Dear Philips… or the way, how to communicate a maintenance on your SmartTV portal

Dear Philips,

the last 24 hours were again a good example, how bad you communicate with your customers!

What happened? Yesterday morning you started a maintenance on your SmartTV portal and this maintenance lasted almost a complete day. Well, it’s really good, that you try to improve you stuff over there, but you need to communicate this to your customers! Your end-users! At least, when it directly affects your customers – and yesterday it did!

From my point of view (and many others) you made two big mistakes:

1. You did NOT announce any maintenance. You have a “Support Forum” – a very fast way to communicate to your customers! Take a look at it – there are many reported “problems” that “Due to a maintenance the requested page is not available”! Many people don’t understand, that their SmartTV is in the end a webpage based system! They think, their TVs and/or AVM devices are broken! (The Support Forum moderators can only provide information they have! So, let them know!)
2. Your placeholder (“Due to a maintenance the requested webpage is not available”) is only displayed in English! Do you think, that every customer all over the world is able to understand that? For example: people set up their TVs to German and then they got a message on their TVs they don’t understand!

So – please learn, how to communicate with your customers! This would be a win-win situation in the end! But not, how it’s done currently… Take a minute or two to think about it! How do you called it in the good old times? “Let’s Make Things Better”

Toengel@Alex

Follow me on Twitter (@PhilipsToengel)

PS: Some blog statistics from yesterday

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