The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

In my previous post, I was ranting about the craptacular blog host where my personal blog is currently ensconced, and why I’m currently in the process of bailing.

In this post, I explain why my complaints are not simply me being bitchy, but actually add up to a bad business model that you would do well to not emulate.

How does my current blog host suck? Let me count the ways

1. It is clearly designed to make it very difficult to leave, thereby locking in customers - even those who desperately want to be elsewhere.

Trying to enforce customer loyalty via coercion is a bad business model. It’s why everyone hates their cell-phone service and can’t wait for their contract to end so they can take their money elsewhere.

Keeping your service full of customers who hate you but can’t leave doesn’t result in a stable business. It just builds a population of mouth-frothing haytahs whose motivation to warn everyone away from your tar-pit-like clutches increases every time they’re forced to deal with whatever crap it is that’s making them want to leave in the first place.

You want the steady paycheck, good reputation and other perks that come with customer loyalty? Earn them. Make your service or product too good to live without, like Brad Pitt, rather than a horrible nightmare with no escape, like the creepy jerk who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer back in high school.

2. The service seems determined to stick with features that work poorly, or don’t work at all, because…hell, I have no idea why.

I mean, why would you? The technologies behind categories, user-friendly archives, functioning search applications, a dashboard that actually lets you easily locate, search and view past posts, etc., seem established to the point of being taken for granted. I can’t imagine why they insist on not implementing these features, despite ongoing requests from users to do so.

Yes, they do offer some basic features like automatic backup (albeit in a proprietary, ergo non-transferable, format) and stats with a paid upgrade. But I can get all that and much, much more from WP and other platforms for free. So even their paid services offer significantly less functionality than other free services. Not good.

Nobody says, “Instead of a fully-featured, cutting-edge product that’s customizable and makes me look like I’m part of the educated, cool crowd because I use it, I’d rather have this crippled, near-miss knock-off that used dated, kludge-ridden, inconvenient technology that no one’s heard of.” Your product or service should be as good as or better than the alternatives, before you even count the value of your own personal brand cachet.

3. They are unreliable.

Every day I log on is a coin flip. Will the site be functional? Will my blog be there? Or is this the day my blog is finally vaporized into cyberspace?

Granted, they’re not down any more than any other host that I know of. But the real issue here is their apparent policy of keeping their customers in the dark about why, what and for how long. My site is just a personal blog, but if it were a business blog, every unannounced downtime would cost me real money and customer goodwill.

If your customers can’t rely on you, they’ll quickly decide to rely on someone else. I can’t rely on my host, so I’m do the same.

4. Customer service? We don’t need no stinkin’ customer service!

There seems to be a plague of businesses these days who operate as if they hate their customers. They make working with their service or product difficult. Their customer service is non-existent. They insist on crippled features (or no features) that come standard with other brands.

And they treat you as if they’re doing you a favor by allowing you to do business with them, so if you’ve got a complaint you should just suck it up, loser.

It’s also fairly obvious from the forums that submitting trouble tickets gets you nowhere, and that customer complaints serve more as an entertainment for snarky board moderators than as a motivator to make the service better.

Here’s a thought - if you don’t want your service or product going horribly awry without you knowing about it, you might want to make it at least appear that reporting bugs or submitting trouble tickets isn’t a complete waste of time.

5. Repeated requests for improvements fall on deaf ears.

Look, most companies have to hire highly skilled people to tell them how to upgrade their offering. If you’ve got a large population of educated users suggesting viable improvements that would make them want to spend more time and money on your site, why would you ignore them?

Granted, not every customer suggestion can be implemented. Some are just too expensive, or don’t offer enough value to enough people to make it worth the effort.

But from what I’ve seen, most of the suggestions and feature requests made by my fellow bloggers are pretty basic stuff (functional archives, for example) that would be fairly inexpensive to implement, would provide immense value for all customers and would improve customer loyalty. Hell, they could limit these upgrades to premium accounts and make more money just by giving their customers what they want and can already get elsewhere at a lower price (or free), because it’s far easier to stay put than move, even if the service makes it easy to do so.

If You Don’t Have Customers, You Don’t Have a Business

There’s an important tidbit about doing business that I remember reading somewhere, and it has stuck with me ever since: The customer is REVENUE. You are OVERHEAD.

If you piss off customers so much that they leave, they are taking that revenue with them and giving it to someone else, most likely your direct competition. And this applies even to “customers” who don’t pay you anything directly. Folks on your subscribe list could become paying customers at any time. People who took free samples or spent all day browsing your shop and decided not to buy may change their minds, or tell someone else who’s a better fit. Even the free accounts on this host are generating ad money.

The correct response to customers picking up their toys and going home because you aren’t any fun to play with anymore isn’t a snarky, “Well, it looks like that problem solved itself!” It should be, “What can I do to make this right? And if I can’t, how can I at least ensure we part on good terms?”

Unfathomably, the first version is an almost word for word quote of a response by a moderator on the support forum to exactly that situation, a blogger who had thousands of hits a day but was leaving because of an unresolved complaint. That’s thousands of hits a day less the site will now be getting, thousands of eyeballs that could have been converted to customers, thousands of people bookmarking posts with the hosts domain name in the url.

Unfortunately for you (but fortunately for your competitors and prospective customers), if the former is your attitude toward losing customers, the “problem” of running your business may very well solve itself the same way.

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity //