Double standards annoy me, especially when people apply the bad one to me.
First, some background. I work for an Internet company and we have a lot of customers. We get a huge number of support requests, sales questions, etc. every day and we answer them all. Every time someone sends us a new email (as opposed to replying to an existing ticket), they get an immediate auto-reply with a ticket number they can use for future reference if they call, email, fax, etc. This does two things: it lets them know that we received their email and it makes it easy for them to follow up if they don't think their problems are being handled properly. It's extremely rare that anyone waits more than 8 hours for a reply from a real person, no matter what time they email us, and most get replies well within an hour. On top of that, a real person with real technical knowledge is there to answer the phone 24x7. We don't have a huge call centre or anything. We're exremely cost-conscious (part of the reason we're still in business, unlike some of our prominent competitors) and do things efficiently instead of just throwing money at problems (or ignoring them). I think this is a pretty good system and yet I still occasionally hear of people complaining about it.
Now, I'm often in situations where the roles are reversed and I'm the customer. I deal with one particular vendor maybe once or twice a month. Well, I use their automated system to get some stuff. I don't actually deal with a person. I ran into a problem a while back and emailed their support department about it. I really just wanted to know if we'd been billed for something and I included the order number and all the necessary information to make it easy for them to look things up. I didn't receive any answer at all for a week, so I called them. Their automated system told me that all their customer service reps were busy and to please wait for the next available rep. After about 10 minutes on hold, it forwarded me to a voicemail system and said that someone would call me back the next business day which is 9am-5pm Eastern Time, Monday-Friday. The next business day? People still have 9-5 business days? What is this, the 70s? I left my name, contact information, and all the information I sent in my email. That was a week ago and I still haven't heard back from either the call or the email.
This vendor is a big company. A big Internet company. They make a lot of money. Their product requires far less ongoing support than most of the stuff we sell. It should be pretty simple for them to answer anything within a few hours. Granted, this happened around the whole September 11 anniversary thing, but we keep up our support during all holidays and world events. I resorted to contacting their billing department and threatening not to pay them if I didn't get some answers. We'll see how it turns out, but I was pretty sure I'd have to dump them and find someone else. Then I checked out their competition and guess what, they look just as bad. Their web sites don't list prices, they push all kinds of value-added crap that I don't want, and they actually want fax communication for certain things instead of email. Ridiculous.
It didn't take me long to get so annoyed with the whole situation that I gave up for tonight and posted something to my web site.
Posted by tim at September 19, 2002 07:06 PM