David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

I’ve been a loyal NewEgg customer- until now. Their recent customer service blunders have made me reconsider for the future where I’ll take my business. Here’s a rundown of what happened, and what should have happened

The Background

Friday

Last Friday, August 27th 2010, I placed an order to NewEgg for a handful of small items;  USB cables, ink and a mouse. Total of $151.05. One of the major reasons I order from NewEgg is that their processing and shipping is really fast. When I lived in Boston, if I ordered something prior to noon and did their UPS ground shipping, I’d generally have it the next day.

9:47 AM – I get a confirmation email. I’m hoping that I’ll have it Monday, but I’m unsure of how long shipping will take since I just moved to Ohio.

9:55 AM – I get a payment rejection email. I had used my stored Visa information, but somehow I messed up my CIV/CCV number. I go in and correct the information immediately to get the order back on track. Frustration level: 0/10

10:39 AM – Another email from NewEgg. Payment failed again due to billing address. While I’d updated my shipping address, I forgot to change my billing address. My bad. I log in and correct it. Frustration level 1/10, but really its all my fault at this stage. This stuff happens when you move.

I figure since its before noon that the ‘Processing’ status will soon update to ‘Shipping’ like it normally does. At the end of the day, there is no change. Oh well, stuff happens. I’ll wait until Monday.

Monday

After breakfast, I check my NewEgg account, since I didn’t get any other emails or phone calls from them yet. The order is still in ‘Processing’ status. Frustration level: 2/10. I’m sure contacting customer service will fix this quickly.

Via their Live Chat feature, I contact their customer service. Often Live Chat isn’t perfect, but at least there is a log, and there’s no dealing with poor phone connections or non-American accents.

I give him the needed information. Didn’t I give them this information prior? Oh well, surely he’ll take care of it.

Ok, so there’s a department taking care of it. I’m confident that it will resolve soon.

1PM – No change. I’ll contact them again and see what’s up. Surely, they were able to push the button and send verification to my bank again.

For a company that normally resolves stuff so quickly, this is taking quite a while. I don’t like being told to just ‘wait’ with no real feedback. Putting through a credit card verification doesn’t take that long. I’m confident that by the end of the day however it will be fixed or someone will contact me. Frustration level: 4/10. Zero updates at the end of the day.

Tuesday

I wake up early and find that there’s still no change. Surely, a representative will help. At this point I wonder if I should have ordered on Amazon instead. Their prices are comparable often, I’ve got a Prime account for free/fast shipping. The Friday when I placed the NewEgg order, I had also placed Amazon orders and they had arrived on Monday.

I think to myself, “I’m frustrated, but things happen. Surely, since the delay is on their end and I’ve spent good money in the past with NewEgg, they’ll be up for switching me to Next-Day or 2-day shipping from UPS Ground right? Seems a small price to pay for keeping a customer happy.” I know Zappos employees are able to do anything within reason to make a customer happy, and that the trend is being lauded as a great customer service method. This doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask for at least.

A few major points to highlight here.

I’m clearly frustrated, but trying to be polite and I’m not accusing this rep of poor service or making mistakes. I let them know that I am aware I could have purchased from elsewhere, and that I will cancel my order if resolution is not had today. This seems firm, but reasonable.

They claim my bank was closed when they called. Bank of America has 24/7 verification lines, and I had provided them the BofA number in my profile.

At first she doesn’t understand what I’m asking for in speeding up the shipping. Then when she realizes it, she thinks that I want to pay for faster shipping. She doesn’t even consider for a moment that I’m frustrated, and that adding next day shipping would have made me perfectly happy and this blog post would never have happened.

Finally, since I’m not getting anywhere, I ask for a manager. This is a fairly standard request in customer service, which is always to be met with, “Of course, one moment please.” Instead, she says there isn’t one available, and doesn’t even offer to note my frustrations to them, or have them contact me back later. I was hoping that a manager would want to know of their customer service issues in that department, and also might be able to resolve the issue.

Her apologies ring empty.

