Customer Service
MLB.tv Decides Entire Planet Is A Blackout Area
The MLB.tv banner ads that brag, “NO BLACKOUTS!: Blackout and other restrictions apply” may be more accurate than we initially thought. Owen tells Consumerist that he was unable to watch a Cubs/Braves game, even though he was trying to watch well after the game was over, when blackouts should no longer apply. He writes: No one seems to have caught this story yet. Not even the 50+ tech blogs I subscribe to. Your article about Roku hinted at this issue, but didn’t cover it completely. Opening day is an important time in the baseball season. Thousands of people logged in to try and watch their favorite teams and were faced with a message that they are living in a “blackout area.” I found this out because I received the same issue myself and spend almost 2 hours trying to fix it. It was puzzling when I tried to watch a Cubs/Braves game that took place in Atlanta yesterday. I live in San Francisco, so I shouldn’t be blacked out of anything. Regardless, I was trying to watch the archived game after it had taken place, which should not be blacked out anywhere in the world. If you check MLB’s support forum, there are more than a hundred comments of outraged customers facing the following issues: 1. Watching an archived game means getting a message that you are unable to because of blackout restrictions 2. If not blacked out, customers open a game and get a black, blank screen. 3. Calling customer service means (reportedly) getting no refund and being told to “keep trying.” 4. Checking the forum leads to a few comments from the moderator, drowned out by hundreds of replies from pissed off customers. The moderator suggestions do not fix the issue.’ Thus, thousands of customers are outraged that they spent $100 or more on a service that simply does not work. Blackouts apply, to all games, home and away, in a given team’s market. Or any market in which their games might theoretically air. This is right in the service’s fine print. Being unable to access any games at all is not.
JetBlue Charges You $105 For Extra Bags Unless You Produce Your Toddler For Inspection
This story has a happy ending, but its still somewhat baffling. Reader S. recently flew JetBlue with his wife and three small children. They had 4 tickets and 3 bags to check. JetBlue allows one checked bag per ticket. So, there should be no fees, right? Here’s where it gets complicated: S’s wife went through security with the children while he checked the bags. The agent said that despite the fact that he was traveling in a party of 4, the baggage agent had to personally see the family, toddler and all, or S. had to pay $105 in extra fees. Here’s his story: I recently had an odd problem flying JetBlue out of Boston and a complaint letter got the $105 fee refunded. In summary, I was flying to Florida with my wife and two small children. Between us we had 3 checked bags. I went to the bag dropoff to check the bags while my wife took the kids. I was hoping to avoid 2 cranky children at 6am in an airport. However after getting to the bag drop the JetBlue agent stated the TSA requires everyone checking a bag to be physically present. So they needed to see my 2 yr old and presumably ask her if she was carrying any explosives. My other option was to state that I packed all 3 bags (which I actually did) and to charge my ticket for all 3 bags at a cost of an extra $105 bucks. I was irritated that they were still charging me the a 2nd and 3rd checked bag fee but my party of 4 only had 3 bags. I sent letter to their customer service did get them to refund the fee but this may be a nice warning to others. Letter sent to JetBlue Customer Service: On my flight to Orlando I was traveling with my wife and two small children. We obtained our boarding passes online the day prior to our trip. Our family was checking 3 bags one for the adults and each child had their own suitcase. Upon arrival there was very long line at the bag drop and a decent line at the security checkpoint. So as not to have two cranky children at 6AM I sent my my wife/kids through the long security line and I would take the bags to the bag drop station. When I finally got to the counter I was informed that this was not allowed. The person who owned the bag had to be present when dropping the bags off. Personally it seems a little silly that the TSA cares about seeing a 2 yr old present but that is another issue. Since I was the only person present the Jetblue agent allowed me to check all 3 bags under my name. Since I packed all 3 bags this wasn’t an invalid statement. However the agent required a $105 dollar fee for the 2nd and 3rd checked bag. As my family was already on the other side of security, and it is illegal