What Not to Do
There’s a sure way to discourage your customers from coming back for more online courses: give them a terrible membership experience after they purchase from you.
Too many marketing agencies for online courses focus only on getting the sale. They ignore the long-term ramifications of not having good follow-through. Our marketing philosophy is always aimed at the long game with your customers however, so we do things differently.
For fun, we thought we’d collect our experiences with online courses (that we didn’t produce) as well as customer service feedback we have received and used to grow. This is a great example of what not to do!
Signing Up
The worst online course ever never sends you a confirmation email after you purchase. You need to write the customer service address in order to be sent a login that expires 10 minutes after they send it (for security!), which never works the first time. Or the fifth.
But this is assuming you can find the customer service address, which is not published anywhere on the purchase page, the marketing emails, the website, or the thank-you page; in fact, you’re only mostly sure you’re writing to the right company because your desperate google search revealed this email address in a twitter post made by another irritated customer back in 2017.
Inside the Product
The worst online course ever, once you get access, looks more like a collection of home videos from 1994, hosted in a simple list. They’re organized alphabetically, not by curriculum, and half of the links go to files that don’t exist anymore. (Yes, it is possible for Kajabi to look like this.) The audio quality is patchy at best, rarely synchronized with the speaker’s mouth, and definitely not available for download. You are clearly expected to get the value of the course from the live call component.
Attending a Live Call
However, the live call times are all listed only in one timezone, and it’s not clear whether they observe Daylight Savings Time there. If you do manage to join a call, the instructor is late and lets you in 7 minutes past the published start time only to make you wait for 3 minutes while they adjust their phone camera from looking at their forehead to looking at the lower half of their face and back again until you can see their eyes…which are staring off at a computer screen far to the left of the camera.
Your poor instructor doesn’t really know how to use Zoom, so each time one of your fellow long-suffering participants joins, a chime sounds and interrupts the teacher. Your classmates aren’t automatically muted either, so occasionally your lesson is interspersed with construction noise, fire alarm chirps, dogs barking and the inevitable marital spat.
Customer Service
When you write the customer service address to complain and ask for a refund, you wait 4 days to be told simply that “too late, u can’t get a refnd. sry.” So you join the private facebook group (another 3 days) to commiserate with your fellow students.
Only when you finally get in, you discover that two students are apparently making a competition out of who can spam the group the most with their pyramid scheme offers, and the other dozen participants are cowering silently on the sidelines.
Emails
Just when you think you’ve had enough, and that you can ignore the rest of the course and catch the replays, 5 emails land in your inbox in the space of 20 minutes:
1) a notice of access to a different course;
2) an apology for the previous email;
3) a live call announcement for a call starting in one hour, meant to be an exciting surprise bonus;
4) a “link corrected” email for the live call announcement;
5) an email explaining that they can’t actually take your access to the course they gave you by mistake away without cancelling your purchase of the course you are supposed to be a part of, so please keep it as a thank you for your participation.
