david rasch -- technology. business. life. » customer service http://www.davidrasch.com Fri, 21 May 2010 02:58:14 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 love: my blackberry; really mad at: AT&T http://www.davidrasch.com/2008/08/06/love-my-blackberry-really-mad-at-att/ http://www.davidrasch.com/2008/08/06/love-my-blackberry-really-mad-at-att/#comments Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:39:30 +0000 drasch http://www.davidrasch.com/2008/08/06/love-my-blackberry-really-mad-at-att/ My saga this far:

Signed up Jan 24th on the web, selected plans and received no warnings Called to activate received phone, activated, and found voice worked, but BlackBerry did not (2/1) Called and spent 1 hour on the phone converting to BlackBerry Plan and splitting to two plans as this had been “the problem” and thus why my . . . → Read More: love: my blackberry; really mad at: AT&T]]> My saga this far:

  1. Signed up Jan 24th on the web, selected plans and received no warnings
  2. Called to activate received phone, activated, and found voice worked, but BlackBerry did not (2/1)
  3. Called and spent 1 hour on the phone converting to BlackBerry Plan and splitting to two plans as this had been “the problem” and thus why my blackberry wasn’t functioning. (2/1)
  4. Called to find that I needed to exchange broken holster to local corporate store for replacement (2/15)
  5. Made trip to local store to exchange holster
  6. Called to discuss 2 service outages in first 3 weeks, received $10 credit and told I couldn’t receive another credit for 1 yr
  7. Called and spent 30 minutes on the phone to straighten out and receive $316 credit for bill in usage charges because 1, 2, and 3 above still didn’t have my account setup properly. (2/28)
  8. Called to discuss blackberry isn’t working after phone call #7– spoke with Monica Coan (monica.coan@att.com) (45 more minutes) She found that I was not even on a blackberry plan, but still had MediaMax (see 2-7) (2/28)
  9. Received a call 3/10 to say that some of the charges had been credited, but that it was still over my minutes (450). The credit still left $157 in overae charges. In this conversation, I was told I never needed to switch from FamilyTalk to my new plan, which caused all this problem to begin with (see #3).
    10. Upon examining my bill, i find that many of the minutes for which I’m being charged are calls to my wife (another AT&T customer who USED to be on my FamilyTalk plan) either way, these are mobile-to-mobile calls which I was assured are still Unlimited under my plan. At this point, I still owe 266.05 and $140 in usage charges (that aren’t valid)
  10. Called for 46 minutes and spoke to Chantelle about my call on 9. She agreed that the credit for #9 was not sufficient after spending 20 minutes manually counting up the number of minutes I spoke with my wife (~350-380 of 900 total minutes), which put an upper bound on my over charges of 100 minutes and $40. In fact, she gave me a credit for the whole thing, which I let her do because if you factor in other Mobile-to-Mobile calls I was at most ~30 minutes over, which I told her and I’d be willing to pay the overage for 30 minutes as this is what I actually incurred. (3/20)
  11. I realized today that I actually incurred another $102 of false charges in the 2/20-3/20 billing cycle that occured before I resolved #8. I will need to call again to try and reclaim this amount. On top of this, my actual statement for my “paperless billing” doesn’t show up, at all, for 3/20 or for 4/20. Why did we ever rely on paper? it’s so unreliable!
]]> http://www.davidrasch.com/2008/08/06/love-my-blackberry-really-mad-at-att/feed/ 2 ViaTalk cut by BBB http://www.davidrasch.com/2008/03/04/viatalk-cut-by-bbb/ http://www.davidrasch.com/2008/03/04/viatalk-cut-by-bbb/#comments Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:28:42 +0000 drasch http://www.davidrasch.com/2008/03/04/viatalk-cut-by-bbb/ In following up with my ViaTalk letter from October, I’ve been informed by the Better Business Bureau that ViaTalk is no longer an “Accredited Business of the BBB” and that my next option for seeking refund of paid monies for services is court.

It saddens me greatly when a company who had superior features and . . . → Read More: ViaTalk cut by BBB]]> In following up with my ViaTalk letter from October, I’ve been informed by the Better Business Bureau that ViaTalk is no longer an “Accredited Business of the BBB” and that my next option for seeking refund of paid monies for services is court.

It saddens me greatly when a company who had superior features and even some technologies to bigger players failed on the Customer Service front and now wins my seal of disapproval.

Stay away from ViaTalk and their hosting business HostRocket.

]]> http://www.davidrasch.com/2008/03/04/viatalk-cut-by-bbb/feed/ 0 On the phone with Vonage http://www.davidrasch.com/2007/10/27/on-the-phone-with-vonage/ http://www.davidrasch.com/2007/10/27/on-the-phone-with-vonage/#comments Sat, 27 Oct 2007 19:56:13 +0000 drasch http://www.davidrasch.com/2007/10/27/on-the-phone-with-vonage/ As I still have no traction on resolving my Viatalk troubles, I’ve decided to move my service back to Vonage. I’ve called up Vonage to reactivate my account. It’s been quite a smooth process, though quite a long one. It’s taken about 30-45 minutes, but they’re on the phone with me to make . . . → Read More: On the phone with Vonage]]> As I still have no traction on resolving my Viatalk troubles, I’ve decided to move my service back to Vonage. I’ve called up Vonage to reactivate my account. It’s been quite a smooth process, though quite a long one. It’s taken about 30-45 minutes, but they’re on the phone with me to make sure my device works and is hooked up.