Frustration level: 8/10

1:06 PM – I get a email that they have successfully verified my card. w00t! My frustration level subsides a bit. Progress! 6/10

1:10PM – Payment charged. Ok, its moving. Now when will they ship? Did a manager end up upgrading my shipping? 5/10.

5:17PM – I get my shipping notifications. Three of them. All from different locations- NJ, TN, and CA. Why are some of the ink carts coming from different states? I get keeping different types of parts in different areas but I’m confused. Never before had NewEgg shipped from anywhere buy NJ. All UPS Ground. Two of them set to arrive Thursday, one on Friday. No email/phone calls from a manager. Frustration Level: 6/10. Whatever, the stuff is coming. Lesson learned.

Wednesday

I think to blog about this. Pretty frustrating experience. Could have all been fixed if they had called me on Friday and did the verification right then on the phone. Or had one of the reps upgraded my shipping. I contact NewEgg for the chat logs. I had only saved one of them.

Did Leah freak out and drop intentionally? Seemed odd. I expect the logs soon from Vanna and trust that I’ll have them soon. I check my email and spam box an hour later- nothing. Frustration level rising…

Thursday

Well, asking a third time for the chat logs should be the charm right? Sure enough, I get another rep and I have the logs within the hour.

Overview

What has NewEgg done here? What did they do wrong? What did they do right? What should have they changed

Right:

• Having a LiveChat line – Customers know that a phone call will involve hold times and might take up too much time. This is a good move.
• Keeping good records

Wrong:

• Not empowering staff
• Not connecting a customer with a manager on request
• Constant apology without action
• Not following through on promises (chat logs)
• Slow verification department with no way to speed things up

Result:

• Probably lost a customer that spends around 2K/year with them
• Lost referrals to friends (already my girlfriend ordered her new monitor through Amazon instead)
• This blog post

What should have they done:

• Phone call when first verification failed
• Faster re-verification process
• Don’t tell customers to ‘just wait’, without feedback
• When all else fails, offer faster/free shipping
• Try to make the customer happy
• Try to show some real understanding, not robot voice
• Connect a customer to a manager instantly upon request
• Followthrough with promises to deliver things, like chat logs and other requests.

TL;DR – I screw up my card information. NewEgg takes forever to get it together afterward and provides poor customer service. Shop elsewhere.

Today on Twitter news spread like wildfire about Matt Bacak (don’t follow him) and his terrible PR release that he put out on PRWeb. Not only does this highlight my prior post that Twitter has become a numbers game and popularity contest, but it shows that this guy is a self promoting monster. Sure, we all self promote some, who doesn’t? But this guy takes it to a new level of ego and arrogance.

One of Matt's websites! How friendly!

People on Twitter swarmed on this guy. In his press release he claimed himself to be big on Twitter because HubSpot’s Twitter Grader put him in the Twitter Elite for Atlanta, GA. The language used made him seem so full of himself, egotistical and in short a douchebag. It was enough for hundreds to Digg his press release claiming him the “The Biggest Douchebag in Social Media“. It should be noted that Twitter Grader can’t tell that “Atlanta” and “Atlanta, GA” are the same place, and that he’s only highly ranked in “Atlanta, GA” where even a Cat is above him as was pointed out in a comment on Jamie Scheu’s blog, in a post about the ordeal.

You should take a glance at the Search/Summize feed for this guy, as its a riot from the past few hours.

I had a hint from the beginning that this likely wasn’t a one time occurance however, and when Googling his name my Firefox autocomplete put finished out his name with “scam” at the end. That seemed odd, so I selected it and searched for “Matt Bacak Scam“. All of a sudden I felt that I was watching an X-Files or Lost episode where what you thought was the main plot suddenly became a diversion and melted away.

It seems that our friend Matt Bacak isn’t just a newbie in PR and marketing that got it all wrong. No, this guy knows what he’s doing and is a grade A scum of the internet douchebag that makes the guys on 4chan look good.

There have been alleged scams that he’s ran (that seem like 1-step pyramid schemes), every press release has more spin than watching Fox News, oh and he has great sites like http://www.generatemillionsonline.com/ on which he claims he made over 3 million last year, on the front page. Most people don’t even like to talk about their salaries, but bragging about it like that is pretty bad. Other sites like http://www.powerfulpromoter.com/ are just as bad, claiming to make you gobs of money with your web business.

