8 ms·

So moral of the story? Make sure you have a blog with significant readership if you want good customer service?

by jiggy2011 14y ago

_pferreir_ 14y ago
Quite so. Or that you have a friend who can do that for you.
thejosh 14y ago
Same as problems for pretty much any tech, such as Google.
jmilloy 14y ago
Does anyone have any data about how often [Amazon] ignores or fixes customer service issues despite a lack of high-visibility blogging? My 10th grade world history teacher had a small segment on the rainmaking rituals of some group of people. When rain was needed, they would continue the rituals until it rained. From their view, the rituals worked. I don't think clouds drift around waiting for the rituals to build up, and I don't think customer service departments sit around waiting for blog entries about their company. I'm not suggesting that large companies are blind to signal from the public, or that they ignore it. But why do we think that without such signal from the public these fixes wouldn't have happened, other than a cultural aversion to large companies and their PR departments?
- TillE 14y ago
  > I don't think customer service departments sit around browsing the internet for blog entries about their company This story bubbled up through HN, BoingBoing, and many other tech news outlets. Someone at Amazon inevitably saw it. Nobody's claiming they randomly stumbled across the original blog entry.
  - csixty4 14y ago
    Specifically, Computer World UK and Jeff Jarvis (currently of Buzz Machine but formerly of People, Entertainment Weekly, and the SF Examiner) got in touch with Amazon PR directly for a statement. There were likely more big publications contacting them for a statement that I didn't see. You can't write it off as "just some blogger" at that point. Someone needed to rectify it ASAP.
  - jmilloy 14y ago
    I'll reply to just this comment, although each response I've gotten is similar. I'm not claiming that no one at Amazon was aware that the issue had public visibility. I'm not even claiming that the public visibility in this case didn't contribute to the swift, clear, and visible resolution we've seen. Instead, I'm asking for evidence that high visibility correlates strongly with a resolution. Honestly, I will not be surprised if it exists. But no number of highly visible stories that are resolved will provide that evidence on their own. Certainly, the way in which a large company discovers that an issue has become highly visible is completely irrelevant. The question is whether, if an issue doesn't become highly visible, do they still try to resolve it or do they ignore it?
    - tsotha 14y ago
      The only possible evidence for this would be either an internal email or an admission from Amazon. Based on the email she got I'd say from Amazon's point of view the matter was closed. There had to be some prod to get them to take another look. If not the publicity, what was it?
      - jmilloy 14y ago
        Again, it's not about this instance, which is one data point on the side of "publicity -> resolution". And there are many more data points on the side of "publicity -> resolution". Instead, the evidence required is data points on the side of "no publicity -> no resolution". The fact that Amazon didn't solve the issue until the publicity exists doesn't count as a "no publicity -> no resolution" data point. Somehow, this is less clear to others than it is to me. I'll break it out into some cases. If the data points are mostly - a mix of "publicity -> resolution" and "no publicity -> resolution", then publicity is irrelevant. - a mix of "publicity -> resolution" and "no publicity -> no resolution", then truly the moral of the story is to have publicity if you want a resolution. - a bunch of "publicity -> resolution", then we cannot make any conclusions! We hear about the issues with publicity because, well... they have publicity. We make up the other half because it fits our preconceived bias.
        14y ago
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  I would be surprised if amazon didn't have at least one person full time looking at blogs/forums etc trying to gauge public reaction and put out fires. It's a shame that things like this aren't used as an opportunity to clarify things or affect changes in policy for everyone. It seems more common that a company will just come out and basically say (not in so many words) "oh , we made an exception for this person because we got bad PR".
