How to Lose Customers and Stop Influencing People
by DanIt’s no secret that I love Tivo. I frequently point to it as an example of good interaction design. But over the last six weeks or so, doing so has meant that I have to grit my teeth. In an OS upgrade, Tivo introduced a bug into the system which causes the service to occasionally not change the channel — even though it thinks it has. Thus, it records whatever is on the channel you were last watching instead of switching the channel if it needs to. This doesn’t happen all the time — probably only half the time. But this has the effect of angering users and making them paranoid. Users like me have to attend to the Tivo service, making sure the box is on the correct channel to record what is ever next on the To Do list, instead of just enjoying their shows. Some users have had this bug for months.
This bug, since it obviously breaks the value proposition of Tivo (record shows and watch them later), is a major flaw. And yet there is no mention of this bug anywhere on the Tivo site, except in the user forums. Since Tivo’s marketing budget seems to be approximately zero, it relies heavily on word-of-mouth to sell the service. Who is going to recommend an erratic service? Simply saying publicly, on the forums, on their website, in their monthly newsletter, anywhere really: “Hey, some of you have this bug, we’re working on it” would have gone a long way to make me (and probably many others) feel better and hang in there longer.
Reportedly, Tivo has put out a patch yesterday to fix this, but again, no official word, just a user noticing that the system software had changed. More transparency would have gone a long way here. Keeping users — your product’s evangelists — in the dark both about problems and solutions is a fast way to lose those users.
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January 10th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
One cannot bring this up more often, independent of any specific product. Companies need to take care, very simply spoken.
January 10th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
And a good time to give praises to the online forums. Those of us who are curious, aggravated, net-savvy, and otherwise motivated enough have derived solace if not resolution from the dozens of such sites. I’ll give “two thumbs, way up” for broadbandreports.com, for DSL, cable, and anything else. Knowledgeable customers, occasional good-egg techs from the inside, geographic tracking of roll-out problems, success and failure shared.
I’m not letting Tivo off the hook at all. I think the word-of-mouth heavy products have that kind of customer base, and so it’s not a coincidence, but Tivo can’t get away with being a laissez-faire organization.
And what about the long-tail? Who’s going to code up a hack for me to disable the open-door alarm in my new LG fridge? Or fix the defaults-to-AC-if-the-fan-is-on-regardless-of-temperature bug in my RX-8? These aren’t long-tail products at all, but they don’t lead to exactly the same kind of engagement that you’ve got in your Tivo community.
January 11th, 2007 at 6:14 am
Tivo is a great case study in squandering customer advocates all around - I would point to it’s exceedingly late and tremendously expensive support of HD as well.
My husband and I were early purchasers of Tivo. We loved it, told everyone about it, bought at least three more as gifts. I loved the experience, usability, service, everything about it.
But then (not tremendously early) we bought an HD TV. Not that shocking - the same type of early adopters that are (or at least *were*) the core Tivo supporters also were early-ish adopters of HD. But Tivo didn’t work with HD - not only did it not record in HD, for all their boxes (when we were looking, about two years ago), you were forced to run your signal through the Tivo box in a way that *broke* the HD for all programs. Tivo support for HD was at that time way in the future, and looking incredibly expensive.
We switched. We’re now using *$%^& Time Warner’s DVR. It hurts me. I hate that we’ve switched. But it’s cheaper monthly, doesn’t require us to purchase expensive hardware, supports HD, and works well enough. This is Tivo just squandering goodwill to me - honestly, I would have paid several hundred dollars more at the time just out of sheer loyalty to Tivo, had they provided something that would meet my (pretty predictable) needs.
January 11th, 2007 at 9:48 am
[...] keep people in the know 11Jan07 Dan over at Adaptive Path wrote a good piece yesterday about how failure to acknowledge a problem to the people you’re serving can lead to a lot of confusion and lack of trust. Basically he (along with many customers apparently) have been experiencing a bug in their Tivo systems that cause the boxes to record the wrong channels some times. Dan goes on to say: This bug, since it obviously breaks the value proposition of Tivo (record shows and watch them later), is a major flaw. And yet there is no mention of this bug anywhere on the Tivo site, except in the user forums. Since Tivo’s marketing budget seems to be approximately zero, it relies heavily on word-of-mouth to sell the service. Who is going to recommend an erratic service? Simply saying publicly, on the forums, on their website, in their monthly newsletter, anywhere really: “Hey, some of you have this bug, we’re working on it” would have gone a long way to make me (and probably many others) feel better and hang in there longer. [...]