It’s almost too much to type. He puts stupidly shameless self promoting stuff on Digg. Not just blog articles that he wants to share, but ones like “Matt Bacak joins Twitter“.

Then he has the audacity to have a site like “Matt Bacak’s Pansy Report” in which is partially refutes some claims against him, and tries to use reverse psychology and other sales techniques to try to get you to sign up for his stuff. Oh, and he claims in it to warn you about the “Dark side of internet marketing”. There’s complaints on Rip-Off Report about this guy. He IS the dark side of internet marketing. Look at the final page on his Pansy Report. It’s a get-rich-quick scheme.

So let’s be clear, this wasn’t one guy’s small mistake in putting out this press release. The guy’s entire career is a dark mark on the internet, marketing, pr and social media as a whole. I don’t care how much money the guy has made, but he’s clearly one step from being a fraud, and doesn’t make what most of us would term as an honest living.

Sickeningly, since all of this has happened… he’s gotten almost 100 new followers. Of course Matt himself hasn’t responded to anyone via Twitter so god knows what he thinks about this. Incidentally he has his office phone number of  770-271-1536 on his website, so maybe I’ll call tomorrow morning and ask for comment.

UPDATE 12/5/2008: Yea, I tore into this guy a little hard. So did just about everyone. He screwed up. Putting something out on that PRWeb site cost him at least $500, so I’m sure it wasn’t something done without ‘any’ thought put into it. I mainly have a problem with this guy’s ego and tone. I have zero problem with success in social media. I’m friends/acquintences with many ‘big’ people in social media and think they are great. None of them are full of themselves, or have huge egos. I didn’t even know that Chris Brogan or Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) were “big” in social media until someone else told me. Zero ego, just confidence and skill. Matt’s done some of the right thing by partially owning up to making a mistake. He hasn’t done so with the hubris that I’d expect after a massive screwup like this, but he has done well and tried to reach out to the people who made comments about him and for that I respect him. I still think that in general what he does online with “Internet Marketing” isn’t exactly something that I find to be good or wholesome and I’m not sure what real value it offers, more than just pissing people off or offering get-rich-quick schemes. He’s obviously done well in his field, but just needs to tone down things a bit and learn a bit of humility. He charges for seminars, but in him doing this, he’s gotten more than a seminar of Social Media consulting of what not to do.

Twitter, the CB-Radio of the internet, has become a follower numbers game for many. Everyone has to play a bit, but some people are living and breathing the game.

The end goal for many is to have more “Followers”, that is people that hear what you say, on Twitter. Having a larger number of followers gives to a degree more credibility, gives greater ability to spread ideas or products, and often overall makes you feel pretty good. Then again, some people just want to spam you with their company’s failed social media attempts.

At first, some tried following a ton of people, some upwards of 50,000, in hopes that 10-20% of those would follow them back, and would give them a strong following to spread their message. This started looking bad, and having a poor “ratio” often would be indicative of a spammer. This lead toward the faux pas of following too many people and having such a ratio or you too would be considered a spammer. Oh yea, and Twitter started banning them. This has been further reinforced by things like Hubspot’s Twitter Grader, which rewards people with a higher grader if they follow significantly less people than follow them (among other things). Keep in mind that at the end of the day this causes a pyramid scheme like stack, if the act of following/being followed is a currency, where the ‘top’ people have put the least into it but have gained the most, and the people at the bottom have put the most in but gained the least.

Now, new tools have been developed which have only perpetuated this game. When Twitter was young curating 10,000 people that you’ve followed and seeing if they had followed you back was tedious. Now with something like Twitter Karma you can quickly look at everyone following you, and all of the people that you follow and check for reciprocation of the follow. However, another tool is helping alert people of this activity: Qwitter.

Qwitter lets you see who has unfollowed you. At first this might seem useless, or vain but its neat to notice and catch people who are trying to game the system. Everyone at first says, “Oh, no one unfollows me, all of my followers love me and what I say.” They soon find that isn’t true.

