Excellent Customer Service, or Greasing the Squeaky Wheel?
One of the things I’ve long wondered about bloggers writing about good service from a company is whether they got that service because the company really cares about taking care of it’s customers, or if they got that service because of who they are.
A fine example came about last weekend when Louis Gray wrote about his good experience with Disqus. Now Louis is a fairly well-known blogger, he’s been listed on Techmeme a few times and has significantly more readers than I do. Louis was trying to do something that I had attempted to do, use Disqus on a customized Blogger template, with an FTP connection to my own domain.
At the time I attempted this, I posted a quick note to Twitter about it and Daniel Ha asked me to send my template to their help address and see if they could help. That was very responsive, and I was impressed. That was April 14. I’ve never gotten a response from them.
Louis, however, got a response the next morning, and then an additional tweak after asking for it “seven minutes later”.
Louis chalks this up to “a great example of next-generation customer service, and engaging”. I’m wondering if it’s more a case of knowing how to get good PR where you can?
My point here is not to try and discredit anything Disqus or Louis is doing here, and it’s not to whine about not getting the same treatment. If you read the comments over there, I’m not the only one who didn’t get so much support and Louis isn’t the only one with a great story of getting support from Disqus. If I do have a point, it’s that as bloggers, especially A-list type bloggers, I wonder if we shouldn’t take what responses we get with a grain of salt. We may get great service from an organization, and may be tempted to do what we can to help that company out and tout their product, but do we really know whether our readers would get that same service, without the bully pulpit and the same audience? Wouldn’t it be only natural for someone like Daniel to spend his limited time making sure a well known blogger gets first rate service, even if that means other people get less? After all, who’s going to influence more people?
I’m just asking….
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Mike, I don’t have enough points of reference to say if my experience was dramatically different than others, but it’s not a huge surprise that it was extraordinary. I essentially thought I was SOL, given my Blogger config.
To be honest, I feel like I know the real truth about Louis Gray. He’s no A-lister. So if it’s portrayed that way, surely there’s some mistake. 🙂
Louis, you may not be an a-ister yet, but you sure seem to be closing in on it. and to be fair, as I said in the post I don’t know whether Daniel was being cynical and helping you knowing you would write about it or was just really trying to help because you wanted to use Disqus. I was trying to make a larger point about reviews. In the old days of newspaper reviews of restaurants or hotels, the reviewer wouldn’t let the establishment know who he was, for fear that they would, naturally, treat him/her differently than they would treat the typical customer. In the case of Web 2.0 services, it’s not really possible to be incognito like that, so it may behoove us as bloggers, who don’t have the same journalistic training, to have a few doubts about the service we’re getting compared to what the average user is getting.