My relationship with
soccer.com is complex.
On the one hand, I'm a fan of Eurosport - the retailer one finds at soccer.com. The firm's catalog contains a healthy dose of
retailtainment in print form, enough to be a constant on my nightstand or - dare I say it? - the magazine rack near a certain porcelain bathroom fixture. It's my wishbook for all things soccer: shoes, uniforms, videos, and so forth... The sale section gets special focus.
I am a long-time member of the Goal Club, the brand's frequent buyer group, and periodically I'll splurge my accrued points on the best sale items I can find. I've purchased apparel, uniforms for teams, shoes for myself, shoes for others, highlight videos, and more from Eurosport. I'm loyal, almost to a fault.
Which brings me to "the other hand"... Soccer.com is a clunky website. Periodically, it causes me such fits that I consider leaving it. Like a grumpy girlfriend, it refuses to talk to me, not allowing me to log in. Or, when I try to put that special something in my cart, it tells me I've selected an "invalid item" - though it may have actually placed the item appropriately and simply decided to have a bit of fun by telling me it didn't.
Recently, I had two bouts of frustration which brought me closer to a painful break-up than ever before. The first resulted from a lovely email announcement: "We're Mobile! Find us at MOBILE.SOCCER.COM". O Joy! I picked up the message on my smartphone, only to find I couldn't click through to the mobile site. The only link in the message actually went to the standard URL. Grrrr...
Not to be denied, I punched in the
http://mobile.soccer.com/ address and hopped excitedly as the new site loaded. Loading done, I could see the new site but I couldn't use it. Once again, the only link that seemed to work took me back to the base URL. Double Grrrr... I tried again from my newer, touchscreen featured other smartphone... Denied.
It seems my
Windows-based system wasn't good enough for mobile.soccer.com. A friend with a
Droid confirmed it. The mobile site worked for that phone. But, how many potential customers out there were stymied by the botched implementation?
Which brings us to my latest challenge: my seeming inability to sign in as a Goal Club member over the past week or so. Over and over and over, what had always worked failed. I'd input my username and password, only to be told I needed to input my password. Huh? I clicked "Forget your username/password", got a reset on the password, and tried again. By now, you've figured it out - I had gone crazy, trying the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different outcome.
Incredulity took hold... "How could this be?" "This has never happened before!" "There's got to be a mistake!" I sent a note to Customer Service and stewed. Customer Service sent me a very nice note back to inform me that they'd checked, and nothing was amiss with my account. Really? Really?!?!
"Can't you see I can't get in?" I thought as loudly as possible. Nobody heard, so I tried a different approach. I contemplated my own assumptions, and lo and behold, one BIG one jumped out at me. I'd assumed that soccer.com would react to all browsers the same way, which of course I should have realized wasn't too bright on my part given the previous challenges with the mobile site. What if I were to head to the site using a browser other than my standard,
Google Chrome?
I fired up
Internet Explorer. I typed the soccer.com URL. I held my breath. I clicked "Sign In". I entered my username and password. I waited. By now, I was noticing how long my breath had been held; my mind wandered to thoughts of "Shouldn't I be able to hold my breath longer? I should work out more..." and then it happened: I was in (again)! All it took was for me to switch browsers. Whew! Soccer.com was still there for me... but wait a minute!
Why should I have to troubleshoot and switch browsers just to get to stuff I might want to buy??? I mean Chrome doesn't have the greatest market share among browsers, but it's up
around 10% these days. Imagine a normal retailer telling every 10th potential customer, "No thanks, you can't come in... Don't like the car you drive, so you're not welcome." It makes no sense.
At a minimum, I wish I'd been told of the incompatibility. Who knows, in the case of the mobile site I may have concluded that it was time for an
iPhone or a Droid... Instead, I felt spurned. I wasn't happy. I was gonna do something about it, too, except...
Except...
Except that the Customer Support people at Eurosport are fantastic. Whether because their bosses create so many problems for them to solve, great training, or inherent good Samaritanism, it doesn't actually matter. They rock. During my trials and tribulations, they kept up a constant friendly dialog with me.
They offered to send me gift card for my troubles. They apologized for the fact that I was having trouble. They reminded me, ever so politely, that I could always call when I had an issue; a real human being would be happy to confirm my membership and place an order. They thanked me for my feedback. They thanked me for my loyalty over the years. They simply did everything right.
Know what? It worked. Remember the girlfriend I mentioned before? We made up. She's got her faults. She's actually got quite a few of them. But deep down, her heart is pure. She wants to do the right thing. She knows she's not the best at what she does, but she's trying hard to do it well.
Eurosport, I'll be back to soccer.com. Please keep sending me your catalog. And, at this busy time of year for all e-tailers, hug your Customer Support team. Hug'em from me, too!