to leave unattended baggage at the airport, I had no way of calling back my children to see your agent. Now I am not asking you to try to change/circumvent the official TSA policy, however I think charging the 2nd and 3rd checked bag fee for a party of 4 that is only traveling with 3 bags is unwarranted. However the additional baggage fees are something that JetBlue can control. Certainly It may have been my mistake but I am disappointed that there was no way offered to correct the mistake. I would kindly request that these fees be refunded if possible. Coincidentally our return trip from Orlando was also booked through JetBlue. On this trip we stayed at a Disney resort. You have arrangements with Disney to allow us to check into the flight while we are still at the hotel and check our bags there. The check-in agent there specifically stated that only one member of each party had to be present to check the bags for the flight. I had no problem checking all 4 bags for our return flight without incurring any additional fees. S. included JetBlue’s response, which was an email announcing a full refund. Something to watch out for if you’re traveling with kids. Thank you for contacting JetBlue Airways regarding your travel between Boston and Orlando. We have extended the courtesy of refunding the $105 that was paid for additional baggage, to your credit card. Please allow the processing time required by your credit card company for the funds to appear available. Thank you for your support of JetBlue. We wish you and your family our very best. Sincerely, Michael Customer Commitment Crew JetBlue Airways
10 Essential Social Media Tools for B2B Marketers
This series is supported by the MarketingProfs B2B Forum , where you’ll learn the ins-and-outs of social media as part of your overall B2B marketing mix. Register today ! Like anything else, social media marketing is easier, more efficient and more effective if the marketer has the right set of tools. While hundreds (if not thousands) of tools and services exist for social media marketing, many are still primarily aimed at either consumers or B2C marketers. Fear not B2B marketers — there are still plenty of great tools out there than can best address the unique needs of the B2B space. We’ve raided our own toolkits to come up with some of the best tools and services for B2B marketers that want to get the most out of social media. 1. Salesforce.com The mac daddy of web-based CRM products hasn’t been afraid to embrace social media. In the last six months, Salesforce.com has introduced a number of different solutions via its Service Cloud 2 platform for helping integrate social media with the Salesforce.com ecosystem. One of the best applications for B2B marketers who use Salesforce.com is Salesforce for Twitter. Don’t confuse this with Chatter , Salesforce.com’s Facebook for Business, Salesforce for Twitter will let you pull in and monitor Twitter feeds and accounts within the Salesforce.com CRM. What makes this fantastic is that you can assign cases or leads based on a tweet directly in the CRM that can then be followed up on and monitored along with the other aspects of your work flow. What makes social media more difficult for B2B marketers isn’t that the tools can’t translate from B2C to B2B — they can — it’s that many times those tools don’t integrate well with existing platforms and solutions that a B2B business might have in place. 2. HootSuite HootSuite HootSuite is a great tool not only for managing multiple Twitter accounts (or allowing multiple users access to an account), but also for managing multiple social networks. In November, HootSuite introduced support for LinkedIn and Facebook . HootSuite also now supports WordPress WordPress blogs, which works great if you want to have a way to schedule posts and messages to multiple networks. HootSuite also supports alerts and stats tracking. HootSuite is free. 3. CoTweet CoTweet Billing itself as a Twitter CRM tool, CoTweet has been used by a number of big brands, including Ford and JetBlue, and it offers an easy way to manage multiple accounts and also allow multiple users to access a single account. CoTweet also lets you monitor keywords and trends and assign updates to colleagues for follow-up, which can be great for lead-generation. CoTweet was acquired by ExactTarget last month. While the service is available for free, an enterprise option is available for large brands or organizations, starting at a pricey $1,500 a month . 