You know, these security breaches — where people external to a company break-in (usually virtually) and steal the company’s data — are becoming increasingly common. Living Social is the latest “victim” of a breach, compromising 50 million accounts. Fifty million!
Yet if you’re a digital company operating solely on the Internet and mobile platforms, you have only one asset you need to protect — your data. Your customer’s data is like gold. You have only one chance to protect it.
Living Social, like so many companies that have come before it, has lost another customer.
So when I went to close out my account, guess what I didn’t find anywhere in my account’s profile page? “Delete account.”
Wow. Just wow.
Right now, I guess because so many of those 50 million people are trying to do the same thing I am — close their accounts — their one “customer support” option (“Help” section) is offline, returning a 503 Service Unavailable message to my web browser.
So let’s walk through all the things Living Social has done wrong:
- Failed to protect its one key asset.
- Fails to offer customers the option to delete their own account via self-service (heck, even Facebook allows this now).
- Fails to provide services while under heavy traffic or load (you’re an Internet company — if you don’t even know how to do this basic task, words fail me).
Goodbye Living Social.
