Not Good Enough
Last month we got a slap in the face by one of our users and rightly so. It was for a problem with Eventzi and as we went along more problems popped up.
When people tried to buy tickets, certain email addresses would get a message saying, “please enter a valid email address”. It turned out that the issue was due to our team blocking email addresses with full stops in the first part of the email e.g. scott.purdie@purdie.com, because the top email providers dont allow it, however commercial businesses do. The problem affected the hosts ticket sales, which isnt good at all.
After the initial investigation, more problems were hitting this user with buttons disappearing due to upgrades the team made without seeing changes i had made. Then when we had that sorted the credit card option wasn’t appearing and the event host had to change settings on PayPal.
Problem was, we were poor at communicating from start to finish. We didn’t communicate well with the person who initially reported the problem (its should have been acknowledged within an hour, the problem made clear a lot earlier and it shouldn’t have been a problem at all. Superb customer service is a constant target.
Improving
After reviewing what went wrong, we have reworked our internal process for dealing with problems. We will acknowledge the problem asap, then get every single detail possible, then work on it until its fixed with updates each day for the user.
After a fresh slap in the face has done us the world of good, it became clear that the processes we were using were wrong. We should give new users a guide to getting started when they sign up, while setting the right expectations from the start. Problems should be communicated and solved with less pain.