4. SocialTALK SocialTALK from Syncapse is a social media workflow tool that is designed to help companies control their presence on different platforms and monitor feedback. We covered SocialTALK when it launched in February and it remains one of a handful of services really aimed at helping businesses manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. You can create and schedule video and photo posts for Facebook, have multiple user-access levels, access multiple pages from the same dashboard and monitor incoming traffic and analytical information. [Disclosure: Syncapse is a Mashable Mashable sponsor] 5. Radian6 Radian6 Social media is one of the best tools that B2B marketers can use for lead generation. By monitoring Twitter, forums and online communities, you can seek out not only what people are saying about your client, but you can find people in need of a solution that your client or company can offer. Radian6 is a really comprehensive monitoring tool that can scan blogs, comments, public Facebook Pages, Twitter and other sources that you feed it. You can then get real-time updates pushed to your dashboard so that you can follow-up or reach out to a potential customer. Radian6 can integrate with Salesforce.com, meaning you can create new contacts or leads in Salesforce directly from the Radian6 dashboard. 6. Spredfast Spredfast is a tool that can monitor, manage and measure various social media solutions. You can use it to manage multiple accounts or to schedule content. Spredfast can also be used to do real-time monitoring of persistent keyword searches in search engines, RSS feeds and Twitter and Facebook streams. It can also index relevant and competitive sites. Spredfast also offers metric reporting and tracking so that you can better understand what methods are working best and what methods might need some tweaking. Spredfast starts at $50 a month. 7. Social Radar Social Radar is another tool that can do a real deep dive of social monitoring and analysis. The SR Alerts package can monitor conversation fluctuations, important topics from designated influencers and sentiment analysis. The Social Radar tool isn’t cheap (SR Alerts starts at $200 a month), but for businesses that want to monitor a lot of ground, it’s worth investigating. 8. truPULSE truPULSE from Visible Technologies can monitor and listen to conversations surrounding certain topics or keywords from Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, video sites and blogs. What’s nice about truPULSE is marketers can track the tone and perceptions of a brand amongst your brand, your product or competitors. truPULSE can also highlight crisis and customer service issues — which is an area that B2B marketers can excel at by either fixing the situation before it gets out of hand, or use as a way to get a lead or pitch their own service or product. 9. Viralheat Viralheat is a social media monitoring and analytics service. It can monitor Twitter, Google Buzz Google Buzz , Facebook Fan Pages, the real-time web and even viral video statistics. One area in which Viralheat differs from some other options is that it can both restrict profiles by location (which can be huge if your B2B is local or is trying to target a certain sector or location) and it has its own API. Having its API means that you can make Viralheat extensible and potentially integrate it into other existing business solutions. 10. Sentiment Metrics Sentiment analysis tools can be really helpful for B2B marketers because without context, just having a number of Twitter mentions surrounding a certain topic or brand is pretty meaningless. Sentiment Metrics is a tool aimed at larger businesses and the enterprise but it can be useful for B2B marketers because it can monitor not only sites like Twitter, but also online forums and blogs. While people might inquire about products or services on Twitter or Facebook, the in-depth conversations often take place in forums or on blogs. Monitoring these areas for not only mentions but sentiment analysis can be pretty powerful. Your Picks B2B marketers, we want to hear from you! Let us know what tools and services you use with social media in the comments! Series supported by MarketingProfs B2B Forum Drive sales and make social media work for you at MarketingProfs B2B Forum ! You’ll learn the ins-and-outs of social media as part of your overall B2B marketing mix – from integration and engagement to measurement. Get 1-on-1 access to the best and brightest B2B marketing stars who will share best practices and FREE advice! Plus, our loyal attendees say our events are ridiculously fun, interactive and the kicker is – we have the best Freebies in the biz! (no keychains here…FREE industry research reports & memberships—stuff to help you really drive sales in 2010!) Register today ! For more business coverage, follow Mashable Business on Twitter Twitter or become a fan on Facebook Facebook Images courtesy of iStockphoto iStockphoto , Yuri_Arcurs , Andresr , WendellFranks