Thursday, August 09, 2007
Customer Disservice
This week's customer disservice award goes to Earthlink. I'm a little tempted to give it to the entire ISP industry, given that I spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks trying to find a good high-speed connection solution and couldn't: basically the only option is Comcast, the Evil Empire, and I don't want them to have any of my money.
But Earthlink eventually proved itself superior in this category. They're providing our dial-up service, so I went to check on whether we could switch to high-speed with them. No go, so I continued my research. But then...
Last night, they called me. Now I'm never a fan of being called at home by people who don't know me. We're on every "no call" list we can find. And even with charities that we support, I tell them to send us stuff through the mail. I don't want to make purchasing decisions while I'm on the phone.
So Earthlink calls to "follow up" on my DSL inquiry, which involves this woman rattling off a whole page of marketing script about how wonderful their DSL service is and how if I sign up now I get eight wonderful things. I ignore all of this because it doesn't tell me anything of actual concrete importance, like (a) how much it really costs after the intro price expires and (2) how fast it actually is (Qwest can offer us a whopping 256k connection!) and (iii) whether they can actually even provide me this service, since online it said they couldn't.
She finally asks me if I'm interested which lets her take a breath and me raise the crucial question, which is (iii): can they really provide me this service? So she "checks," because apparently (she claims) sometimes their online info is just wrong about whether they can or cannot provide service to someone. This makes me wonder: why are they storing two sets of data when they know one of them is wrong? What data is she looking at that contradicts what they've posted online? And why don't they just hook up their website to the real data?
But eventually (after asking me if I already had dial-up service, so I could point out that yes, we have it with her company, which is how they have any of my info in the first place) she concludes that no, they can't, but they'll let me know if that changes. I didn't even need to be part of this conversation. She could've just pretended to call me, imagined that I said ok, looked it up and disappointed "me" with the news that they couldn't provide the service.
Or Earthlink could check to see if they can provide a service before calling someone to offer it to them. Just a thought.
And if they've got time on their hands, they could get to the bottom of the whole two-sets-of-data-with-different-answers thing.
But Earthlink eventually proved itself superior in this category. They're providing our dial-up service, so I went to check on whether we could switch to high-speed with them. No go, so I continued my research. But then...
Last night, they called me. Now I'm never a fan of being called at home by people who don't know me. We're on every "no call" list we can find. And even with charities that we support, I tell them to send us stuff through the mail. I don't want to make purchasing decisions while I'm on the phone.
So Earthlink calls to "follow up" on my DSL inquiry, which involves this woman rattling off a whole page of marketing script about how wonderful their DSL service is and how if I sign up now I get eight wonderful things. I ignore all of this because it doesn't tell me anything of actual concrete importance, like (a) how much it really costs after the intro price expires and (2) how fast it actually is (Qwest can offer us a whopping 256k connection!) and (iii) whether they can actually even provide me this service, since online it said they couldn't.
She finally asks me if I'm interested which lets her take a breath and me raise the crucial question, which is (iii): can they really provide me this service? So she "checks," because apparently (she claims) sometimes their online info is just wrong about whether they can or cannot provide service to someone. This makes me wonder: why are they storing two sets of data when they know one of them is wrong? What data is she looking at that contradicts what they've posted online? And why don't they just hook up their website to the real data?
But eventually (after asking me if I already had dial-up service, so I could point out that yes, we have it with her company, which is how they have any of my info in the first place) she concludes that no, they can't, but they'll let me know if that changes. I didn't even need to be part of this conversation. She could've just pretended to call me, imagined that I said ok, looked it up and disappointed "me" with the news that they couldn't provide the service.
Or Earthlink could check to see if they can provide a service before calling someone to offer it to them. Just a thought.
And if they've got time on their hands, they could get to the bottom of the whole two-sets-of-data-with-different-answers thing.
Labels: customer service, DSL, earthlink, phone, telemarketing
