About six months ago, I bought a Motorola Cliq XT smartphone. The phone itself is still just fine, and I have no real complaints about it. However, my phone is at the center of an issue that is demonstrating how not to deal with your customers: the issue of a promised upgrade that keeps slipping away.
My phone runs version 1.5 of the Android OS. When I bought my phone earlier this year, Motorola was promising that an upgrade to 2.1 would soon be forthcoming. Not wanting to get locked in to a dead-end technology, I was happy to hear that there was an upgrade in the pipeline, although it wasn’t a huge selling point for me and wasn’t something I was banking on. It was expected that the upgrade would be coming out in the summer.
Early summer turned to late summer, and is now turning to fall, and the delivery date for that upgrade keeps on getting pushed back. First it was 2Q2010, now it is late 3Q2010/4Q2010, or the October/November timeframe. People on the Motorola Forum are, unsurprisingly, completely fed up at the constant delays. Many have already gotten rid of their Cliqs and moved onto non-Motorola devices in disgust. Many of these people are self-described longtime customers of Motorola and are leaving forever.
Motorola has broken the first rule of customer service: always underpromise and overdeliver. Never do the reverse: overpromising and failing to deliver. If they promised an update by December, and got it out in October, everybody would be thrilled. If you promise an update in June, and get it out in September, everybody will be pissed. And, seeing how this upgrade is a serious IT project, they should have known that unanticipated roadblocks would crop up. When it comes to projects like these, you estimate how long it should take, and then double or triple it to get close to how long it will actually take.
T-Mobile isn’t looking so hot here either. People who complain to T-Mobile are told that Motorola is the hardware company responsible for this, etc. etc., and they should take their complaints to Motorola. While true, the fact is that T-Mobile is the first customer service experience that most people facing this delay are going to have. As such, T-Mobile can no more blame the problem on Motorola than a restaurant can blame the food on the poor fish that was delivered today. Customers don’t care that the product you are selling them was manufactured elsewhere. They bought it at your store and it has your name on it, so you have to deal with it.
T-Mobile should have worked with Motorola from the beginning to get accurate information to salespeople and ensure that they would not be overpromising what couldn’t happen. They should be putting pressure on Motorola to get a fix out as fast as possible. When some of these frustrated users jump ship, they are not only ditching the Motorola phone product line, they are sometimes ditching T-Mobile too.
Personally, I don’t care if my phone doesn’t have 2.1 yet. It does what I need it to do. However, this has been a great example of how not to deal with a customer service issue, and everybody in this line of work should take heed.