Have a Relationship with your Customers

I have been a customer of Tivo for a long time; I first saw one at a friend's house in the fall of 1999, and bought one for myself that Christmas.  Over the years I have owned somewhere around 6 tivos... Upgrading when the series2, series3, and most recently the Tivo Premiere came out.

Of course at its heart, the Tivo is a computer with a hard drive, and in the past 12 years I've had a few technical issues.  This story starts last month when my Tivo Premiere died a horrible hard drive death and needed to be replaced, and ends with a lesson on the importance of having a relationship with your customers.

I wasn't looking forward to replacing the Tivo - besides the call to Comcast (which is an entirely separate blog post), I know from experience that every Tivo is a blank slate...  I have to 'teach' it everything about me again... the shows I record, the stuff it should suggest for me, and so on.

Once I got the box set up, I was greeted with a "Welcome to Tivo" message in the Tivo's "messages and settings" that politely told me what I needed to know to use my Tivo, as if I was a first-time user.  I was slightly annoyed at this...  I thought to myself "Tivo *knows* who I am - this Tivo is linked to a lifetime account.  Why not have a welcome message that says 'Here's your replacement Tivo - we hope Rudy at the service center was able to resolve your issue.'?

Of course, Tivo could easily do a lot better than that suggestion.  My Tivo is linked to an account where I can schedule shows on the Tivo website; Why not back up my preferences there, and automatically download them to the new tivo?  Why do I have to set up, yet again, things like "Record episodes of Phineas and Ferb off of DisneyHD"?  I'm not asking Tivo to back up tons of data - not the actual shows, just the 'metadata' about my shows, my thumbs up and down ratings, the premium channels I subscribe to, etc.  This can't be more than a few hundred kilobytes. (I would think they would be interested in that data too - wouldn't TV executives PAY to know how many people gave a TV show a thumbs up vs. a thumbs down rating?).

A week after I set up my replacement Tivo, I received a new message that says "You may have noticed extra recordings that you didn't request - these are Tivo Suggestions".  This reminded me how annoyed I was...  "Yes, I know you suggest shows to me - you've been doing it for ELEVEN YEARS...  DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!?"  I began to get the feeling that Tivo, as a company, doesn't care that I'm a loyal customer.  They should be sending me a message that says "Its been a week and we see you're recording your preferred shows again.  We're happy everything was set up properly with your cable company".

Another week went by and I got another message "Have you ever missed an episode of your favorite program?  Learn how to set up a Season Pass".  Sigh.  Perhaps you didn't notice, but I've already set up, like, 70 of them?  Remember me?  I was mildly annoyed at having to set everything up - but weeks later, Tivo's naive attempts at customer contact are simply reinforcing the negativity of the whole experience.

Now, I'm not expecting Tivo to greet me by name when I call their service department, or send me cookies at Christmas time, but they can do a lot better than this. As a software engineer, I know the things I'm suggesting are next to trivial to implement.  I'm also quite sure the Tivo engineers have a list of user stories like these sitting in an idea tracker somewhere...  The only reason Tivo, as a company, would not do these things is because they haven't been made a priority.

Thats right, Tivo, as a company, has not made it a priority to have a relationship with their customers.

As much as I love my Tivo, I think they survive because their biggest competition is from cable-proprietary DVRs... and we all know the track record of customer relationship management cable companies typically have.  Tivo should be thankful Apple didn't make the AppleTV a DVR... I don't think they could survive the competition.  If Apple made a DVR, I'm sure it would be sending me tweets: "Hey Dave - Neal DeGrasse Tyson is going to be on Letterman tonight - don't worry, I'll record it for you."

You know what would have been the ultimate experience?  A message on my tivo 2 months ago that said "We've noticed your Tivo is beginning to have issues with its hard drive.  We've backed your schedule data up and scheduled a hardware replacement under warranty.  call 1-800-get-tivo to schedule your return and replacement".  Upon plugging my new Tivo in, a message like "We've downloaded and rescheduled your shows and noticed you've inserted your cable card.  You now need to call 1-800-comcast, and give them this MAC ID and Card Pairing Code to have them reactivate your cable service".  Every piece of hardware and data is available to make that possible; all thats missing is software.


Is there a lesson here?  Yes!  We can trivially use the data we have on our customers to improve their experience, and make it seem like they have a more personal relationship with a big faceless company.  How can you improve your relationship with your customers?