Loyalty is easily destroyed when the product is free

Posted by Dave CollinsDigital Marketing

I’ve been a long-time user of the Cligs URL shortening service, and have recommended them to countless colleagues and friends. Yet they’ve recently been experiencing technical issues that have forced me to jump ship to one of their competition.

There are two main issues, both of which remain unresolved.

1: Their shortened URLs don’t always work. This is a problem for a URL shortening service.

2 : When I try to edit a URL, I’m taken to a blog post on the Orange County’s news source. This means as little to you as it does to me.

Obviously the first issue is the killer. The Cligs service essentially does one thing. When that one thing stops working, you’re left with nothing.

I did contact the company yesterday, but don’t have the time to wait for a reply. And I’ve now switched to bit.ly, whose interface and statistics are, it has to be said, a whole lot slicker.

Had I been paying for a subscription to Cligs, even a very small monthly fee, I would have emailed them about the issue, and would probably have waited longer for a fix. Even paying as little as $1 per month would have effectively bought my patience, and the income that Cligs would receive might help ensure that technical issues are dealt with a little quicker.

Sometimes the price you pay for free is your patience.

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