Bloglines: Still Sucky After All These Years

Apparently, Bloglines CEO Mark Fletcher replied to June Oshiro’s blog regarding their broken feed reader. June hits the nail on the head with her reply:

But Mark! You don’t address the second fundamental problem. I find this ironic and indicative of the whole issue – I complain that customer support is virtually non-existent, and you seem to pretend I never mentioned it. So let me ask you – do you believe that the issue of tech support not responding is fixed? Are you monitoring that situation as well? Mark, you are the leader of Bloglines – your employees take their cue FROM YOU about company priorities. If you don’t emphasize the importance of responding to customer concerns, who will?

Here are some questions I’d like you to think about. Why doesn’t anyone from support read the discussion forum? Why isn’t there a bulletin board detailing known issues (and estimated time until they’re fixed)? Why did customer support ignore 4 out of 6 attempts to contact them? (I was polite. I even said “pretty please.”) Why couldn’t anyone tell me, over two weeks of emails, that there was nothing wrong with my feed, and that the problem was on the Bloglines end?

The difference in attitude between Bloglines and a company like, say, Jotspot is night and day. Jotspot shows the kind of obsession with good customer service that a web services company needs to have while Bloglines…well…does not.