Customer service and JF
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 11:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianMelannen posts on her experiences with JF: She remarks that "hating your users and wishing the site would die is the *inevitable result* of trying to deal with the people on a fannish journal site." XD
Yeah... The issue is that people expect professionalism, when the domain such a site is in is not totally professional. In normal social life, if someone insults you, or you feel they're not treating you with respect, you naturally kick them out of your house or tell them what you think of them. But when dealing with institutions and provision of services for cash, users start to have a consumer mentality.
Someone told me that obviously few companies would want to have (fanfic?) fans as customers, because they deal in things of dubious legality (copyright), often controversial and difficult to monetize with ads (sexually explicit content), and they get angry when ads are put up, but don't want to pay. I'm not sure whether the latter is true, though? I know lots of people who set up paid webspace for their fansites. As it should be, the financial burden is on the producer of content, and it's up to them to ask for donations/whatever if they can't pay the server bill.
(Personally, I've always felt very strongly displeased at the attitude on of some of the users on LJ that 'we have a right to treat employees however we want, and of course they must treat us like the customer is always right,' especially because of the power relationship between the customer and the employee, and because the employee is often not in charge of making policies. It always struck me as like someone who screams and shouts at the lowly customer service clerk over some policy or whatever that they're not even personally responsible for.)
Oh, have started to receive google hits.
"angela carter dr hoffman"
"dreamwidth v livejournal"
site:dreamwidth.org "google analytics"
Yeah... The issue is that people expect professionalism, when the domain such a site is in is not totally professional. In normal social life, if someone insults you, or you feel they're not treating you with respect, you naturally kick them out of your house or tell them what you think of them. But when dealing with institutions and provision of services for cash, users start to have a consumer mentality.
Someone told me that obviously few companies would want to have (fanfic?) fans as customers, because they deal in things of dubious legality (copyright), often controversial and difficult to monetize with ads (sexually explicit content), and they get angry when ads are put up, but don't want to pay. I'm not sure whether the latter is true, though? I know lots of people who set up paid webspace for their fansites. As it should be, the financial burden is on the producer of content, and it's up to them to ask for donations/whatever if they can't pay the server bill.
(Personally, I've always felt very strongly displeased at the attitude on of some of the users on LJ that 'we have a right to treat employees however we want, and of course they must treat us like the customer is always right,' especially because of the power relationship between the customer and the employee, and because the employee is often not in charge of making policies. It always struck me as like someone who screams and shouts at the lowly customer service clerk over some policy or whatever that they're not even personally responsible for.)
Oh, have started to receive google hits.
"angela carter dr hoffman"
"dreamwidth v livejournal"
site:dreamwidth.org "google analytics"
