Last night my wife was trying to upload some photos to albelli.co.uk to generate a hardcopy album. She wanted to take advantage an offer from the Daily Telegraph that ran out at midnight.
The uploading did take some time but I guess the albelli servers were busy because of the promo deadline. Fair enough. Shortly after 11pm she tried to complete the order but the discount that came with the offer no longer seemed to apply. One unhappy wife pulled the plug on the deal.
I tweeted this and had a response from a follower who had the same problem. It looks as if the set up on the server had the offer timing out at 11pm instead of midnight. Not good but mistakes do happen.
This morning I got a response from @albelli_UK with apologies for the problem and asking for more details. By 9.40am they had sorted it out and my wife is now very happy with their service.
This is a great example of how Twitter can be used as a customer service tool. Albelli has turned the situation from having negative PR to positive one and won over a customer. Note they will still have to offer a competitively priced service – my wife can very easily find out what the competition is up to on the wild wild web 🙂
PS yes this is the same telegraph that was hit by a DNS hack last night – as far as I can see the problem is still there at 11am on Monday morning.