My Vonage phone crapped out on me again a week or so ago. Had a nice chat with Ezekiel the customer service rep, who troubleshot the problem and determined it was a faulty power adapter (for the second time in six months). He said they would send a replacement “in a few days.” Two days later I received an email asking me to fill out a survey about the experience: “Your feedback … would be extremely helpful in improving the process and providing valuable feedback.”

Well, I wasn’t going to complete a survey until I received the replacement part and made sure it worked. It arrived earlier this week, and the phone is functional again. Cleaning out my inbox today, I came across the survey and decided to click on the link to fill it out - and give Vonage high marks. “We’re sorry,” the web page read, “our records indicate your survey has expired.”

Another lesson in superficial customer care.

Facebook flip-flops on social ad platform. A firestorm of protest over the social networking site’s Beacon opt-out ad system resulted in a major mea culpa from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and changes that will allow users to turn off the feature. Ah, the perils of pioneering new online advertising models.

Coke launches island in virtual world There.com. Just what the real world needs – another Second Life competitor. I’m thinking of launching my own virtual world, called NotThere.com. You register, create an avatar and then … nothing.

Airlines, coming and going. I’m reading about JetBlue planning to add Internet access to their flights while I’m flying United, whose customer-facing employees are collectively joyless. Talk about going through the motions.

Newspaper filler. The New York Times had a story in its Travel section on Friday about people who name their vacation cottages. The Web won’t kill newspapers – bad content will.

Check email this morning, open one from HP with the semi-disturbing subject line, “HP wants to get to know you better.” Not sure I want that, but they’re offering 10% off on ink and multifunction printers if I update my email newsletter profile. I’m in the market for a new printer, so what the heck, it’s worth five minutes of my time. Click on the link, go to the landing page, and see this:

System Down

We’re sorry, but we are temporarily unavailable. Please try again soon.

This was less than two hours after I received the email. I now know more about them than they know about me.

After hearing the latest regarding consumer electronics chain Tweeter’s bankruptcy, I went to their site to see if they were having a fire sale. I was greeted by this:

Bad earnings. Store closings. Bankruptcy.

You’re thinking, Tweeter’s going the way of the hula-hoop, right?

Wrong. Dead Wrong.

Find out more>>.

OK, I’ll bite. The link takes you to an open letter to customers - basically a mea culpa page - explaining the root of the company’s struggles and its commitment to make things right:

We’re down, but don’t count us out.

Here’s the problem: Over the past several years we stopped doing the things that made us successful in the first place. For thirty-five years our stores were famous for cool products, people that you could talk to and service that made the competition look pale.

We strayed from what made us great.

How we’ll get back on course:

Best Products
We will only carry the newest, coolest, best products in each of the categories we sell.

Smarter People
Technology is changing fast. We’ve stepped up our training program to keep us ahead of the curve. When our salespeople, technicians and installers are smarter, everyone wins.

Outstanding Customer Service
We are renewing our focus on taking care of you, our customer, like never before. You are our number-one priority.

All this means nothing unless you are there to notice.

So give us a shot. The only way to get better is to both be better and have you there to tell. One without the other is futile.

So come and pick our brains and see if we have any. Whether you want a home theater that rivals the local cinema or one “command and control” system that’s easy to use and controls everything from your lights to your thermostat to your security camera, we’ll come up with something that’s sure to fire your imagination.

The rest is on us.

Impressive. A frank acknowledgement of past mistakes, an action plan to do things better, and a plea to give them another shot. As someone who drifted away from Tweeter over the past couple of years as their in-store customer service declined, I understand where they’re coming from. Tweeter used to be my only choice for big-ticket consumer electronics, because I knew I could get straight answers from their salespeople and never felt they were just trying to upsell me. That changed as the service fell below the premiums they were charging for their products. My last visit was at least 8 months ago, when I couldn’t grab the attention of any of the half-dozen clerks talking to one another to ask a simple question about an HDTV (LCD or plasma?). I bought one the next day at Best Buy.

Tweeter’s management finally figured out that their best asset was their loyal customer base, which they let drift away to Best Buy and other big-box retailers without a fight. The epiphany may be too late to pull them out of their death spiral, but at least one former customer is willing to give them another chance.

My 9-year-old son Conor was engaged in his usual hypermultitasking activities last night - simultaneously watching TV, building something out of Legos, visiting the Webkins site, hugging the dog - when a Circuit City commercial came on. He stopped everything he was doing and proclaimed to no one in particular, “I will never shop at Circuit City again!”

You see, Conor and I had a bad experience at a local Circuit City store when an overmatched and undertrained sales clerk couldn’t figure out how to ring up the three items we were purchasing. His incompetence was both comical and frustrating. Twenty minutes into the transaction, I gave up, stopped a manager on the way out of the store, and ripped him a new one for putting staff on the floor who obviously weren’t prepared to do their jobs.

Not a big deal, right? Especially for Conor, who as a consumer-in-training is endlessly bombarded with brand messages and has trouble remembering where he left his socks 10 minutes ago. The negative memory will surely fade into the background, and all will be well. Except for one thing: That in-store experience happened nearly four years ago, when Conor was 5. No amount of slick advertising will ever convince this young consumer to spend his allowance in a store that wouldn’t let him buy a PlayStation game.

General Motors, which cannot afford to lose any customers these days, is alienating a big chunk of them - about half a million - thanks to wireless providers’ government-approved plans to drop analog support from their cellular networks on Jan. 1.

