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Customer "Service"

July 1st, 2006 | View Comments

It seems like horrid customer service is the theme of the month. A couple friends have been the victims of critical errors and nasty runarounds from airlines. Crappy AOL customer service makes headline news, but all that bad publicity does exactly nothing to make AOL change their practices.

What I want to know is, since when poor customer service good business practice? Getting horrible service is such the norm now that I’ve made it a practice of taking copious notes for every customer service call I make, including the time of the call and the name of the representative.

I also learned early on to never hang up the call without getting what you want, because if you do, you will have to go through the exact same rigamarole all over again.

And I only call technical support as a very last, desperate resort. It usually takes much less time to Google the problem and fix it myself than it takes to call, wait on hold for 20 minutes, and then wait 20 more minutes while the support tech explains in great detail how I can find my Control Panel.

And I know this isn’t entirely the reps’ fault, which is why I make every effort to remain polite, but firm. It is the companies who train and mandate these horrible practices.

Here are my top five customer service nightmares, in chronological order, starting from summer 2001:

1. Ameritech. This was for the first apartment I ever had in Madison, a summer sublet that I shared with a friend. We called and asked for the most basic phone service you could get, specifically mentioning NO call-waiting, NO caller ID, NO three-way calling, NO voicemail, NO NO NO to everything several times.

   We get our first bill and discover that we’d been signed up for everything we’d explicitly refused to have. To make a long story short, it took four separate phone calls and three whole months to get our money back. The refund check had to be mailed to our new residence in the fall.

   To their credit, Ameritech did significantly shape up their customer service after they became SBC. I had to use their phone service again later and had a much, much better experience.

2. Saturn Services. Saturn Services is a web hosting company, although now they have a new name. Here are the things that went wrong:

   • It took over 24 hours for them to set up my account (they had a 24-hour account setup guarantee), and when they finally got to it, they sent me a confirmation email that included none of the information that I needed to access my account.

   • It took them three days to respond to my request for my logon information.

   • They’d messed up my domain settings so that it did not resolve properly. It was at this point, one week post-account signup, that I decided to cancel. I was well within the 30-day money back guarantee.

   • I made three or four phone calls, during normal business hours, to their customer service line and only got an answering machine, on which I left three or four messages. I sent at least as many emails to the customer support address with no response.

   • As this was happening over the span of a couple weeks, they went ahead and billed me for a month of service, three times. I guess, contrary to all science, time moves faster on Saturn.

   I eventually got resolution through my credit card company. I had compiled a very large packet of information documenting the company’s customer service guarantees, my actual experiences and communications with the company, forms to dispute all the charges, and just let the credit card company deal with it.

   To the credit card company’s credit (heh), they immediately blocked Saturn Services from charging my account and removed the disputed charges.

   I switched my web hosting to Hosting Matters and have been with them since. I remember trying to log into my Saturn Services account for the heck of it months later, only to discover that they still hadn’t cancelled it and would probably still be billing me if it weren’t for the credit card block.

3. Verizon. This was when I first moved here. They tried to claim that the erroneous charges on my account were due to my dial-up usage, even though the dial-up number I was calling should not have incurred said charges.

   I gave them the number, and they verified that yes, my dial-up usage to that number would have cost me somewhere in the realm of $10, rather than the $80 they were charging me.

   Then they refused to remove the charges from my account and also refused to tell me exactly what number I was allegedly calling that incurred those charges. We went around and around until the customer service rep, possibly facetiously, suggested I just file a complaint with the Public Utilities Commission. She gave me the address; I hung up and did exactly that.

   A Verizon higher-up called a few days later and removed the charges from my account.

4. Earthlink. For the record, Earthlink still owes me a buck fifty, but I decided that it was worth a buck fifty not to have to wrangle with the customer service rep any more.

   I originally had my DSL with Earthlink, because Verizon erroneously told me that I couldn’t get DSL through them. I switched to Verizon after my contract with Earthlink was up. They didn’t cancel the account like they should have when Verizon initiated the transfer, though they did kill my internet access.

   One day after my Earthlink internet stopped working, they charged me for another month of service. It took me a half hour on the phone, including several requests to be transferred to a manager that were refused, to get them to cancel my account and refund me most of that monthly charge. Like I said, they still owe me a buck fifty.

5. Midwest Airlines. I had a flight voucher from them and wanted to use it to book my flight home for winter break.

   • Problem #1: There was no way to do this online. I had to hold the reservation online and haul myself to the airport within 24 hours of that reservation, where they would apply the voucher and issue me a paper ticket.

   • Problem #2: No one at the Midwest Airlines counter at the airport knew how to issue a ticket using a voucher.

   • Problem #3: They took about forty minutes to figure out how to do it for the two guys in front of me at the counter. When I got to the counter, they took another half hour to re-figure out how to do it in my case.

   All in all, it took me about three hours, including travel to and from the airport, to perform what should have been a five-minute transaction. And then I didn’t even get a fresh-baked cookie on the flight.

Yvonne posted this on July 1st, 2006 @ 2:42am in Life | Permalink to "Customer "Service""

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