AOL found this out recently when one of their customers tried to cancel his account. Vincent Ferrari had heard horrible stories about AOL’s “customer support” so he decided to record his conversation.

After 15 minutes he finally got through to a human being. The call resulted in something that’s a cross between Dante’s 9th ring of hell and Orwell’s 1984. The king from Monty Python’s Holy Grail had an easier time explaining to the palace guards to keep his son locked in his room than Ferrari had explaining that he just wanted to cancel the account. “I don’t know how I can make this any clearer, just cancel my account,” he says time and again.

Ferrari put the recording on his blog, but was overwhelmed by the social bookmarking traffic. You can now listen to the whole painful affair at Putfile.com. When something’s this painful or funny, it’s very likely to go viral.

That virus got Ferrari on a number of talk shows and got him an official apology from AOL.

The lesson here: treat your customers with respect, because they just might be blogging.

By the way, if you think Ferrari is just a crank about customer service, read this recent post on his experience with Audible.

Welcome, internet, to The Consumerist, the latest title from Gawker Media. The Consumerist loves to shop, and is reconciled to utilities, but hates paying for shoddy products, inhumane customer support, and half-assed service.

Each week The Consumerist will guide you through the delinquencies of retail and service organizations. The Consumerist will highlight the persistent, shameless boners of modern consumerism — and the latest hot deals, discounts, and freebies around.

As I wrote here and here a few weeks ago, I’m one of thousands running a business blog on TypePad. The service has been excruciatingly slow of late. (Just now I thought I’d tear my hair out while waiting for this post to Save.) Sometimes it’s down altogether.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not a “trash 6A” blog entry. It’s a please please please listen to your customers before it’s too late message. The buzz is building. There’s talk of moving some high-profile blogs (including this one) to WordPress or another platform.

My advice? Post fast. Post fresh. Be transparent. The blogosphere is gonna bite if you don’t. And get something up on your Status Blog (which, BTW, doesn’t have an archive so it’s conspicuously not quite a blog) or on Mena’s Corner that acknowledges the problem.

C’mon guys. We love you! Don’t disappoint.

So when the TypePad service goes down, as it did earlier this week, it’s a pretty big deal. Lots of business blogs disappeared for hours. And if you’re the publisher of one of them, as I am, it strikes fear in your heart. Has the damn thing been swallowed up? All those thousands of words gone forever?

I was in a panic to put it politely. For me, and thousands of other customers, this was a crisis. Frustratingly, there was scant information at the time on SixApart’s supposedly real-time status blog.

Well, I’m delighted to report that 6A now gets this crisis blogging thing (see above). They’re talking to us. They’re telling us, candidly, what happened:

Both Monday’s and Tuesday’s outages were the result of hardware failures…

That’s really all customers want. We care more about being kept in the loop than about how bad the news is.

It’s just that we want the information in real-time, during the crisis. Tell us something, anything immediately. Acknowledge that there’s a problem (even a big problem) and that you’re working on it. But do it in plain English. Get the CEO to jump on the "status blog," if necessary. Don’t for heaven’s sake leave it up to your techies to pen one sentence about a "temporary service degradation." That’s jargon. It’s not communication.

Hard to do in a crisis, I know. But it’s the whole point of having a blog as a channel for real-time communication. To turn your customers, who are momentarily in a panic, into your evangelists. And who better than SixApart to model how this should be done. Thanks guys, for being responsive to my comments.

Note: turns out you can back up the contents of a TypePad blog into a file and download it to your computer. I just did it here. Now that would be a good tip to give TypePad customers, wouldn’t it? Doesn’t reflect badly on 6A and is a gentle reminder that these are just machines after all.

Earthlink’s Protection Blog

Link

Link

Well, ever since we spotted the trial blog at Google a few weeks ago, we knew this was inevitable. The Google Blog was born on May 10th. Disappointing there hasn’t been a new post yet today — seems like they’d have a lot to talk about, but I wonder whether it will end up being a more occasional blog, like Blogger’s own blog. Another peculiarity of the blog seems to be that there is no obvious author. The first post (see below) is from Evan Williams, appropriately enough, creator of blog software tool Blogger.com, which Google acquired last year. But we know this only because he signed the post within the body of the post. The footer information about each post does not contain an author identification, so the second post is anonymous.

Here’s Evan’s first post to the new Google blog:

Ever since I came to Google, they’ve been talking about putting up an official Google blog. And now, less than 15 months later, voil√†.

Oh well, it’s not like we own a recently relaunched service where you can create a blog in two minutes or something. Okay, we do. (Sorry for the plug.) But I guess other Googlers have been a little busy what with all the searching. And the advertising. And filling out purchase orders for all those hard drives.

Anyway, I’m excited the blog’s up. We’re going to post stuff here – regular bloggy things: What Larry had for breakfast. What Sergey thinks of that Hellboy movie. Which Dawson’s Creek character reminds us most of Eric.

And perhaps, news about Google, and our thoughts on whatever random events cross our horizon.

Oh, and we have email feedback too. So we hope to hear from you, as well.

- Evan Williams

(Blogger Program Manager, Google)

ClickZ makes this pertinent observation:

Interestingly, the launch comes as Google is preparing for an initial public offering of stock, during the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) "quiet period" in which companies usually refrain from making public statements that could be interpreted as an offer to sell stock.

CNET’s New.com is already nit-picking at Google’s blog for having discretely edited a post to tone down potentially controversial comments about outsourcing. It’s clear that this blog will remain under a magnifying glass for some time to come, at least through Google’s IPO.

Link

Red Hat, vendors of commercial Linux services, staged a worldwide customer outreach tour in early 2004, and supported it with this blog about the behind-the-scenes activities of the tour. During the tour, the blog was averaging more than 3,500 visits a day. MarketingSherpa has a great case study about this event and blog.

Link