Thank You for Complaining

"Your service doesn't work" read the Subject line. This is an email I received today from a GetQuik customer. With our new "no fee" policy implemented June 1, we sent our registered users an email notification of the changes. As well, we requested feedback on ways to further improve the GetQuik service. This customer explained his GetQuik mis-experience in gory detail. The problem began when our customer placed an order in the GetQuik system, and somewhere in the process, it did not post successfully in our system. This in turn created a situation where the customer showed up at the restaurant to pick up his order, and our restaurant partner was totally clueless about the order. You can imagine that this customer was not happy.

To make matters worse, this customer is not only the coveted "early-adopter", but also an "influencer". He was preparing to get all his colleagues to use the system, but obviously could not endorse the GetQuik system after his disasterous customer experience.

Now if we had the transaction record posted, and we knew about the problem at the time or order (approximately 2 months ago), we may have been able to work on a damage-control situation. We had a day or two of posting irregularities during the time of this order error. However, although our restaurant partner mentioned a ticked off customer, we were not clear on who it was... till we received this email.

One of the things that GetQuik should have implemented earlier is our "Customer Satisfaction" survey, which we are now using to get a regular pulse of our user community. We are using Survey Monkey. In fact many of the recent changes we have made are a direct result of our survey responses. We currently have a 75% positive response for our survey question: "Would you go out of your way to refer GetQuik to a friend?" We have not been running the survey that long, so we probably would have had a more critical response if we had begun our survey from day 1.

So why air our dirty laundry in a blog format? Because the more criticism we collect, the quicker we can address our shortcomings. It is not realistic to expect our customers to tell us every thing they dislike about our service, but the more we ask, the more we receive. For each unhappy customer that speaks out, there are many more that simply vote with their feet. Every company asks for feedback, suggestions and complaints, but the ones that I admire most are the ones that do more than give lip-service to their customer's feedback. If GetQuik can emulate the customer service experience of industry-leaders like Nordstroms, Whole Foods, Amazon, eBay; hopefully we can also produce their results. We still have our work cut out for us, but we are making strides in this area. Who wants to build a company that is despised or simply tolerated by their customers?

We are working to try and patch our customer relation with the customer who sent the email. We have provided him some store credit to give our service a second try. Hopefully, he will take us up on our offer.

If you have a suggestion or comment, we welcome your feedback.