  - ericts8 14y ago
    You mean PR people?
    - jiggy2011 14y ago
      I suppose so, even in small companies it's not uncommon for someone to have at least set up google alerts.
  - prodigal_erik 14y ago
    Even if not full-time PR, I'd be astonished if Amazon had zero developers who happen to read HN and would notice what's written about their workplace.
- mikeash 14y ago
  It is as ridiculous to think that a company full of intelligent people is not influenced by tech news as it is to think that clouds are influenced by dancing.
- pasbesoin 14y ago
  Because "the process" had already made its determination and sent the Kindle owner its final "kiss off" email.
- wtallis 14y ago
  You don't think a company like Amazon would have software crawling social media doing sentiment analysis? Amazon's going up against Google and Apple, so they have to care about their image. I would be shocked if the social media outcry over this issue hadn't triggered an automated alert in Amazon's PR department.
reitzensteinm 14y ago
Unfortunately, sampling bias means the moral of the story for consumers at large is going to be "DRM lockouts happen, but the customers are usually taken care of".
- Karunamon 14y ago
  Alternatively, the moral is "DRM lockouts happen, but very rarely, the chance of it happening to you is pretty low." It still shouldn't have taken a front page story to get this fixed, though.
  - seanc722 14y ago
    This is exactly what I was thinking. There has to be enough outcry from the world for a simple problem to get answered and fixed? I feel this is a little ridiculous...
praptak 14y ago
> So moral of the story? You don't own anything with DRM on it, until you make a copy that is free of DRM. Judge the price accordingly. Use the rippers as soon as they are available. Exercise and eat healthy.
- podperson 14y ago
  The question is, how much is your time worth? I'd rather take the time I save by not ripping all my media and spend it doing useful stuff. Someday I may discover I can no longer watch old episodes of How I Met Your Mother -- and it will incense me, but I think I'll get over it.
  - cullenking 14y ago
    But it doesn't take any time. I just plug in my Kindle into Calibre (OK yes, there was time to install Calibre and maybe 10 minutes of reading about what it can do etc), and it does the rest. It's incredibly simple. Just like maintaining a backup of your computer takes a little time up front, but hardly any marginal time, the same can be said of your Kindle.
    - podperson 14y ago
      This is great for ebooks but doesn't really apply so much to many other things that are DRMed which I might prefer to use for convenience. E.g. a DVD is DRMed and quite inconvenient to rip (and then you need to store the files somewhere).
      - steevdave 14y ago
        But you have the physical DVD. You don't have a physical copy of the books that they wiped. Or you do. I know I have some just for the convenience
- bigiain 14y ago
  I had a different take-away/question/moral. If un-notified/disclosed behaviour on a Kindle book purchasing account can get that or "a related account" closed without notice, and I've got important things running in AWS on both personal and work accounts that Amazon quite likely knows are "related" (since I and my colleagues often log out of personal accounts and into work/customer accounts), it seems like a non-ignorable risk that some of my critical infrastructure may one day vanish from underneath me and I'd end up in non-accountable support hell cut-n-pasting barely relevant sections of policy documentation in reply to email queries. All of a sudden having my businesses main cloud computing supplier be the same company that I personally use to purchase things like tech-toys, DRMed media, have occasional disputes with 3rd party vendors, and pay for high-risk projects via KickStarter - seems like an unnecessary business risk. This is possibly misplaced paranoia, but…
temuze 14y ago
> So moral of the story? The Amazon giveth, but the Amazon mostly taketh away.
- davidw 14y ago
  Actually, I think some of us are a bit surprised by this because Amazon mostly does have pretty good customer service. There have been tons of stories about Google pulling this kind of stunt, but far fewer about Amazon.
Yver 14y ago
And in this case, not even "good."

