Putting on your game face.

I remember reading a while back that Aflac had just hired a new voice actor to replace the guy who voiced the Aflac duck. "Strange," thought I, "What happened to the old guy?" Turns out the old voice actor had made some insensitive comments, quite publicly, regarding the tsunami that hit Japan. Japan actually holds a large percentage of Aflac's customer base, and so it was quite an embarrassing to have their "Spokesperson" as it were to diminish them so. He was canned, and now we have a new voice for the duck.

How many times can you think of that someone did something publicly that cost them their job? Their reputation? Their family?

Take a minute and list them out. I'll wait.



Done? Good.

How long did it take for them fall apart? Why was it a bad thing to do? Was their an overreaction on the part of the boss or family?

Life gives us so many ways this can happen, it is hard to quantify every possible variable. But I have a tale of woe that might put things in perspective.

If you are not a geek or a nerd, you likely are not familiar with this story. It starts out last November when a guy who for this story is going by Dave tried to order a special game controller. The controller itself is not really the issue here, it simply serves as the item in question, a MacGuffin, if you will. Dave pays for this controller, and is told he can expect it early December. Great! Christmas item checked off the list.

Or... not. It is late arriving, so he emails the companies PR and Customer Service group to inquire about the delay.

From: Dave 
To: Ocean Marketing 
Dec 16, 2011, at 1:34 PM

I ordered 2 of the upcoming PS3 controllers (invoice xxxxxxxxx—Nov 3, 2011). Any chance of getting an update of when these items will ship? I’m not really happy about being forced to pay upfront then have the advertised date of “Early December” be completely missed without any sort of update on availability. I really need one of them for a X-mas present as well. Anyways, looking forward to finally using one of these bad boys. Thanks and happy holidays.

-Dave

 This group is called Ocean Marketing. A man named Paul responds, quite poorly, with this: "Dec 17."
How very... concise.

From: Dave 
To: Ocean Marketing 
Dec 19, 2011, at 11:02 AM

Thanks for the reply Paul.  Can you clarify whether my particular order already sent or if Dec 17 was the first day shipments went out?  I have not received any sort of shipping confirmation email or tracking information.

Note the date and time stamp for the sending of this email. Since the reply from Paul was dearly lacking in information, Dave was grasping at straws as to why he did not have his products.

From here, the situation quickly falls apart. A few messages down the chain Paul degenerates the value of Dave's patronage, pretty much saying that they don't need his business, they items will sell anyway.

This is when all heck breaks loose. Dave replies, copying the whole chain of emails, and includes Kotaku, Penny-Arcade, and a few other news sites.

And then the vitriol really starts to flow.

Eventually Mike, the owner of Penny-Arcade and of the PAX Gamers con (Penny Arcade eXpo) gets into it, and then after tiring of trying to show Paul the error of his ways posts the entire E-Mail chain on his website.
I am not going to give you the whole chain here, you can read it at this link.

How long did it take for Paul's life to fall apart?

Thirteen and a half hours.  You can check the time stamp on the posts.

The customer may not always be right, but he is always going to talk about bad service. A customer will tell others about a bad experience far more often than they will a good one, and believe me, some of them can get vindictive when they do it.

I have a had a series of calls at work regarding a service that two employees feel one of them should have. I offered to them the only way I know to get that service. One of them, who is not a small player in the company, was not thrilled with my response. My answer was essentially, "Well, sir, this is the way I know how to do it. I simply don't have another answer for you." I could have left it at that, but I decided to check with my dept manager. I related the whole situation and he told me "No, you did it right, but why isn't he wanting to use the process?" And so on and so forth. I ended up calling back to offer some more ideas, which I hope left a good impression instead of the roadblock they could have perceived before. maybe it didn't help. I don't know. But I tried.

Paul... is so far out of the path of good customer service I wouldn't hire him to be a punching bag for angry buyers. He would probably be so dense they would hurt themselves.

Please, whatever your job is, work on being good at customer relations. Without them, you don't have a job.