Customer Service

Image: Bumble

Bumble is fighting ghosting once again – this time with a marketing campaign whose launch coincides with Halloween.

“Ghosting” is a dating term that refers to two people who have been messaging or seeing each other, and one suddenly stops texting or returning calls, leaving their date to wonder what happened and why they “disappeared.”

The tie-in with Halloween is clever but ghosting itself can be very painful for those on the receiving end. Many daters have experience with ghosting and know how it can ruin the dating experience to be left in the dark. When someone is ghosted, it’s easy to assign blame and make up stories as to what happened, or worse – they can lose confidence as they consider how they might have fallen short - which is counter-productive to finding the right person.

Image: Newsweek

In today's highly competitive business environment, companies are constantly fighting for consumers’ attention and loyalty. Those that manage to secure it set themselves on a path to market domination and financial success. Those that cannot face an uphill battle. Though we’re used to hearing that “the customer is always right,” the reality is that not every company lives by that credo.

Few industries are more competitive today than the online dating industry. From the major players of Match Group and Spark Networks to countless hopeful startups, dating services around the world are locked in a fierce feud to become the go-to matchmaker of tech-savvy singles.

Chinese dating app Tantan, which was recently removed from the Chinese app stores, is on the rise in India. The popular app has gained traction among singles and is now the fifth most popular dating app in the country.

“India is one of the fastest growing internet markets in the world, hence it’s very important to be present and win in the Indian market,” Tantan told Quartz. “After doing a soft launch in India, we learned more about the market and users which helped us in serving the market better.”

Days following the longest outage ever reported by a social network when Facebook went down, users of popular dating app Tinder reported outages with the app, too.

Users were reporting problems with the app early beginning on March 20^th, including not being able to see their matches or messages for hours. Newsweek was the first to report about the problem.

Tinder experienced outages earlier in March as well, with users reporting their dating profiles were suddenly wiped, or that they could no longer see their messages or matches.

Many took to Twitter to express their frustration and to ask Tinder execs what was going on, and how long they expected the outage to last. According to Newsweek, only some users were affected, and it did not seem to be widespread, but users who experienced problems were still unhappy.

Image: Adweek

Dating app Bumble repurposed a coffee shop to act as a gathering space for attendees of the famous SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. The company wanted to create a more intimate and inviting space to allow its customers to better connect, as well as to show off the capabilities of its platform.

Bumble’s headquarters are also located in Austin, and while there is traditional booth space available for companies looking to market themselves to SXSW attendees, Bumble chose a more engaging way to reach out to potential customers, according to AdWeek. They rebranded a local coffee shop in their signature yellow, providing comfy couches and tables along with a tagged wall saying: “Make the First Move.”

On Wednesday March 13, Facebook and its popular group of apps including Instagram and WhatsApp were unavailable to many users across the globe. While the company struggled to address what was happening, people were turning to other social media outlets like Twitter to express their frustration with the hashtag #FacebookDown.

Ironically, Facebook also had to turn to rival Twitter for help in communicating the issues as the problem persisted.

Instead of being able to post status updates and selfies, users were getting error messages. Advertisers who spent large amounts of money on promotions via Facebook apps were especially concerned by the length of the outage.

Countries affected by the outage included users in the United States, Europe, and Central and South America. Outages in the U.K. were especially widespread. Reports of outages in Asia began several hours later.