Not communicating with your users is really bad customer service.

I love companies and people who provide great customer service. I have varying degrees of negative emotion ranging from annoyance to all-out hatred for companies who suck at it.

Today I stumbled, in a rather personal way, across an example of really bad customer service. The web site tens of thousands of LEGO fans have used to host photos of their models has been yanked from the web with not so much a warning — rendering thousands of image links and references unavailable and some people (including me) without some of their photos. The only “warning” was after the fact - a message on the BrickShelf web site that read:

Brickshelf has discontinued operation. We apologize for any inconvenience.

I for one lost a pretty rare photo — one of me with James Jessiman’s parents, Don & Robyn, when they came to visit in 2001. For those of you who know the backstory of James and LDraw, that’s a big deal to me (and I presume to a few others). Yes, I should have had that photo backed up, but I had no idea Kevin would pull a stunt like this.

Now, for some background, Kevin Loch has been hosting these images for free for about ten years. The bandwidth charges have been enormous for this, as Eric Smith speculates in his post (his numbers are spot on, I work in the data center industry). The LEGO company did subsdize the site for a while (not sure of exactly how long) when the cost became prohibitive, but has since stopped. Kevin also attempted to recoup some costs by displaying ads on gallery pages.

On one hand, it’s Kevin’s site, his out-of-pocket expenses, and he can do whatever he darn well pleases with the site. No one is or has paid him a dime (save individual donations). He has no legal obligation to anyone to maintain the service or give a warning of shutting down. It even says so in his terms of service.

So here you have it. Hundreds of thousands of pictures hosted on a site for years (and linked to by thousands of pages) are just gone. No advance warning, no opportunity for image owners to back up their stuff if they need, no chance for them to change their links over to say, Flickr, and keep their web site viewers happy.

People are expressing their frustration, shock, and even attacking Kevin various places on the web. Others like Eric Smith of NorthStar Computer Systems and Troy Cefaratti, a long-time contributor to the online parts marketplace, have stood up in Kevin’s defense. Eric has one of the best posts on the topic and says:

Kevin deserves our thanks for providing a place to look at people’s creations. If he’s decided to take it down, then we need to say thanks, and move on. A warning might have been nice, but you have no idea what the circumstances were that caused the shutdown.

They have good points, but ahem “A warning might have been nice?” ??!

Let’s look at the bigger picture here. Tens of thousands of people have uploaded their stuff to BrickShelf. Thousands of people have used it as the de facto image hosting site for about ten years. This means there are thousand and thousands of links to images across the internet. Many are indexed on web sites, discussion forums, and blogs and they reference creations that are easy to find with a simple search. Kevin knows all of this.

While he’s been providing this for free for years, and it’s within his rights to take it down without a word, it’s certainly not nice. In fact, it’s downright rude. And while yes, the people who have used his site and enjoyed the pictures on it over the years do owe him a huge “thanks,” it’s also reasonable to expect us to be upset when it just disappears overnight, uprooting the majority of model images online.

The bottom line: it’s about customer service, and Kevin blew it on that one. By not giving people any opportunity to back up their stuff when he discontinued BrickShelf’s service, he pulled the rug out of a whole lot of people who “bought” into him and his site as a trustworthy place to host and link to their stuff. I don’t know what Kevin does for a living, but if I were looking to buy the professional services he provides and knew the BrickShelf story, I’d look elsewhere without batting an eyelash.

So Kevin, so long and thanks for all the images–but no thanks for pulling the cord.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 and is filed under Business, LEGO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.