So moral of the story? Make sure you have a blog with significant readership if you want good customer service?

_pferreir_ 14y ago

Quite so. Or that you have a friend who can do that for you.

thejosh 14y ago

Same as problems for pretty much any tech, such as Google.

jmilloy 14y ago

Does anyone have any data about how often [Amazon] ignores or fixes customer service issues despite a lack of high-visibility blogging? My 10th grade world history teacher had a small segment on the rainmaking rituals of some group of people. When rain was needed, they would continue the rituals until it rained. From their view, the rituals worked. I don't think clouds drift around waiting for the rituals to build up, and I don't think customer service departments sit around waiting for blog entries about their company. I'm not suggesting that large companies are blind to signal from the public, or that they ignore it. But why do we think that without such signal from the public these fixes wouldn't have happened, other than a cultural aversion to large companies and their PR departments?

TillE 14y ago
> I don't think customer service departments sit around browsing the internet for blog entries about their company This story bubbled up through HN, BoingBoing, and many other tech news outlets. Someone at Amazon inevitably saw it. Nobody's claiming they randomly stumbled across the original blog entry.
- csixty4 14y ago
  Specifically, Computer World UK and Jeff Jarvis (currently of Buzz Machine but formerly of People, Entertainment Weekly, and the SF Examiner) got in touch with Amazon PR directly for a statement. There were likely more big publications contacting them for a statement that I didn't see. You can't write it off as "just some blogger" at that point. Someone needed to rectify it ASAP.
- jmilloy 14y ago
  I'll reply to just this comment, although each response I've gotten is similar. I'm not claiming that no one at Amazon was aware that the issue had public visibility. I'm not even claiming that the public visibility in this case didn't contribute to the swift, clear, and visible resolution we've seen. Instead, I'm asking for evidence that high visibility correlates strongly with a resolution. Honestly, I will not be surprised if it exists. But no number of highly visible stories that are resolved will provide that evidence on their own. Certainly, the way in which a large company discovers that an issue has become highly visible is completely irrelevant. The question is whether, if an issue doesn't become highly visible, do they still try to resolve it or do they ignore it?
  - tsotha 14y ago
    The only possible evidence for this would be either an internal email or an admission from Amazon. Based on the email she got I'd say from Amazon's point of view the matter was closed. There had to be some prod to get them to take another look. If not the publicity, what was it?
    - jmilloy 14y ago
      Again, it's not about this instance, which is one data point on the side of "publicity -> resolution". And there are many more data points on the side of "publicity -> resolution". Instead, the evidence required is data points on the side of "no publicity -> no resolution". The fact that Amazon didn't solve the issue until the publicity exists doesn't count as a "no publicity -> no resolution" data point. Somehow, this is less clear to others than it is to me. I'll break it out into some cases. If the data points are mostly - a mix of "publicity -> resolution" and "no publicity -> resolution", then publicity is irrelevant. - a mix of "publicity -> resolution" and "no publicity -> no resolution", then truly the moral of the story is to have publicity if you want a resolution. - a bunch of "publicity -> resolution", then we cannot make any conclusions! We hear about the issues with publicity because, well... they have publicity. We make up the other half because it fits our preconceived bias.
      - 14y ago
jiggy2011 14y ago
I would be surprised if amazon didn't have at least one person full time looking at blogs/forums etc trying to gauge public reaction and put out fires. It's a shame that things like this aren't used as an opportunity to clarify things or affect changes in policy for everyone. It seems more common that a company will just come out and basically say (not in so many words) "oh , we made an exception for this person because we got bad PR".
- ericts8 14y ago
  You mean PR people?
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    I suppose so, even in small companies it's not uncommon for someone to have at least set up google alerts.
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  Even if not full-time PR, I'd be astonished if Amazon had zero developers who happen to read HN and would notice what's written about their workplace.
mikeash 14y ago
It is as ridiculous to think that a company full of intelligent people is not influenced by tech news as it is to think that clouds are influenced by dancing.
pasbesoin 14y ago
Because "the process" had already made its determination and sent the Kindle owner its final "kiss off" email.
wtallis 14y ago
You don't think a company like Amazon would have software crawling social media doing sentiment analysis? Amazon's going up against Google and Apple, so they have to care about their image. I would be shocked if the social media outcry over this issue hadn't triggered an automated alert in Amazon's PR department.

reitzensteinm 14y ago

Unfortunately, sampling bias means the moral of the story for consumers at large is going to be "DRM lockouts happen, but the customers are usually taken care of".

Karunamon 14y ago
Alternatively, the moral is "DRM lockouts happen, but very rarely, the chance of it happening to you is pretty low." It still shouldn't have taken a front page story to get this fixed, though.
- seanc722 14y ago
  This is exactly what I was thinking. There has to be enough outcry from the world for a simple problem to get answered and fixed? I feel this is a little ridiculous...

praptak 14y ago

> So moral of the story? You don't own anything with DRM on it, until you make a copy that is free of DRM. Judge the price accordingly. Use the rippers as soon as they are available. Exercise and eat healthy.

podperson 14y ago
The question is, how much is your time worth? I'd rather take the time I save by not ripping all my media and spend it doing useful stuff. Someday I may discover I can no longer watch old episodes of How I Met Your Mother -- and it will incense me, but I think I'll get over it.
- cullenking 14y ago
  But it doesn't take any time. I just plug in my Kindle into Calibre (OK yes, there was time to install Calibre and maybe 10 minutes of reading about what it can do etc), and it does the rest. It's incredibly simple. Just like maintaining a backup of your computer takes a little time up front, but hardly any marginal time, the same can be said of your Kindle.
  - podperson 14y ago
    This is great for ebooks but doesn't really apply so much to many other things that are DRMed which I might prefer to use for convenience. E.g. a DVD is DRMed and quite inconvenient to rip (and then you need to store the files somewhere).
    - steevdave 14y ago
      But you have the physical DVD. You don't have a physical copy of the books that they wiped. Or you do. I know I have some just for the convenience
bigiain 14y ago
I had a different take-away/question/moral. If un-notified/disclosed behaviour on a Kindle book purchasing account can get that or "a related account" closed without notice, and I've got important things running in AWS on both personal and work accounts that Amazon quite likely knows are "related" (since I and my colleagues often log out of personal accounts and into work/customer accounts), it seems like a non-ignorable risk that some of my critical infrastructure may one day vanish from underneath me and I'd end up in non-accountable support hell cut-n-pasting barely relevant sections of policy documentation in reply to email queries. All of a sudden having my businesses main cloud computing supplier be the same company that I personally use to purchase things like tech-toys, DRMed media, have occasional disputes with 3rd party vendors, and pay for high-risk projects via KickStarter - seems like an unnecessary business risk. This is possibly misplaced paranoia, but…

temuze 14y ago

> So moral of the story? The Amazon giveth, but the Amazon mostly taketh away.

davidw 14y ago
Actually, I think some of us are a bit surprised by this because Amazon mostly does have pretty good customer service. There have been tons of stories about Google pulling this kind of stunt, but far fewer about Amazon.

Yver 14y ago

And in this case, not even "good."