Since I started blogging, I’ve been using Feedburner’s tools to manage my feed and to check on site stats etc. It’s a fantastic service and I find myself logging in every day to see how things are going. Over the past couple of days, I noticed that clicking through on certain links in the Site Stats section would generate ‘Page Not Found’ errors. Actually, they were generating “There is no spoon” errors. I love the touch of whimsy that’s pervasive throughout the site. Little things like “There is no spoon” instead of “page not found” make me me feel good about giving them my money. No mean feat, especially when I’m smiling when something is going wrong.

Having had the importance of maintaining working URLs beaten into me by Dave, I was concerned about this. A quick check showed the blog was fine and that the URLs in FeedDemon worked as well. I then decided to email Feedburner’s support using their webform.

This was late Sunday - I got the standard “Thanks for emailing us” response, following by a live email about 2 hours later. The note said that I might have the wrong URL, to which I wrote back saying that the link I sent it had been pasted from the Site Stats area. The next morning I got a note apologizing for the problem, telling me that they had a bug and giving me an approximate timeframe for resolution (measured in days, not weeks.)

Even though I contacted them because something was wrong, I came away feeling really good about the interaction. Their reponse had almost everything you want to see in a customer service email of this sort:

  • Apology
  • Acknowledgement there was a problem
  • Notification of a fix with timeframe for resolution

They made me feel important, and they committed to fixing my problem. All this happened over the course of a few hours on a Sunday night. I’m impressed.

(I really do hope the fix goes in as expected so I don’t have to be disappointed.)

UPDATE: 2/27 - Fixed, as promised. Awesome.