Customer Disservice

Here's a tip for those running live streaming channels on services like Roku - invest in a reliable fucking server.  I know that for many of the bottom-of-the-barrel services I favour (they show my kind of low-rent viewing) money is tight, but really, having your stream crash when I'm in the middle of watching a crucial episode of a series - at the crucial scene, in fact - it really isn't a good look.  Especially when it won't reboot.  Oh, and if your only point of customer contact is, say, a Facebook page, then for fuck's sake address the issue there as soon as possible.  Mind you, that presupposes that they actually monitor their streams.  I'm a great believer that, even if you are providing something free (or, in the case of this sort of streaming channel, free-to-air, but ad supported), you are still providing a service and should engage in a bit of customer care - like keeping them updated.  It isn't just Roku channels I've had this sort of problem with - I've found a fair proportion of online services treat their users very badly, going off line without warning and failing to update users on what is going on.  I've had these sorts of problems with both of the main stats services I use on The Sleaze and when they go down it isn't just that I lose stats, they can also slow the loading of my pages.  I had that problem a few years ago with one of them and I pointed out on their user forum that they hadn't bothered to give any updates as to exactly what the problem was, or how long it was likely to take to rectify it.  I added that, as their code was slowing down my page load times, I would have no choice but to remove it until the issue was resolved.

Incredibly, I was suddenly the villain, finding myself being accused of being unreasonable by a couple of other 'customers' (I strongly suspect that they were actually 'sock puppet' accounts of the site owners), pointing out that this was a free service.  Which presumably meant that I had no right to complain.  Except that I did as, free or not, they were offering a service (supported by ads) and it is perfectly reasonable for users of said service to expect to be kept informed as to problems and outages.  But, on the web, it seems, service providers don't seem to share this view, seeing customers as an inconvenience.  It isn't just the small operators who take this attitude, either.  The other day I went to check my Feedburner stats and found the entire domain going to '404' page cannot be reached.  Now, Feedburner is owned by Google, yet nowhere in their help sections (or anywhere else on their site) could I find any explanation for the sudden disappearance of these pages.  After many hours, the reappeared as mysteriously as they had vanished - still with no explanation.  All of which represents pretty shitty customer service.  But hey, Google is a multi-billion dollar corporate behemoth and doesn't give a fuck about a peon like me - 'if you don't like it, go elsewhere - except you can't because we have a virtual monopoly on so many web services.'  As for those nickle and dime operators, well, I've found that a lot of them have delusions of being 'entrepreneurs' who just see us customers as stepping stones to their first million.  Except that, without decent technical support and customer service, you aren't likely to get beyond the first rung of the ladder - it is only when you hit the top, like Google, that you can get away with that sort of shit in the long term.  (Don't forget that when they started out, Google was everybody's friend: 'Don't be evil'.  Yeah, that lasted, didn't it?).