Well, kinda.
See, both have products people really love. YouVersion has these awesome new reading plans, AT&T has the iPhone. Both are so popular that they are causing their respective networks admitted problems and outages. We’re crucifying AT&T for this…so why aren’t we doing the same for YouVersion? Googling “I Hate AT&T” returns 1.24 million results. “I Hate YouVersion?” 15K results. However, none of them seem to actually complain about YouVersion!
I think the reason is because of the way the two companies are handling the outage. YouVersion.com regularly admits to server troubles on Twitter, talks to people with problems via Twitter, and even posted a “We know we’re having problems, it’s because of our awesome users, thanks so much, we’re working on it!” blog post.
AT&T? They tried to stop selling the phone in their problem areas. Well…that seems about right? Naw…
Look, when you have a problem, and EVERYONE knows it, why not just admit it, fix it, and be honest? How is that going to lose people? How will that not built trust and gain you a longer leash with your clients/users?
AT&T, you could learn a few things from YouVersion.com…
#1 by portorikan on January 14, 2010 - 9:15 am
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give it some time. ATT has been having problems for a lot longer than youversion.
#2 by Kevin Switzer on January 14, 2010 - 9:16 am
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I get fed up with YouVersion all the time. I complain to them, and send in support tickets, but they don’t fix anything. As a matter of fact, they say, “It’s fixed now,” and then I go try to do whatever I was doing and it still doesn’t work.
#3 by Clayton Bell on January 14, 2010 - 10:17 am
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Sam, I don’t understand what you’re saying. That we’ll eventually give up on YouVersion, or that they’ll start to be worse?
Kevin, I’m not saying either are perfect, just their approach to their problems is totally different. And just remember this is a free product produced out of one church’s efforts to bless the world, and their usage has quadrupled on the site and tripled on the handsets since the release of reading plans. I’ve met multiple people though the church plant that YouVersion is the first bible they’ve ever owned and read. It’s allowing people in China and India and the middle east to have a Bible when it’s illegal to do so. So while it’s buggy and having problems, there are bigger things at work than it just not remembering our cookie settings.
#4 by Daniel on January 14, 2010 - 11:00 am
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And of course, it may not be AT&T’s fault, it may be the iPhone. I’ve read several articles lately on the matter. Here’s one of them. Interesting stuff…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/business/13digi.html
But, I agree. Let’s be honest with customers. It gives you more credibility in the long run rather than making you look like an organization that’s completely ignorant of what’s going on with themselves.