Flickr sucks (kinda)

Don’t get me wrong – Flickr is a great service. They have done some really cool and innovative things. Their pro account is the best deal out there if you want to put up your photos on-line, either for sharing or as a backup/storage option. Recently however, there have been some kinks in my user experience.

It all started out as partly my fault. One day, I cancelled my pro account only to learn later that Flickr does not refund you the balance of your fees. Nowhere is this stated during the cancellation flow. Only the user boards talk about this and I see that others have also been bitten by this in the past. This apart, why can’t they refund the balance fees? Its fairly standard practice on the part of all service providers. The good thing was that after contacting their service folks (via email of course, which sane company these days wastes money on providing a phone number to its paying customers?), they offered to restore the pro-ness of my account. My photos were gone of course, but I knew that up front and so can live with it. This was followed by a series of me filing more of their service tickets, since they simply don’t reply to your emails on the original tickets. File a ticket, expect a single response and that’s it. I had to include the previous emails in my tickets to get a response from them.

On the positive side, they are offering to give me back the pro account. On the (significantly) negative side, this customer service experience has left a sour taste in my mouth, and I’m not sure if I want it anyways.

And while I’m on the topic and ranting, in Flickr why is it so difficult to delete photos quickly or to sort uploaded photos in the “Date Taken” order? In some ways, its a very cool service but in other ways it frustrates the heck out of me. I don’t expect anything out a free service, but if I pay then dammit, I have a right to expect good customer service.

Lessons?

• Give users the information they need
• Users will judge you through your customer service. Give it as much importance as a revenue generating product.
  
• User goodwill is an intangible revenue

UPDATE: After more than a month, Flickr did reinstate my pro account. My criticisms of their service and features still stands though.

Will someone please think of the user?

Recently I was in the market for a DVD burner since my laptop has just a regular DVD ROM. For flexibility, I was looking at buying an external USB 2.0 burner. This would nicely complement the external 250G hard drive that I had also just purchased for backup purposes. After hunting around in the usual places – Amazon, Fatwallet, eBay, TigerDirect etc. – I found a good deal with free shipping on NewEgg. That’s where all the troubles started…

Firstly, the site won’t work with Firefox. After adding the item to the cart I could not create an account nor enter my details for checkout. The worst thing is that there is no error message as well. In this day and age, how hard is it to make a website that works with at least the #2 browser? So I switched to the IETab extension, which allows you to open any page in IE within Firefox. This refused to work as well.

So I had to open up IE and go through the whole rigmarole from scratch. The (newegg) gods must have been in a good mood at that time since I managed to proceed, create an account and actually get to the Payment options page.

• This page presents a plethora of options (Credit card, PayPal, Money Order, NewEgg credit etc.) all assembled together in the most confusing way possible.
• You can use PayPal, but the email addresses in your NewEgg and PayPal accounts must match; they don’t inform you of this requirement when you register for an account. There’s no way of specifying an existing PayPal account.
• They accept credit cards (hallelujah), but need the 1-800 customer service for “card verification”.
• There are tons of other minor annoyances with the entire checkout flow and presentation.

I understand most people who visit and purchase from NewEgg and its ilk are looking for a deal and don’t mind jumping through a few extra hoops to do so. My first experience has left a sour taste though, and I won’t be buying from them again, unless there’s a really good deal of course

This really seems like Product and UED 101 (I wonder, is there such a course that’s taught anywhere? If not it should be, but I digress…), especially for checkout, which is very much a solved problem in the e-commerce world.

In an ideal world, potential customers should be treated equal to existing customers. Most (there are always notable exceptions) companies offer preferential treatment to potential customers via snazzy brochures, aggressive marketing, sales talks, while doing the minimum to keep the existing customer base satisfied and loyal. NewEgg seems to subscribe to the opposite philosophy – treat potential customers as badly as possible; if they still get through, then they are going to be loyal anyways and we don’t have to work any harder.

Remember:

First impressions leave lasting impressions

Make the user experience as seamless and as simple as possible

Every user interaction with your product is an opportunity to acquire a customer, or increase loyalty