Hello, my name is Moisés Chiullan, and I’m a cleaner.
Moisés Chiullan is the guy who took over marketing and sales for game product manufacturer N-Control from the now defunct Ocean Marketing. He’s been assigned the Herculean task of cleaning up N-Controls’ former PR representative, Paul Christoforo’s, customer service debacle, and he’s written about the experience in a very smart and thoughtful way.
But let’s back up a little bit to December 16, 2011. A customer named Dave contacts Ocean Marketing to ask when his Avenger controller would arrive. Paul Christoforo responds to this customer’s request in a less than professional way. In fact, his abusive and bullying customer service story has gone bananas viral. Christoforo’s grammatically challenged emails contain such PR gems as, “Grow up you look like a complete child bro. I Don’t have my controller so im gonna cry to the world … Really ??” And “your not an industry professional and you have no money on snap you just got told.” You can read more of the email exchange at Penny Arcade.
And the fallout from giving really, really bad customer service? On December 27, the story was reported on tech and gaming blogs including Destructoid, Gameranx, Nukezilla, GamerFront, and TechCrunch. The emails showed up on web forums including ScrewAttack, SLUniverse, and Neogaf. On December 28, the single topic blog Paul the PR Guy was created on cheezburger.com. Additionally, advice-animal image macros spawned on Quickmeme and Meme Generator were posted using a photo of Christoforo from the Ocean Marketing Twitter account accompanied by quotes from the various email exchanges such as, “I wwebsite as on the internet” and “I goyt 99 problems but Ocean Marketing aint one.”
And now it’s up to the valiant Moisés Chiullan to set things right, placate irate customers, save N-Control’s brand, and reason with Christoforo who is still (STILL!) talking smack and making demands. Chiullan’s first brilliant move was to immediately engage the (who knew?) enormous and gossipy community of gaming forum, blog, and website users and readers. He quickly gained their trust and admiration with his frank discussion of the fiasco and its consequences and his tireless efforts to make things right. Not only has he turned around a public relations nightmare, he has the denizens of the gaming world cheering for him and likening him to a superhero. Amazing PR save.
Let this be a lesson to you marketers and customer service reps: Treat every client and customer with respect and courtesy or you just may find your entire professional universe imploding – as on the internet.
Tagged with Avenger, Chiullan, Christoforo, N-Control, Ocean Marketing, Penny Arcade, Reddit