Rosetta Stone #fail
Thursday 11 February 2010 - Filed under Computers + Journal
I’m mad at Rosetta Stone right now and I think it is a lesson in how NOT to run a company.
Here is the crux of it: Rosetta Stone is more concerned about preventing software piracy than they are about existing customer satisfaction. These things always come from the top down. Some big important MBA has a spreadsheet which tells him how much richer he could be if their software wasn’t pirated. So they spend a ton of money and create all sorts of processes to prevent piracy. That alone would be fine – I am anti-software-piracy for the most part.
But what has happened psychologically at Rosetta Stone is that everyone, including good, loyal paying customers, is viewed through this lens of suspicion. The focus is not on making sure customers are happy, it’s on making sure they are not pirates. The goal is not to make sure customers get what they want, it’s on making sure Rosetta Stone gets what it wants.
This is completely backwards. It’s a cancer in an organization. You can never put a corporate goal above the goals of your customers. Without your customers there is no corporation.
I’ve tweeted many times about how much I like Rosetta Stone. Now I am tweeting about how much I hate Rosetta Stone the company. That is a colossal failure of management and a sign, frankly, of a company in decline.
UPDATE: Someone at Rosetta Stone came through, solved my problem and took responsibility for the runaround I had been getting. They even said they read this blog post! I can’t say how or if Rosetta Stone will address the big picture ideas I mention above, but they did, in the end, make sure I was happy and I appreciate that a lot.
2010-02-11 » lolife
6 October 2010 @ 8:52 am
This is the letter I wrote to Rosetta Stone:
Date: September 14, 2010
Mr. Jay Topper Senior Vice President, Customer Success
Rosetta Stone 135 W. Market Street Harrisonburg, VA 22801
Dear Mr. Topper:
I have been a Rosetta Stone customer since 2008 and have enjoyed some success with your program, mostly in combination with other learning materials. But I will never purchase another Rosetta Stone product nor will I recommend it to friends or colleagues because of Rosetta Stone’s horrible customer service. Indeed, in a world where economics dictate a less comprehensive and personal approach to customer service, Rosetta Stone stands alone in the category for creating a frustrating and even antagonistic environment to its customers.
My primary issue with Rosetta Stone is the paramount importance you place upon anti-piracy measures, much to the detriment of clean and functional computer engineering. I certainly agree that Rosetta Stone can and should take measures to ensure that its product is lawfully purchased and distributed. But your company’s obsession with keeping its product away from software pirates makes it nearly impossible for law-abiding customers to upgrade or migrate the application to new hardware without completing a series of onerous tasks — each of which can render your purchase inoperable if not completed correctly. And when hardware failure occurs, recovering Rosetta Stone software enters into a world of the absurd. At the very least, Rosetta Stone is not ready for the realities of life in the 21st Century.
Perhaps more galling is your team of customer service reps, who have been indoctrinated to treat all calls as criminal and suspicious: each rep asked me to produce a receipt from almost 3 years ago, and questioned the veracity of my request when I complained that I do not, as a rule, keep receipts like that. (Most were not amused when I asked them to ship receipts to me of the T-shirts or skirts they purchased circa 2008).
Rosetta Stone is not the only language-learning program (Tell Me More, Transparent, etc.) and is not worth enduring the skewed priorities of your company. You know how to defend against intruders, but you do not know how to create a livable world for a pleasant user experience; essentially, you are the former East Berlin of language learning.
If your priorities ever change, drop me a note and I may return as Rosetta Stone customer. But until then, I’m off to the competition.
Sincerely,
Thomas J. Miller
cc: Tom Adams, Chief Executive Officer, Rosetta Stone