As a very happy user of the stunning HTC Desire Android phone, I was wondering what my first experience of HTC customer service would be like, after I required their help a few days ago. Sadly, it was poor. However, I do believe there’s a powerful marketing lesson here, which is what I want to share with you.
HTC customer service frustrations
I eventually found the answer I needed, after being given incorrect information by one of HTC’s customer service team, over a series of extremely frustrating messages that spanned 2 days. I wasted hours of my time, needlessly.
However, anyone can have a bad day (or 2) and this could have been that I caught the particular customer service person at a bad time. No, my real issue was with the over complicated process, which made a bad situation worse.
HTC customer service hurdles
For example, I had to dismantle the phone, to get a code, before they would allow me to submit a very simple, generic question. They could have answered my question with just a model name.
Unbelievably, although they replied to my tech support questions via email, they did not allow me to reply to those emails via email! Seriously! Every time I needed to ask a question, it meant I had to leave the email program, visit a URL, enter a long series of numbers, enter my email address and then type my message out.
All that information was already on ALL the emails they sent me, so simply by replying, they would have had all the info they needed.
The impression I got, was that HTC didn’t want it to be easy for me to get in touch with them. It felt that they were placing hurdles in front of me. I may well be wrong and if I am, I welcome HTC to respond. It could be that they are genuinely unaware what a total pain in the ass it is, to deal with their tech support in the current way.
Hopefully, if HTC monitor mentions of their brand, someone will see this and maybe mention it to someone who has the power to fix it. Then, their customer service might match their amazing products. Just to confirm, the phone itself is the best I have ever used. This may be why I was so disappointed at the horrible customer service experience I had, from start to finish.
If HTC contact me, I will of course let you know.
Here’s the thing: Until that poor customer service experience, I had been evangelically recommending their HTC Desire and Desire HD phones to everyone.
Today, I don’t!
I no longer recommend the brand, because I don’t want people to experience the same customer service frustrations that I encountered.
Word of mouth recommendations are incredibly powerful. In the week I owned my HTC Desire, prior to this customer service incident, I helped them sell around a dozen HTC Desire phones, via my recommendations to friends and contacts. Had I blogged about them, the way I did when Dell customer service exceeded my expectations, who knows how many of you would have considered buying an HTC phone when you next upgrade.
In fact, in 3 years this is only the 2nd time I have ever named a brand in a negative light! As I showed with that Dell post, I always prefer to focus on the positive, yet the marketing message here is too important for me not to share the learning with you.
HTC customer service: The marketing lesson?
If you were ever in any doubt as to the strong connection between customer service and marketing, this example makes the point extremely well. Just as your marketing promises need to be backed up with great products, they also need to be backed up with great customer service. No matter how good our products or services are, we can turn passionate advocates away and send them packing to another provider or brand, if we let them down when it comes to the customer service experience.
My negative customer service experience, both with the person who was “looking after me” and their HTC tech support system itself, has seen me go from being a passionate advocate of great HTC hardware, to a frustrated user of HTC customer service. To turn someone away like that makes no sense at all.
UPDATE: 28th December 2011
It’s now 8 months since I wrote this post and have still not had any reply from HTC.
It’s not my intention to turn this post into a place where people can slam HTC or their products. It was always intended simply to showcase an example of an amazing product let down by pretty poor online customer service procedures and offer suggestions on how it could be fixed. My issue was exclusively around the inability to reply to tech support emails, and have to go through a lot of hassle via a website, in order to reply.
As a result, I am closing comments on this and suggest future complaints are directed to HTC.
As HTC have taken no notice of this post whatsoever, it’s unlikely your problems will get an answer from them here.