Why Amazonfail is still failing
Apr. 14th, 2009 06:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spookyeviloneNew reports about the Amazon brouhaha have pointed at a poor catalog click by an employee in France. They're falling all over themselves to apologize.
Really?
And that fatal click was made back in February, when authors started noticing and inquiring, but only hit the fan on Easter weekend?
If it was a catalog filter, why did it take a month and a half to run? Databases don't work like that. If Amazon's huge and constantly changing db waits a month and a half to run a global filter, something is seriously messed up at that company.
If it was a mistake, and they knew it to be a mistake, why didn't they pull out the mea culpas as soon as the outrage started, instead of when it crescendoed? Why was there a curt and bullshit response from their PR department instead of instant placation of the masses? When PR failed, why didn't some uppity up at Amazon get on the phone with the press and make a statement?
I work for a company for which brand and reputation are everything. We lose our rep, our brand is garbage and our sales tank. We have whole departments to scour for news articles, blog posts, internet rumour, and another two departments to respond at any time. Had something like this happened to us, someone would have woken the CEO up, if necessary, and he would have gotten out there and reassured our customers. This is the expected and reasonable response from any company who's currently doing business on the web. In this, the internet age, news travels like a wild fire. It starts out a small spark in the dark, and within minutes, it is a roaring, furious mass destroying everything in its path. For a company with as huge a web presence as Amazon, it is absolutely not possible for me to believe that they didn't have some sort of policy in place to handle Extreme Internet Uproar. It's not possible for me to believe their PR people wouldn't have known just how bad internet rumour can get, and to have been hired specifically because they were capable of handling this kind of uproar. I'd be willing to bet the PR person spoke without confirmation from Amazon, and didn't actually know it was a "glitch", but felt they needed to say something when this whole thing spiralled.
Amazon said nothing. Even if they didn't know why, placation of the masses was still necessary and did not, and HAS NOT, happened. There's been "Oops, our bad." but nothing even remotely resembling an apology. A simple, "We're sorry. We don't know what happened, but we'll look into it and fix it." would have cut this issue off at the knees. It still would have. Instead, they've chosen to handle it the worst way possible, and come up with a story that is, frankly, not believable. The outrage didn't require an explanation. It required reassurance that, no matter why, it would all be put right.
I pulled my account. I do not intend to resume my account. If they're not up to handling a minor crisis like this, they don't deserve my money. If they're going to fail a huge portion of their customer base like this, they're not going to do it with my money. At this point, I don't really care why it happened. I care about the response.
The response is inadequate.
Really?
And that fatal click was made back in February, when authors started noticing and inquiring, but only hit the fan on Easter weekend?
If it was a catalog filter, why did it take a month and a half to run? Databases don't work like that. If Amazon's huge and constantly changing db waits a month and a half to run a global filter, something is seriously messed up at that company.
If it was a mistake, and they knew it to be a mistake, why didn't they pull out the mea culpas as soon as the outrage started, instead of when it crescendoed? Why was there a curt and bullshit response from their PR department instead of instant placation of the masses? When PR failed, why didn't some uppity up at Amazon get on the phone with the press and make a statement?
I work for a company for which brand and reputation are everything. We lose our rep, our brand is garbage and our sales tank. We have whole departments to scour for news articles, blog posts, internet rumour, and another two departments to respond at any time. Had something like this happened to us, someone would have woken the CEO up, if necessary, and he would have gotten out there and reassured our customers. This is the expected and reasonable response from any company who's currently doing business on the web. In this, the internet age, news travels like a wild fire. It starts out a small spark in the dark, and within minutes, it is a roaring, furious mass destroying everything in its path. For a company with as huge a web presence as Amazon, it is absolutely not possible for me to believe that they didn't have some sort of policy in place to handle Extreme Internet Uproar. It's not possible for me to believe their PR people wouldn't have known just how bad internet rumour can get, and to have been hired specifically because they were capable of handling this kind of uproar. I'd be willing to bet the PR person spoke without confirmation from Amazon, and didn't actually know it was a "glitch", but felt they needed to say something when this whole thing spiralled.
Amazon said nothing. Even if they didn't know why, placation of the masses was still necessary and did not, and HAS NOT, happened. There's been "Oops, our bad." but nothing even remotely resembling an apology. A simple, "We're sorry. We don't know what happened, but we'll look into it and fix it." would have cut this issue off at the knees. It still would have. Instead, they've chosen to handle it the worst way possible, and come up with a story that is, frankly, not believable. The outrage didn't require an explanation. It required reassurance that, no matter why, it would all be put right.
I pulled my account. I do not intend to resume my account. If they're not up to handling a minor crisis like this, they don't deserve my money. If they're going to fail a huge portion of their customer base like this, they're not going to do it with my money. At this point, I don't really care why it happened. I care about the response.
The response is inadequate.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-04-14 02:01 pm (UTC)When all is said and done, the number of books affected is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of their catalogue, and the number of individual customers affected similarly small. Amazon is not just the province of geekdom, with its higher proportion of people who care about these issues and these books. It has a broad, general audience the vast majority of whom still have no idea that there's even been an issue.
no subject
Date: 2009-04-14 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-14 07:58 pm (UTC)The filter itself has been in place since at least last August, and undoubtedly, a few individual items were miscategorized in it to begin with. The CSR who failed to investigate that author's complaint further did screw up, but I don't see how that should reflect on the entire company.
As for it blowing up this weekend, I'm guessing that they deliberately chose a holiday weekend to do an update on that filter, due to low traffic. They probably should've had more people on staff to monitor the update, and I do give them a fail on that, but I certainly don't see any conspiracy here on that count.
Once they found out what was happening, they had to go investigate it. That probably meant pulling a heck of a lot of people out of bed or getting them back home after visiting family over the weekend. That in itself is going to make response time slow. Then they had to track the DB problem back to its source. Then they had to work on a fix.
This is NOT something that's going to happen in 12 hours. It's not even going to happen in a week. I don't blame them for not having a better PR response in a shorter time if they didn't even know what was wrong, yet.
The blowup was good in that it got their attention. But now that they're aware of it and fixing the problem, it's time to step back and let them do their jobs.