Sep

Amazon Finally Wraps Up Orwell Book Mess

written by Scott Olson

A little over a month ago Amazon created a stir when they deleted George Orwell books off their Kindles without notifying the users of the Kindle and in the process deleted any annotations they might have had for school or other purposes. I wrote about their delay in properly addressing this issue in the post Amazon’s Social Media Strategy to Address Orwell Book Deletions from Kindle? Ignore it.

Jeff Bezos later issued an apology for their handling of the incident and it appears that today they have taken a final step toward resolving the issue. Pogue in the NY Times reports that Amazon has redelivered the books to the Kindle along with any lost annotations. This is the right step but should have been taken much earlier. Pogue gets it right when he says:

The Kindle store already sold a different edition of those books that did NOT have rights problems; it should have offered that swap from the beginning.

There is no reason why Amazon couldn’t have found a way to serve their important Kindle early adopters earlier and turned a crisis into an opportunity for superb customer service. For many people this might be a case of too little too late.

Tags: crisis management, marketing strategy
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21

Jul

A Crisis is an Opportunity to Excel at Customer Service

written by Scott Olson

Yesterday I wrote about Amazon’s failure to address their customer service crisis with the Kindle and their deletion of e-books that was reported in the NY Times. Today I came across a good entry from Seth Godin’s blog titled “Winning on the uphills” identifying that it is in the difficult times that companies define themselves and can excel above their competition. I couldn’t agree more.

One of my business mentors, Craig Tysdal who was the CEO of NetSolve, made this a primary focus of a customer service class that he required every employee to take. He emphasized that your customers remember how you respond to problems, difficulties and crisis more than anything because so few companies do that well. It is the opportunity to turn a negative situation into a positive that can not only solidify customer loyalty, but also create significant positive word of mouth and customer references. (more…)