This post is by Michael Pollock, the original owner of Small Business Branding. Yaro Starak now owns and produces the latest content for this blog.
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Typepad users have been experiencing "service degradation" quite a bit lately. I mentioned it a couple of weeks back. After that time, things improved a bit, but this week I’m still having intermittent problems with the service – at times it’s slow, and occasionally it’s down altogether. Frustrating.
Steve Rubel mentioned it as well earlier today. He framed it this way:
"Everyone who has issues with customer service from time to time should take a page from Six Apart’s blogging playbook. They are consistent in how they explain when their TypePad
service is lagging, which it has been over the past few days. TypePad
powers this site. Unfortunately, my blog was down for hours on Tuesday
(as was Scott Adams’ Dilbert blog
on the day it debuted), yet the CEO took the time to email me. I am
sure they will work out their issues as they begin to migrate to their
new architecture, Project Comet."
As
much as I respect Steve, I have to disagree. Maybe Typepad’s CEO
emailed Steve, but have they reached out to any of their other
customers via email? They haven’t reached out to me. Yes, they’ve made
posts on their various blogs, but frankly, I don’t follow those blogs
day-to-day. I wouldn’t have know what was behind the Typepad’s service
degradation unless I had read something about it on Steve’s blog.
I’m not meaning to whine here.
What’s really at issue is how aggressive should a company be in
reaching out to its customers when problems occur? Is it enough to just
talk about it on the company blog? Or should they reach out via email
or some other means? In my book, I would appreciate some more proactive
information sharing on Typepad’s part. Especially when problems like
this continue happening.
Don’t make me come to you. Come
to me and tell me what’s going on. What’s the problem? When will it be
resolved. Why should I continue to endure this "degradation of
service?" And, most important, what are you doing to make sure it
doesn’t happen going forward?
With much respect to Steve,
Typepad’s blogging playbook may be tops, but their customer service
playbook seems to be a few pages short.