Stranded at 2am: What Digital Marketers Can Learn From Lyft’s MANY Customer Failures

Recently, I flew home to Madison, Wisconsin on a late flight from Newark. This flight pretty much ALWAYS get delayed. But there aren’t too many options for direct flights from NYC to Madison, so you take it and hope for the best.

On this particular night, the flight got delayed. Instead of landing around 11pm, I got in at 2am. It was a Sunday night (or I guess Monday morning), and I was getting up with my kids at 6am, regardless of what time I got to sleep.

Not great.

But it is what it is.

I land and make my way outside. En route, I open up the Lyft app and order a ride.

It tells me I’ll wait 15 minutes for a ride. Sounds good. I hit book. It charges my credit card (I get an alert). I’m on my way home.

Normally when you book a ride, it tells you who your driver is (name and license plate). But this time it keeps saying it was still identifying my driver. I wasn’t worried — they let me book a ride, surely they were going to find me a driver!

 

 

 

 

But alas, 15 minutes pass and suddenly… my ride is cancelled. I’m given the option to book again. Now clearly, if I wasn’t so tired, I would probably not have done this. But they were giving specific times, to the minute!, that a driver was going to show up. So I booked another ride. This one was 17 minutes out.

Same deal.

App counts down 17 minutes and then, instead of getting into a car and heading home, they cancel my ride.

WHAT THE HELL LYFT?!

It’s now 2:30 in the morning and I’ve wasted half an hour standing outside the Madison airport, because they told me they had drivers when they didn’t.

What they should have done — OBVIOUSLY! — is let me know they don’t have any available drivers in their system and not let me book a ride in the first place.

But of course, that’s not what they did.

And I wasn’t the only one. There was a group of folks standing around, looking at each other’s phones, all dealing with the same issue from Lyft!

But this (massive!) failure is not why I am so angry with Lyft. I know they have a network problem and while their solution (lying to riders) is egregious, I get it.

No, the reason I am so angry at them is because of how they handled the issue after the fact.

So while this might just sound like a peeved Yelp review, it’s actually a lesson for anyone who uses social media (and/or a website!) for customer service.

ARE YOU THERE LYFT? IT’S ME. A CUSTOMER!

So I did get home. After Lyft dropped my ride for the second time, I called and woke up my wife (who was home with our kids) and she ordered me an Uber through her account (I’ve never used Uber, only Lyft – something that WAS true in the past).

My ride showed up in 9 minutes, as promised.

I got to bed, got up early the next morning, hung with my kids.

And then, later that day, I contacted Lyft via Twitter, sharing one of my tweets I had posted the night before and asking them if they had any response.

While they ignored my first DM, they promptly replied to my second one.

And we spoke back and forth. For a bit.

They asked me for some details, as well as the name, email and phone number on my account, which I quickly passed along.

They then said they were looking into it.

About ten minutes later, they came back to inform me they were “unable to verify that we’re speaking with the account holder” and therefore “we’re unable to discuss the details of a user’s account.” They asked me to go to their website to continue the conversation.

I immediately asked if there was no way we could verify that I was who I said I was. I mean, I had all the account info and could have accepted text or email confirmation, the same way I might from any local restaurant. I didn’t want to have to start this process over from scratch with a new rep.

NOTHING

I waited 10 minutes and asked them if they saw the irony in blowing me off, seeing as how that was my issue in the first place.

NOTHING

So I went to the website, as instructed, to fill out a form. But guess what: THERE WAS NO WAY TO DO IT! They have pre-written options for customer service, and since mine didn’t fit into any of the choices, there was literally no path forward through their site.

So I went back to Twitter and let them know, and asked again if I could verify my account with them to continue.

NOTHING

My final message to them:

Are you just ghosting me? I’m legitimately asking for help. There is no section on the contact us page that applies to my issue and there’s no way to select other. I’d really like your help. Please.

And they finally responded.

JUST KIDDING.

I got nothing in return.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THEIR TERRIBLE DIGITAL MARKETING AND CUSTOMER SERVICE

We’ve all grown so accustomed to big tech not being accountable to its users that we small businesses and nonprofit organizations might think it’s fine to do the same.

But that is not correct!

Not by a long shot.

Yes, Facebook and TikTok can ignore our messages and we will keep logging on.

But if a local restaurant does it… suffice to say we probably won’t go there anymore.

Social media is people. It’s a whole bunch of people, talking to each other.

As a digital marketing and social media professional, the ironic thing here is that I actually think Lyft would have been better off ignoring me altogether than talking to me, only to then eventually stop talking to me.

I know they are seeing my messages. They are making a decision not to reply.

And for me, that’s worse than just assuming they aren’t seeing my messages in the first place.

So let’s look at some lessons for any company worth less than ~$50 billion (cause Facebook will be fine without you, most companies, not so much):

• Don’t lie to your customers — Lyft knew they didn’t have drivers. Yet they told me, and those other would-be-riders, they did and we wasted 30 minutes of our night standing around. If I called a cab company and they didn’t have drivers, they would tell me. Lyft chose to lie about its network and in the process, they screwed us.
• Treat DMs with respect — You don’t have to reply to every DM. But if you ignore customers, they will likely stop being customers. Pretty simple.
• Don’t ghost customers — I mean… this one kinda speaks for itself. I cannot believe that Lyft doesn’t even have some boring statement to copy and paste to just keep sending me back to their website. That would piss me off plenty, as the website didn’t work for me, but at least it would show they aren’t completely writing me off.
• If you have a contact form on your site, have an option to select “other” — Lyft literally built a contact form that was impossible for me to use. Having the option to choose other, and then spelling out my issue, would have solved this. Instead, they gave me no path forward.

I hope that we can all learn something from Lyft’s many, many mistakes.

And if you ever find yourself in the middle of the night, waiting on a Lyft, and they aren’t telling you your driver’s name and license plate, cancel that ride and find another way home!

Rant — and lesson! — done.