Customer Service Case Study: TidySongs

I bought a copy of TidySongs because it bills itself as “an easy and powerful program that will fix any missing or misspelled song details, add album artwork, remove duplicate songs and organize your music.”

How great would that be? To have all 46 GB, all 7,000 songs, properly spelled, sorted by genre, labeled by album? Delightful!

If it worked. Sadly, though, it never has. All I’ve gotten is an error message, though I’ve done everything I can think of to fix it.

But the story is less about the product glitch and more about the customer service that went with it. TidySongs says their help is very connected: Twitter, email, Facebook and blog. Again: delightful!

Trouble is, I contacted them eight times, by Twitter and email (and although I did get a human to respond, which in fairness is more than some) all I ever got were a few declarations over a few months that the development team were working on a fix… and then no more responses at all.

It’s extraordinarily frustrating, but I’m trying to make the best of it and have a learning experience. So here’s what I’ve learned.

• If you’re responsible for “Customer Experience,” you should have more at your disposal than empty promises.
• You should not promise that during “normal business hours of 8-5 Monday through Friday… she will reply back to your email as soon as possible” if “as soon as possible” will in actuality mean three months or not at all.
• If you’re going to offer a product that bills itself as easy to use, even if it doesn’t work immediately, it should be easy to fix.
• If you’re going to buy software, you should be prepared to lose your money.

I like those first three lessons, but I’d rather not believe in the fourth one. Isn’t there a better one?