ReveNews
AWeber.com Customer Service … A TOS Pusher?!
Note: This is a re-post of my original post + comments from August 27, 2007. It was not converted to the new platform , which happened at the same time. Just FYI.
Ian Lee, who is an OPM, contacted me recently through Facebook to ask for information about Email marketing service providers, because he remembered a thread at AffiliateManager.net forums about this subject.
I sent him to my resources page to Email marketing at Cumbrowski.com and talked with Ian a bit about the options including hosted solutions and hosting providers.
We also touched on the reason why he was looking for a provider. It turns out that he ran into trouble with his current provider, which is AWeber.com. That caught my interest, because AWeber.com had an impeccable reputation up to this point. I never heard anything negative about them; on the contrary, people loved AWeber.com and evangelized the service free at forums and blogs.
Ian wrote a blog post about his issues with AWeber.com at his Ads-Links.com blog that explains the details. I made a long comment and shortly after did the number of comments increase more and more. Some of the comments are from other AWeber.com customers who also experienced issues with the service.
Adjustment Of Perception
AWeber.com seems to provide an excellent service and a good product for a fair price, high reliability and general support. Where they seem to do a horrible job is the customer services in cases of non-technical issues, but issues with the administration of the service or if AWeber.com notices some unusual activities at an account. Their procedure there seems to be TOS citing and a “talk to the hand” like attitude. That this does not go too well with people is obvious, especially clients who would like to discuss and solve a problem.
This is certainly not good PR for them. Other AWeber.com customers who did not have a problem with the service so far commented on the site that they also start to think about changing the service. They do that for a good reason. Most vendors in the service sector do a good job in general when it comes to the general things that have to do with a normal account. The fire test happens when issues come up.
Partner or Necessary Evil?
Then you will find out what kind of company you are using and what you are in their eyes, an unfortunately needed evil to generate revenue for the company or somebody who needs to solve a problem where you have the solution, a business partner.
If you realize that you are the evil, run if you can. If you are considered a business partner, chances are good that they will be able to solve the problem with you to the satisfaction of every involved party.
Life of Its Own
Ian’s post seems to attract more and more upset AWeber.com customers and ex-customers. This would be a good chance for AWeber.com to fix what is broken and to show it to the world. Turning something very bad around by acting on it within the community where the issues come up, can turn very negative things about your business toa case study of how you handle problems like this and turn it to something good that will reinforce the confidence of existing clients into your service and bring you new customers as well, because it demonstrates to them, what they can expect if they use your service and run into an issue.
Ignoring the Issue Will Hurt You
Not responding, because of fear to use the little “comments” box at the bottom of the page of the post is leaving the problem on the table. It will stay there forever and not go away. If it is there, people will find it and continue to harm the reputation of your company. Those things tend to take a life of their own and can haunt you later and wish that you would have taken care of the issue before it was too late. I saw a few “nice” examples, where customer complaints ranked right after the companies website at position 3 in Google for the search results of the company name (one word name). In that position will it attract more and more attention and potential new clients who will see it will turn away and check out your competitor instead.
Brand Management in a Web 2.0 World
As I mentioned, did I just came back from SES San Jose where they had a number of good sessions about brand management online, including search engine results as well as web 2.0 communities, such as social networks or blogs. We will see how well AWeber.com is capable to control their brand image in the cyberspace. They seem to be a company who is comfortable in this new environment and should be able to deal with it properly, but I might be wrong. I assumed the same with Yahoo, but learned the hard way that the hip and supposedly social media savvy company is not so hip at all. Yahoo! is still stuck in the Web 1.0 and pre-Web thinking, at least their marketing department.
Note to Yahoo! (again)
Your Yahoo! Search Marketing Landing Page is still not fixed. $75 in free clicks for YSM anybody? Here is the fake link with real acknowledgement by Yahoo!, which makes the fake link a real one I guess: Instant new coupon approval on demand! No rush guys you are only aware of this flaw since April. After terminating the affiliate relationship with me for having the impudence to criticise you, don’t continue to proof to the world that this criticism is very much warranted. Maybe a paper memo got lost somewhere. I will continue to remind you in the future about the flaw, don’t worry. I already provided you with a solution, but the programming do you have to do yourself.
If you are a Merchant or Service provider, keep an eye on this issue and learn from it. It could happen to you tomorrow. Be ready for it!
Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski
Comments from Original Post
Carsten,
I’m perplexed by your commentary on Ian’s post. By my interpretation you basically said AWeber is
evil because we took action to prevent email from being sent to those who did not request it.
Am I incorrect in that characterization? May I ask how you would have handled a similar
situation?
While we absolutely strive to make every customer interaction a pleasant one, in the email industry
sometimes a customer does something unintentionally or intentionally that requires a bit of strong
guidance to prevent it from happening again.
For obvious reasons that guidance isn’t always well received and can result in a public post based only partly on the actual facts of the situation.
As you say, the test of a business partner comes when an issue arises. I think it should be pointed
out that being a good business partner doesn’t mean capitulating to whatever request or demand the other
party makes. It’s not our intent to inhibit our users’ email campaigns in any way, but what occurred in this
situation put us in a position where we had to choose between allowing the issue - and make no mistake, there was a serious issue that needed addressed - to persist, or taking action to ensure that our other thousands of users would continue to enjoy the email deliverability that they come to AWeber for.
