When facing a product or PR problem that could be catastrophic for your business, there are a few things that you don’t do.
At the most basic, you don’t pretend the problem doesn’t exist and you don’t ignore the customer having the problem.
Sounds simple right?
Surprisingly, a large number of firms have yet to learn that ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. For one thing, pretending that you don’t have a problem makes you appear either negligent or incompetent. For another, the longer you fail to address it, the more time it has to spread through social media sites and to the traditional media. Toyota, BP, and Goldman Sachs have all flubbed this in recent memory – and all of them have more or less recovered from their missteps. But billion dollar companies have billion dollar budgets and the PR departments to match.
So what happens when a smaller firm ignores the basics?
A good example of “the bad” comes from LiveJournal, Inc., a blogging and social media site owned by Russia’s SUP:
- At 9:21pm on the 24th of October, users began complaining to the site’s release blog about various features that no longer worked after the most recent update. Among these were various broken buttons and a timed, automatic log-out that redirected users to the homepage at every-few-minutes intervals.
- At 9:29 pm on the 24th, one irate user pointed out that when they logged in they were being connected to another user’s account. More chimed in, some pointing out that they were able to see information such as home addresses, Paypal account information, and whatever other data the user had stored .
- At 11:20 pm, A customer service representative responded that the logging out and redirecting was a feature, not a bug, meant to drive away spam bots. The customer service rep ignored the many posts regarding the privacy issue.
- Over the next two days, hundreds of user complaints piled up in LiveJournal’s release blog and were all ignored. Responses to the continued silence ranged from a very polite, “I’d appreciate more information”, to the less patient, “Communicate, dammit!”, to numerous assertions that users would be closing their paid accounts and taking their money elsewhere. No response was received to any of these comments and one user relayed that her attempts to contact the company had been met with the response that reps had “no authority to make an official statement”.
- At 12:45 on the 27th, four days later, the company finally posted an update to their maintenance blog wherein they buried a statement that the login/account mismatch error had only existed “for 3 minutes” on the 24th and that there had been “no affect on security”. No statement was ever issued on the blog post where customers complained. Customers were never addressed directly.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the site’s overall traffic has dropped 15% since October. (This entry posted 12/16/2011.)
It’s not hard to see what LiveJournal did wrong here. From ignoring customers, to pretending the problem didn’t exist, to dismissing whatever problem did exist.
What might be harder to spot is just how much LiveJournal lucked out: No one started a Facebook campaign, passionate rants were confined to LiveJournal itself, and no one in the media (digital or traditional) thought the company was interesting enough to pick up the story despite the four day lag.
And yet, still, they lost 15% of their traffic.
So, if I may make a humble suggestion: When your customer perceives a crisis, don’t ignore them.