Service Provider Frustrations
On this lovely Monday morning I thought I would post about something that I have been facing over the weekend, and it seems more and more lately. And that something is when service providers (none in particular, just in general) claim to have a certain product functionality or service with a lot of fanfare and noise, and then don't actually have that product or service. That sounds like it would be too flagrant to be true, but surprisingly I have been seeing this happen a lot lately in both my professional and personal life. I'm sure it's a fact of life that I will need to get used to, but it still frustrates me to now end.
Here's some insight. Let's say, for example, that a service provider begins promoting upgrades to their service by sending emails and promoting the upgrades on their website. As the weeks go by, expectations are created among the customers (me, for example) and people start to really look forward to the new features, even going so far as to take the upgrades into account when sheduling your work load. Then the upgrades are applied to our account without any notice, which was great. I'll be honest when I say it's a great surprise to log into your account and see that it has been upgraded. Makes you feel kind of nice.
And here's the kicker. The upgrade needs to work!!! I can't imagine a situation where I would create such an expectation. I remember that we told people about our new website for months, and when we first released it there were some configuration bumps that caused me to be pretty bus fixing little tidbits for about 10 days. However, we had tested the website and were confident that the expectations that we had set for our visitors would be met. Currently I am in a situation where one of our service providers rolled out (with a ton of fanfare) an upgrade to our account. I am excited, even still, but I wanted to share a customer service interaction that WILL cause you to lose customers.
When I discovered that the web-based functionality that was supposed to have been an upgrade didn't work, I fired a support request over to our provider mentioning that we are really excited to use the new tools, but that I am having trouble getting it to work. With the typical "customer service brush-off" sent me a response (hours and hours later) saying that the new system works just fine for them, and that it was probably my fault. Try another browser, they said. Knowing that I am not that supid, and armed with every browser in use today (spanning three operating systems) I set out to either get this thing to work or prove that I was not an idiot. Low and behold, as an average customer, it turned out that I was right. The thing does not work. So I set about letting my customer service rep know about this.
I received another response, this time days later. This time they said, We're sorry, but it appears that our system is not working properly. Our technicians are on it and so on and so forth. Now, believe me. I understand that things don't always work as planned. Application development is hard. But anyone that would allow an application in the condition that this one is in go live needs to be talked to. There is just no way that this thing was tested even once before being launched. It simply does not work. However, that is the least annoying of the issues I faced.
The more annoying thing to me seems to be ubiquitous among every customer service rep that I have spoken to in the last year. What I speak of is the automatic first response email that says "everything is fine on our end, it's your fault." This seems to be a theme in customer service now days, and it drives me nuts. Granted, most customer servics calls are probably solved by this response, but they shouldn't just send it back automatically. Had my initial tech (or any tech) actually tried to use their own system to verify my claims, they would have easily noticed that it wasn't working. But they didn't. Rather, they simply tried to put the onus back on me with a quick response. A word to the wise: If you do this to me you will not get rid of me. Odds are I will be more annoying because of it, and if the problem turns out to not have been my fault, your boss will probably hear about it.
This may sound like a rant or complaint, but really this is a notice as a customer to businesses that offer customer service. I have found in the last couple of months that regardless of our service provider (and we have a lot of those) it takes an average of 3 customer service calls per incident to get something accomplished. If that seems high, be sympathetic to me as on many occasions it only takes one call. I like those occasions. However, there are those incidents that take 10 or so calls, frustrate me to no end, and usually represent hours of wasted time by customer service reps that talk rather than listen. I hope that our customer service never comes across this way to any of our customers or subscribers, and if it does, rest assured that we are doing our best to solve your problem.
I'm putting up a wager that the new features I spoke of above won't actually be available and functioning for 7 days (next Monday). Hopefully I am proven very wrong.
