I am so mad at Barnes and Noble’s NOOK that I am writing a blog post about it.

I have a 1st Edition WiFi NOOK. I spent $189 or so on it about 20 months ago. I love it.

Well, loved it.

Even though I have my iPad I still love my NOOK. I use it out by the pool and on the beach. It’s lighter than my iPad, so makes for easier reading in bed.

In fact, I’ve been so loyal that I have since bought each kid a NOOK (NOOK Simple Touch and NOOK Color), and I just got my dad a NOOK Color for his 75th birthday.

I urged my nephew to get a NOOK so we can share our passion for history. I pushed my sister-in-law to get a NOOK over the Kindle so we can share our passion for Sookie Stackhouse.

No doubt about it, we’re a NOOK family.

It’s been great. Up until last night.

My daughter just lent me Book 3 in The Hunger Games series. I went to download it and was notified of an update. Took a few minutes for the update and then I was asked to register it. And then …

NOTHING

As in error code c7850.

As in my NOOK is now a paper weight.

As in for $35 I can purchase another NOOK 1st edition since they have a few lying around the warehouse.

Hey, if I dropped my NOOK in the pool, or spilled my coffee on it, or stepped on it, I’d have no problems buying a new one. I just paid $8o to replace the glass on my iPhone (don’t ask).

But I didn’t do anything to my NOOK other than turn on my device and accept the update.

And then I spent 1.5 hours with technical support tonight trying to find out what was wrong.

I’ll tell you one thing, what IS wrong is that Barnes and Noble HAD an extremely LOYAL customer, and now has an extremely dissatisfied one.

In the “olden” days a dissatisfied customer would share with about 10 people. Well, in the age of social media, I’ve already shared with my 2812 Twitter follwers, my nearly 1000 fans and friends on Facebook, and now here as well.

So what does this have to do with legal marketing? Not much. But it’s my blog.

What this really has to do with is the danger of poor (okay, shitty) customer service in the age of social media.

When you have a customer go from loyal to POd in a matter of minutes, you need to get in there and solve that problem ASAP.

While I was on the phone with George I*******, Digital Manager, I was already posting on the NOOK Facebook page and Twitter feeds about my experience. I was Googling to see if I was alone (hmmmmm, according to this, looks like the same thing happened with the last big update).

You HAVE to have a process in place that allows for a decision maker to make a decision when things are going south.

When you have a customer letting you know that she’s flaming up your Twitter and Facebook pages, it’s time to send her over to the “do what you have to do to make her happy” team.

If Barnes and Noble had chosen to eat $35 dollars tonight, I promise you, you’d have a completely different blog post, and they’d have a continued loyal customer.

But they didn’t.

Edited to add – looks like this post got picked up by White Whine, with no link to the resolution post. Here’s my follow up on how Barnes & Noble resolved the issue: Okay. I’m Satisfied.