Here’s the new game I’ve noticed: Since having much worse than a 1:1 Follower:Friend ratio on Twitter is looked down on and often prevents people from following them back (making the problem even worse), the spammers and spam-like people follow a bunch of people, maybe 200, and then wait two days. They then use something like Twitter Karma and unfollow anyone that hasn’t followed them back. They then have a perfect ratio again! They rinse and repeat, following another large groups of people. If you’re using Qwitter you can catch them. Not that you can do anything about it, asides from maybe contribute to some Twitter Blacklist (well, that one is close now but whatever) but at least it makes you feel good that you didn’t follow them back.

There’s many downsides to this numbers game however. Some of us like a large stream of information. I honestly wish I was following 2-3x as many people as I’m following now, just so at 2am the conversation would still be flowing around me. Its not overwhelming as long as you’re using a good client that supports groups like TweetDeck. I hope that people follow me back, and I like having a healthy and engaged following, yet I don’t want to tip the social norms and be seen as a spammer. Twitter already banned my account once mistaking me for a spammer and I’d prefer to not have such allegations or mistakes made again.

Also, keep in mind that this turns it into a game- not a conversation. Conversations aren’t numbers. People aren’t numbers. Having a ‘killer ratio’ doesn’t matter. People who are only following back 100 people, but having 75,000 people following them aren’t engaged in the conversation (I’m looking at you Kevin Rose). They are there for their own celebrity. People who play the follow/unfollow/spam game on Twitter aren’t in the conversation with you either. Don’t follow them back, and don’t worry when they unfollow you. They don’t care what you have to say, only that you listen to them.

What do you think of the numbers game that Twitter has become for many? Are there any rules you play by? Are there any rules you break?

UPDATE: I just saw a great discussion going on at http://canwetalkpr.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/why-does-social-media-sometimes-feel-like-a-popularity-contest about social media being like a popularity contest. Very similar topic. Over 10 comments already.

@Tibbon is back in action. After about ~5 hours of things being really odd (ie. banned from Twitter) and much bitching and complaining my account is all set. In the end it seems that myself @pfanderson, @davedelaney,  @conniecrosby and @pknit were deleted/banned. I’d really like to thank everyone for helping me out and trying to get the attention of the management at Twitter. As a very cool aftereffect of this, while I’m still following everyone (I see their updates), it shows that I’m following zero people. That’s the ultimate ratio! lol

I’d like to thanks everyone that noticed and helped complain (err, I mean use social media) to help:

• @Repcor (blog)
• @ChrisBrogan (blog)
• @JeffPulver (blog)
• @chelpixie (blog)
• @foulbastard
  
• @crystallyn (blog)
• @Sooz (blog)
• @MattSearles (blog)
• @bentrem (blog)
• @istarman (blog)
• @cherot (blog)
• @awaytogarden (blog)
• @Sean_McGaughey (blog)
• @orchid8 (blog)
• @anniemal (blog)
• @creepysleepy (blog)
• @robblatt (blog)
• And probably a few more that I happened to miss!

I’m still curious as to what happened. The Status blog tells nothing. Companies should perhaps take this as a small lesson. If you’re twittering about watching a movie and having beer, and customer service complaints are racking up on twitter about your service… then things start to look bad. Your illusion of being ‘busy’ gets broken. I totally realize that all people and all companies deserve chill time, but just keep an eye on the customer service too.

For better or worse, there’s a ton of site that I read per day. 95% of them have RSS feeds. I have them set up in my Google Reader. Yet I persist to view the actual websites. Maybe it’s just habit from the past 8 years of typing ‘slashdot.org’ in my browser, and not thinking to go to reader.google.com first and seeing what’s there. Same for my friends blogs.

Maybe it’s that I like the ‘additional’ content that real websites offer. The images, the sidebars, the mini-feeds on the sides. It all does seem to enrich the experience for me.

Does anyone have any tips on how I can break myself of this nasty habit and get into checking my RSS feeds once a day, and then leaving all that junk alone?