Which creates a helluva PR nightmare, doesn’t it?
And, straight from The Consumerist, here is a copy of the letter the customer says Eforcity sent to her.
The letter:
Dear Sarah X XXXXXXXX
RE: Amazon order #XXX-XXXXXXX-XXXXXXX
Invoice #XXXXXXX
Item title: SAM M300… Car Charger
Thank you for your recent purchase with Eforcity on Amazon.com.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. We would like to offer you a refund, if the negative feedback is removed.
Please reply to this email directly and let us know. As soon as the feedback is removed, we will go ahead and process a refund.
Please follow the below instructions to remove feedback on Amazon:
1. Go to http://www.amazon.com/your-account.
2. Find the pull-down menu next to View by Order. Select ORDERS PLACED IN THE LAST 6 MONTHS, and hit the GO button.
3. After you sign in, you’ll find a listing of your recent orders. Select the relevant order and click the VIEW ORDER button.
4. You will find a feedback section 2/3rds of the way down the page. To remove feedback, click on the REMOVE link in the feedback section of the order summary.
5. You may only remove feedback if it is 60 days or less since you left the feedback.
We appreciate your business, and again would like to extend our sincere apology. Please feel free to let us know how we may further assist you with your order.
Sincerely,
Salina
Customer Service Team
And here is the “you’re killing me part”
As if the request to remove the negative feedback were not bad enough, the very specific instructions on how to do so are just side-splitting.
(And bearing in mind that these sorts of things tend to be form letters, it does make you wonder how often Eforcity sent this out, doesn’t it?)
