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Unless you have been living in a cave the last couple of weeks, you have heard, seen, read or even tried the Nintendo Wii. They have, in my humble opinion, had a great TV campaign of those two Japanese guys driving around in a little car saying, “We want to play”. They had a great launch of this new console and many have been saying that the Wii is a better buy than the much more expensive Playstation 3. Unfortunately, with every good thing that happens, you have to expect some problems and problems is what has popped up for Nintendo. There has been a rash of postings about the innovative joystick the Wii has where you actually move to perform an action has been breaking because of all the movements people have to make.There have been blogs setup specifically on this issue, I happen to of stumbled on this one where they actually have video of the joystick breaking while a guy is playing it. This console has been out what, 3 weeks or something and there are already 2.2 million search results for the term “wii have a problem” in Google.

Even though at the moment it does not look like this is a wide spread issue, the reason why I bring this up is to discuss and look at how Nintendo handled this issue. If you look at incidents like this in the past, you can see prime examples of how companies absolutely shot themselves in the foot and then proceeded to put it right into their mouths by either their lack of action, lack of attention or just outright ignoring their customers. Think of companies like Microsoft with the power cord and disk drives on their first Xbox. Dell and Sony with their exploding batteries and finally, the best one, Sony and their rootkit installed on their music CD’s to stop piracy.

The way each one of these companies handled these incidences or in better terms, how poorly they handled them directly caused these problems or issues to multiply in size and scope. If they addressed these problems immediately and properly, these issues would never of gotten the kind of PR they received and more importantly, each one of these companies could of turned unhappy customers into true brand advocates.

Nintendo on the other hand has showed the exact right way to handle an issue of this sort. They immediately announced for all users who broke the joystick they would get a new strap, no fee, no shipping costs. Here is a quote from the blog I linked to earlier.

“After having my Wii Remote fly through the air and hit the ceiling while my brother-in-law played Wii Sports Bowling, I promptly called Nintendo and complained about this catastrophe. The customer service was very nice and professional, and quickly sent me a new Wii Remote, shipping paid for it to come to me, and for me to send the old one back. Little did I know that the Wii Remote I would soon get would have a stronger string connecting the wrist strap to the Wii Remote. Indeed, as I opened the UPS package, I discovered that it was much thicker and looked stronger than before.”

A prime example of if handled properly, a company can turn an unhappy customer of theirs into a brand advocate / evangelist which will pay far more dividends in the long run compared to the short term incremental charges it would cost to fix the problem.

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Technorati Tags: Nintendo Wii, wii have a problem, brand advocates, evangelist