Posted by: Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO) at August 27, 2007 01:58 PM
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Hello Tom,
thanks for taking the time for the comment.
“AWeber is evil because we took action to prevent email from being sent to those who did not request it.”
No, I didn’t say that and also wouldn’t. You probably saw that I recommend to use double opt-in and even would support to make that a law.
My comments at IAN’s blog were suggestions and also tips for how to check if you got foul emails from questionable sources into your mailing list.
I also stated that I am against buying and selling lists and that it should be required that a user agrees to opt-in to a specific advertiser and not just a vague “agree to receive emails from our affiliates and partners”.
That is my personal opinion. I know that the business world looks a bit different than that.
What I pointed out in my post here is an example of a customer issue made public through social media. From the responses at his blog can you see that it already had impact and more people who had issues with your customer support showed up and added to the existing complaints
“that requires a bit of strong guidance to prevent it from happening again”
How about education and pointing out the reasons and consequences for certain actions. Forcing a customer without this kind of explanation is probably not well received. Any forced action without explaining the reasons for the actions and without providing possible options to response will be ill received.
Your comments here are also very aggressive, because you are probably upset about the criticism that was made. I suggest to take a step back and try to look at it from the customer perspective. How would you feel and react if you were in their position? Think about how you would perceive it, if you would not know what you know about the problems for them and for you as an Email service provider because of the issue.
I don’t know how it started and if AWeber got an email from its upstream provider or a notification or even warning from a spam reporting system or not, but if an account of your client is in good standing, spend the time to help figuring out what was going from.
Who knows, he might bought a list from a supposedly clean email list provider, but that provider made an error and got themselves a spammers email list that was sold as a real opt-in list. From Ians comments is it clear that they didn’t and that they never used any emails other than the ones obtained through their own website.
Now they do not have double opt-in, that means that somebody could go and sign up another email that does not belong to the person who submits it. Maybe it was done as a prank or it was done with malicious intentions (e.g. spammer is subscribing a spam activist because he knows the activists email address).
Maybe it was just the typical case of a user who forgot that he signed up for it and reported it as spam. Hard to tell, because they don’t use double opt-in. Double opt-in is not a requirement anywhere. It’s always suggested, but you probably know that the drop out rate is pretty high, because people don’t get the confirmation notice or they forget about it or whatever. Ian said, that his clients business and its competitive nature requires it to do as much as required by law, but not more, if it affects the business negatively.
Hi wanted to determine what this issue caused to take actions where necessary, including pro active ones to prevent something like this to happen again in the future, if that is possible (what I doubt). Your customer service ignored that from what I heard and forced the client to double opt-in against his will.
Btw. another ex-client mentioned issues with your confirmation email that is being sent to users to confirm their sign-up. If that email is not optimized and because of that prevents a larger number of people than necessary from performing the final step of the sign-up, that would be bad. I would check on that too.
I hope that those tips will help. You should not talk with me, but with Ian and the other clients and ex-clients of yours. I will report about the outcome of it and also add a note to this post that people will find that information in a couple months from now too.
Cheers!
Carsten
Posted by: Carsten Cumbrowski at August 27, 2007 02:45 PM
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Another recommendation. I can really recommend to check out the book : SPAM WARS by Danny Goodman. I would also recommend it to your clients or go even further and send them a copy after they paid for the first month of service. Strongly encourage to read it, because it will educate your clients about the issues in detail, what spammer do, how they do it, why they do it etc.
It also explains what the spam activists do and ISP’s and how the alert system works and where the problems are.
I paid $17.95 at Amazon.com for a single copy, but I think that you would get it a lot cheaper, if you buy it in bulk.
You should have a strong interest that your clients are as much educated and aware as possible to have them avoid mistakes, re-think their procedures today and also know what kind of issues could come their way and why and also what issues they could create for you and why you would act radical in some circumstances to protect your own business.
Just another thought.
Posted by: Carsten Cumbrowski at August 27, 2007 02:53 PM
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Hi Carsten,
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and trying to get this issue resolved. It is appreciated.
Here is my reply to Tom from my blog:
“Tom,
It sure has been a long time since we last chatted and it is unfortunate that we meet again under these circumstances.There is no argument that double opt-in is a good method for handling list subscription. Indeed, two lists under this client’s account is double opt-in so they are aware of the benefits. The issue I personally have is not with this. It is the fact of being accused of spamming and not being provided with anymore information so we can resolve the problem.
Again, of the 4 lists cited by both your staff members, 1 does not belong to my client. Two are inactive test lists with zero broadcasts. And an active list that has been running on a website run by healthcare professionals for close to 8 years. When asked which one of these lists could be the cause of the spam issues, the hard-handed reply was that you gave the order and it’s final.
Tom, I do not see any benefit in contacting you offline - your staff has made it more than clear that there is no room for further discussion. As a long time customer and someone who publicly endorsed your company for so long, being served an ultimatum and not given the opportunity to work with your team to trace down the issue at hand is certainly not what I had hoped from a quality service provider.”
Posted by: Ian Lee at August 27, 2007 03:41 PM
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