Here’s why: Many of GM subsidiary OnStar’s in-vehicle communications systems run on analog technology. Those who own 2003-or-later GM vehicles with analog OnStar equipment - about 3.5 million of OnStar’s existing 4 million subscribers - will be able to upgrade to the new digital OnStar network for around $200, according to ConsumerAffairs.org. Owners of older OnStar-equipped vehicles, however are, as my Dad used to say, shit out of luck, as GM is not offering any upgrade options for those vehicles. That means the cool little OnStar button in my 2001 Tahoe will be deactivated and completely useless at the end of the year.

But there’s good news! GM is offering an additional year of OnStar service for free - ”with the purchase or lease of a 2006 model year or newer OnStar-equipped new or certified used GM vehicle.” With the monthly plan I’m on now, that cool deal will save me $203.40 (minus the price of the new vehicle, of course)! Thanks, GM!

I’m sure GM made a basic business decision based on the cost of rewiring older models (if indeed that’s even possible). But they could certainly do a better job of taking care of loyal customers who, like me, expected a key feature of their car or truck to last longer than five years. Like a Rock.

That collective groan you heard across North America was the reaction to the overnight Blackberry e-mail service outage. Predictably, shares of Research in Motion fell while the blogs and message boards heated up with tales of woe from Crackberry users who had nothing to do with their thumbs. Interestingly, even though email service has been restored, the blackberryforums.com site was down as of this posting. Coincidence, or conspiracy? Personally, I’m glad I have a POP (plain old phone).

Nothing on RIM’s homepage acknolwedging/apologizing for the outage. They probably figured that no one would notice.

This story on a website called silicon.com caught my eye for its sheer silliness. The writer posits on how virtual world Second Life could play a role as a virtual waiting room for real-life customer service. The story even quotes a consultant:

In future [sic], the consultants believe call centres could one day ask customers to follow up a phone call with them by moving the query into a virtual world. And hanging around in Second Life is more fun than being stuck on hold. As Claus Nehmzow, member of PA Consulting’s management team points out: “The waiting period can be so much more entertaining than with an IVR system”.

Instead of being placed in a queue to enjoy hold ‘muzak’ when contacting a call centre, virtual world visitors could make more profitable use of their time - talking to other inhabitants, viewing videos, reading information in the environment for example.

And I’m sure customers with real problems to solve or orders to place will eagerly latch onto being shunted to a fake world where they can chat up their issues with an avatar.

This is a textbook case of a journalist desperately seeking a fresh angle for an overexposed topic. Inevitably, the result is an incredibly dumb story.

A lost week for me, blogwise. Immersed in a couple of new projects on top of a couple that are just wrapping up, ferrying the kids around to various camps and activities during school vacation week, the blog has calcified. Too brain dead at this point for a real post, so here are links to a few stories that caught my eye this week.

BT’s Next Stage: Custom Creative. An interview with EchoTarget CEO Greg Smith, who claims his hotel and travel clients see a 200% to 400% lift in transactions when the EchoTarget behavioral network sends the right destination-specific creative to targets. I have experienced this targeting a few times over the past few weeks after checking a few travel sites for flights to Florida. I didn’t make a reservation, but received a few follow-up emails from Expedia, Travelocity or whatever sites I checked (they all seem the same to me) promising “low fares for your trip to Orlando.” Pretty cool stuff.

Snack Attack! Wired’s current cover story on the bite-sizing of our culture. At first I thought it was a lame idea, but the more I read, the more I liked it. The Biz and Music sections were my faves.

AAAA Media Conference coverage. Microsoft’s top marketing exec, Mich Mathews, said that by 2010, the majority of the company’s media mix will be in the digital space, a signal that the company is simply following its consumers. Mathews followed P&G global marketing officer Jim Stengel, who talked about the need for brands to be authentic, trustworthy and generous. “It’s not about telling and selling,” Stengel was quoted as saying in AdAge. “It’s about bringing a relationship mind-set to everything we do.”

JetBlue is taking steps to restore its image in the wake of its scheduling implosion last week that left passengers stranded in airports for days and in some cases sitting in grounded planes for more than 10 hours at a time. A day after trotting out CEO David Neeleman to the New York Times (who said he was “humiliated and mortified” by the delays), the company plans to unveil today a customer “bill of rights” program and new operating procedures. A YouTube video from Neeleman is also front and center on JetBlue’s website - a good use of the medium to speak directly to customers.

For a company that has developed a loyal following despite its low-frills approach to flying, this is a critical juncture. It seems to be aware of the damage control it must do. Here’s Eric Brinker, JetBlue’s director of brand management and customer experience, quoted in the Poughkeepsie Journal discussing the new passenger bill of rights:

“We’ll be reaffirming ourselves as a leader in this industry. It’s something that’s going to hold JetBlue financially accountable to a much greater extent than airlines have today. It’s something that really forces us to do right by our customers.

The airline already has pledged full credits or refunds to passeners whose flights were cancelled. So far, so good. But the next few months - and the steps the company takes to fix its apparently deep-seated operational problems - will determine just how much equity JetBlue has built up with its customers.

More broadly, some observes are calling the JetBlue fiasco a tipping point for airline travel, as the blogosphere heats up with calls for legislation to protect travelers’ rights.  Before the JetBlue troubles, a real estate broker named Kate Hanni had formed the Coalition for a Passengers Bill of Rights and is collecting signatures on a petition to spur Congress to enact new legislation for airline travelers. The JetBlue incident will no doubt feed those efforts.

Another great example of the power of social media.