ESPN’s Fantasy Football Failure: Do “Users” Deserve a Good Experience?

For customer management professionals, the “Internet Revolution” underscores the difference between customers and users.

Customers are those who directly purchase a good or service from a brand.  Users engage with but do not explicitly buy anything from the brand.

Facebook’s “customers,” for example, are those who pay for advertising or promoted posts.  The users are the individuals who interact with the Facebook platform, whether by creating profiles, posting photos, “liking” pages or networking with peers.

Facebook advertisers are ultimately hoping to connect with these individuals, so the massive user base is part of the “pitch” Facebook makes to prospective customers.

This approach is true across numerous online enterprises – from fellow powerhouses like Google and Twitter to the countless startups launching in Silicon Valley.  “Users” are very often part – if not the essence – of the product online businesses sell to their true customers.

Users may not directly spend money with the brand, but they definitely have value.  Is that value enough, however, to warrant a great experience?  Should brands approach their “users” with the same commitment to satisfaction that they do their paying “customers”?

That question factors into this weekend’s ESPN Fantasy Football incident.

Note: While Fantasy Football has become fairly ubiquitous at this point, CCIQ is not in the business of making blanket assumptions.  Click here if you need a refresher on the basics of fantasy football.

The Incident

“You had one job.”

At 1PM ET on Sunday, millions of fantasy football players were ecstatic.  The first Sunday of the 2016 NFL regular season was here, and fantasy football was finally back in full swing!

By around 1:15PM, a great deal of those wide smiles began transforming to frowns – if not fits of rage.

The mobile and desktop iterations of ESPN’s Fantasy Football platform stopped working.  Players could not access their lineups, they could not evaluate the waiver wire, they could not check the platform itself for game day news, and they could not track their scores.  They, quite simply, could not participate in the fantasy football experience.

ESPN fantasy users have dealt with outages before – the app has even crashed on opening Sunday in the past – but this issue evolved into something unprecedented, unexpected and unacceptable.  It was not a five or ten-minute glitch with the mobile app; it was a sweeping issue that locked users out of the platform.

For hours.

Players could not even gain sporadic access to the platform until around 4:30PM; service was not fully restored until 5:30PM.  Since the outage lasted past 4:05/4:25 – the start times for the afternoon games – players did not simply miss out on the fun of tracking their teams’ scores throughout the day.  They actually lost the ability to make lineup changes ahead of the late afternoon games.

While there were admittedly few league developments that would have necessitated lineup changes, there were surely some players who wanted to tinker.

Many fantasy football players participate in money leagues – they “buy in” and then compete for a share of the pot – so the inability to track performance and make changes, in theory, could have had legitimate financial consequences.

Regardless, it was certainly a source of legitimate frustration.  It drove a seemingly endless array of Twitter complaints as well as ample uses of hashtags like #ESPNFail.

When confirming that service had been restored, ESPN assured users that no data had been lost.  It did, not, however, provide any remedy for those who could not make lineup changes – or for those who simply had an unpleasant Sunday afternoon due to the issue.

User Experience: Just a Fantasy?

One who views #ESPNFail through a conventional customer experience perspective can identify a myriad of blunders.

*  ESPN again allowed a tech issue to emerge on what is one of the most important days for its platform.  Given the history of issues, the clear significance of opening Sunday, and the obvious volume it should have expected, ESPN should have gone above-and-beyond to ensure errors were impossible.  It should have installed enough server volume and database redundancies to handle an unthinkably large amount of traffic and immediately repair even the most unlikely of errors.

*  ESPN only offered a few updates during the day, and they were all of the vague variety.  The company did not, at least not immediately, provide transparency into what caused the issue or a clear timeline on when service would be restored.  It also neglected to offer any alternatives for tracking points or editing lineups.

*  ESPN did not respond to the seemingly endless array of Twitter complaints from customers.

*  When ESPN did resolve the issue, it only focused on the preservation of data.  It did not explain how it would remedy the other experiential issues associated with its failure of an opening day.

*  ESPN did not, at least not immediately, articulate corrective steps to guarantee this kind of issue could never happen again.  It also opted not to advertise a backup option in the event that future outages do occur.

There is just one issue:  should #ESPNFail be viewed through a conventional customer experience perspective?

The people most overtly affected by the outage were not, after all, paying customers in the vein of cable or utilities subscribers.  They were users.

Sure, some may subscribe to ESPN Insider or use the company’s league dues service.  The overwhelming majority of those complaining, however, were simply individuals using ESPN’s free fantasy football service.

Are they truly entitled to a great experience?  For what “remedy” is ESPN accountable in the event that the user experience is not as great as expected?

Make no mistake.  ESPN has motivation to deliver a great fantasy football experience.  If a bad experience drives leagues and players to competitive platforms next year, ESPN’s user base will suffer, and its ability to generate advertising revenue (and upsell premium products) will shrink.

For that reason alone, ESPN should do its best to keep users happy.

But the focus here is on a different question:  does ESPN have any specific obligation to its users?

That is an important question to ask because it is not necessarily true that a one-week user experience glitch will damage ESPN’s relationship with its paying customers.  Advertisers are likely on some sort of cost per impression plan; fewer week one impressions potentially meant less week one revenue for ESPN, but it did not necessarily mean disgruntled customers.

Transferring a league to a competitive platform is, moreover, not an easy task – particularly during a season.  The user base will not markedly shrink in the near-term.  And insofar as the anger, as white hot as it may have been Sunday afternoon, has almost a full-year to subside before next season, there is no guarantee that the incident will affect next year’s user base.

So if there is no impact on commercial viability or customer relationships, does ESPN still have a motivation to optimize the user experience?  Should it still work tirelessly to ensure that nary a single user is upset with the ESPN Fantasy Football platform?

That is an interesting question.  And it is one that has even bigger, more financial substantial ramifications outside the realm of fantasy football.

Consider Google.  Web publishers’ livelihoods hinge on the Google search experience.  If Google incorrectly indexes their pages (or stops indexing them altogether), their traffic and commercial viability will fall.  Indeed, the Google user experience has legitimate stakes – for Google users.

These web publishers are not, however, Google customers – at least when it comes to organic search placement.  And it is not as if Google’s paying customers (AdWords advertisers, as an example) would be markedly affected if one specific site started losing traffic.

Given that dynamic, is Google at all accountable to the publisher?  Should it offer a user support line?  Should it feel obligated to optimize the particular user’s placement in organic search?  Should it care if that user is upset?

Question of Stakes

One who answers the previous line of questioning in the negative presumably believes that while the business may derive value from its overall user base, it does not derive value from any one individual user.  Internet brands are not necessarily selling “Joe Smith” to advertisers; they are selling people like Joe Smith.  As long as people like Joe Smith continue using the platform, there are no user experience issues.

But what if we were to extend that logic to the customer experience?

There are many scenarios in which the business has complete leverage over customers.  Perhaps the customer does not have the option to switch.  Perhaps demand for the product is so great that one lost customer represents a mere drop in the bucket.

Even in those cases, customer experience thought leaders compel brands to deliver the best possible customer experience.  They trumpet the importance of effortless, personalized, customer-centric engagement. They grade utilities and other natural monopolies against the same criteria they use to assess hospitality companies that face viable competition from hundreds of other firms.

Clearly, we view the “customer” through sacred eyes.  Is it because they are paying?  Is it because they are entrusting the brand to deliver?

If so, why neglect the individual user?  They are contributing value to the business, and they are just as dependent on a successful experience. 

Image Credit: ESPN Media Zone