This week-end, I was in Concarneau. For those of you who care about French geography:
I had a jolly good time. The trip back to Paris took about 5 hours by train. I wound up back at home a short while after midnight and, since there was no Internet connection available for the entire week-end, I went straight for my Internet fix. Which I couldn’t find, because my CastleNet cable modem had died during the weekend. I scratched at the walls, screamed in the middle of the night, and generally behaved like a junkie for a few seconds.
Today, I replaced the cable modem with a new one for free (Numericable, my cable provider, basically just rents me the modem and replaces it whenever it dies). I’m very unhappy with the new modem because it’s a Netgear cable modem. Netgear.
I’ve had some experience with Netgear routers before. A bad experience. When I was still a teenager, my family moved into a new home and decided to go wireless, so we bought a Netgear router and a Netgear PCI wireless card for every computer. It sucked. First, there were random disconnects as the router would just shut down and reboot of its own accord if you did so much as stare at it. Then, the signal power meant my bandwidth would have been greater if I had just ran around with my packets written down on a piece of paper. And one day, the router just decided life was not worth living anymore. With my last strands of sanity I purchased a Linksys WRT64GL and swore never to buy a Netgear product again. Right now, I’m sitting face-to-face with my latest Netgear modem-router (it’s wedged between my two LCD monitors) with contempt in my eyes.
The Point (yes, there’s one)
So, I judged an entire product line, nay, an entire company based on my experience with a single product that might have been, for all I know, a honest malfunction. Everyone does. You don’t eat a spoonful of Yogurt, decide that it tastes like the zombie apocalypse just happened in your mouth, and buy another pack just in case. I’ve already explained why creating a great first impression is important:
When you manage to attract a truckload of fresh eyeballs, make sure your secret weapon is ready. Show them the fireworks. Have them go Oooh! and Aaah! Every time you attract someone to your website or product, you implicitly promise them that you have something very interesting to show them.
But sometimes, something goes wrong, and the only impression someone ever gets of your brand is a bad impression. What do you do, then?
The common reaction among businesses seems to be «ignore the issue completely» and there’s a fairly simple reasoning behind that: if a one-in-thousands occurrence creates a bad experience for your users and you say nothing, then those few people will be unhappy and stop buying your products, but the vast majority will remain blissfully unaware that there were problems in the first place. This was a fairly good reaction ten years ago. Not anymore.
A one-in-thousands fiasco has a significant probability of ending up on Twitter or on a blog. From there, it’s only a matter of time before that blog ends up with a high Google rank for «[Your Product Name] sucks» and every person looking to buy your product ends up reading it. Seriously, just Google «[Any Product Name] sucks» to find the arguments against any product you can think of. And there’s worse: what if the media finds out about and investigates?
Seriously. Apple tried to hide, and then deny having the iPhone 4 antenna problem, and finally lied that everyone else had the same issues. What is probably the best PR machine on earth after the White House just failed. Can your PR department handle something like this?
What if Netgear themselves had announced that one of their WGRxxx router lines had unusually annoying issues due to a faulty design? Sometimes, all it takes is to sacrifice a lame product line that everyone knew was bad (but no one dared say it) to invigorate the brand.
Oh, by the way: I know today’s post is late. My Internet connection was out.
What do you think about Netgear products (or Linksys ones) ? Have you given up on any brands because of your early experience? Do you have any error-detection techniques that let you target victims of your product failures with an apologetic e-mail?
Hi. I'm Victor Nicollet,
I’ve had bad experiences with Netgear also, but Linksys isn’t exactly setting a high bar either. I use Linksys because their routers are cheap and they work most of the time, but I wish I knew of a better option.
It can be really hard and embarrassing to own up to problems when they occur, but I agree that with how easy it is to spread information these days, there’s no other choice. My web-app recently had about 30 minutes of downtime on a weekday. This hadn’t happened before and we didn’t have any way of knowing who tried to access the site during that time, so we ended up giving all our users a free month (which isn’t a big deal, especially since we don’t have many users yet).
I was concerned that I was making things worse by telling users about the problem even though most of them wouldn’t have known otherwise, but in the end it worked out great. Everyone was very understanding, and they seemed to appreciate being told about the problem even if it didn’t affect them. A simple “I’m sorry” goes a long way.
@Tyler: thank you for sharing your experience. This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. What I do wonder, however, is how you can apologize to large business customers. Small businesses are simple, there’s only a few people and you have a direct contact in there. But large corporations with possibly hundreds of users… who would you apologize to in the first place? Would you add a small message to their log-on screen the first time they come back? Would you use your billing contact?
@Tyler: consider going for the less common router brands. I switched to using these $25 (new!) blue TrendNet routers from NewEgg, and I have never had a days trouble since. The newer ones even take ddwrt if you are that way inclined.