So this ended up taking over an hour, all in all a pretty positive experience and inspiring of confidence. I’m not really sure that the process should take an hour, but c’est la vie.

]]> http://www.davidrasch.com/2007/10/27/on-the-phone-with-vonage/feed/ 4 Open Letter to ViaTalk http://www.davidrasch.com/2007/10/11/open-letter-to-viatalk/ http://www.davidrasch.com/2007/10/11/open-letter-to-viatalk/#comments Fri, 12 Oct 2007 01:55:09 +0000 drasch http://www.davidrasch.com/2007/10/11/open-letter-to-viatalk/ John,

I resort to filling your inbox as only a last resort. I signed onto Viatalk at the recommendation of a colleague. He’d converted to Viatalk from Vonage several years ago and had been quite satisfied. I signed up for Viatalk back in July and early indications were mixed. On one hand, I . . . → Read More: Open Letter to ViaTalk]]> John,

I resort to filling your inbox as only a last resort. I signed onto Viatalk at the recommendation of a colleague. He’d converted to Viatalk from Vonage several years ago and had been quite satisfied. I signed up for Viatalk back in July and early indications were mixed. On one hand, I received very quick replies to the tickets I filed, but I ran into problems almost instantly that seem to have plagued my setup since then. I filed a ticket on 8/11 to attempt to find a resolution to my troubles. I followed up on this ticket twice, but to this day I’ve only received a canned response that I needed to reopen my ticket if the issue persisted. I finally called 9/26 late in the evening (EST) and waited for ~45 minutes to finally speak with someone who was clearly not concentrating on the phone call as appropriate. He changed some configuration and told me he’d connect me with billing to discuss remediation for the poor quality of response to my issues. I filed another ticket 10/4, and updated it today 10/11 with more issues of people not reaching me despite having just spoken with people on the phone not 10 minutes earlier.

The issues I’ve experienced include:
1. dialing out to receive nothing but busy signals
2. calling in to receive a choppy voicemail greeting
3. calling in to receive a fast busy
4. calling in to receive no ringing or voicemail or busy
5. checking voicemail to hear 10-15 second pauses in playing voicemail
6. picking up the phone with no dialtone

As a comparison, my experience with Vonage included 1 support call in 3 years to inquire about fax machine support, knowing that marrying fax machine over VOIP was a pretty far-fetched concept to begin with. My switch, while not dissuaded by price, was in fact motivated by more freedom to customize call routing, response, and have some flexibility with alternative hardware if the fancy struck me. In fact, I’ve almost no time on any of these ventures as I sought to achieve basic dial-tone, incoming, outgoing, and voicemail functionality first.

I implore you to let me know what I should investigate as options. Do note that I paid up front for 2 years of service as a testament to my faith that Viatalk service would be comparable and of acceptable quality.

I realize there are mitigating circumstances with the influx of customers from services which have gone out of business, like SunRocket, but the degree to which accepting these accounts marginalizes both the quality of service you can provide and additionally blemishes the reputation for your long-time customers will ultimately jeopardize any revenue and customer count gains that might seem so attractive to you and your investors.

-David

–
-David Rasch
Chief Technology Officer
iContact

]]> http://www.davidrasch.com/2007/10/11/open-letter-to-viatalk/feed/ 4 Don’t talk down to your customers http://www.davidrasch.com/2006/10/19/dont-talk-down-to-your-customers/ http://www.davidrasch.com/2006/10/19/dont-talk-down-to-your-customers/#comments Fri, 20 Oct 2006 02:56:47 +0000 drasch http://www.davidrasch.com/2006/10/15/dont-talk-down-to-your-customers/ As mentioned previously, we’ve been enjoying our Ambient Orb at the office to show the number of new IntelliConact customers each day. A few weeks ago, one of the developers wanted to see the array of colors provided by the orb. “No problem,” I said, “I’ll just unplug it and you can see . . . → Read More: Don’t talk down to your customers]]> As mentioned previously, we’ve been enjoying our Ambient Orb at the office to show the number of new IntelliConact customers each day. A few weeks ago, one of the developers wanted to see the array of colors provided by the orb. “No problem,” I said, “I’ll just unplug it and you can see the cycling sequence.” I unplugged the orb, and it started cycling after a few minutes. Unfortunately, it never stopped. Long and short, the orb has bit the dust. Today I finally got around to emailing the support line over at Ambient Devices. I let them know that I had two orbs configured in the same way that one was working while the other was not. Within a few hours, I received a response including instructions on removing the circuitry from the orb, swapping out a PCB between the two, and confirming the problem was that suspected by the support team.

Here’s a copy of the email I received:
Ambient Devices Support 1

A screenshot from the instructions:
Ambient Devices Support 2

Clearly, Ambient Devices doesn’t believe in making excuses or defining hoops with RMA numbers and hoops for their customers to jump through. Rather, they sent me instructions on easily diagnosing the problem. As you can see the instructions are worded in a light-hearted way and take the fact that technology isn’t always perfect as the spice of life rather than the price of our connected world. Most importantly, they empower their customers to do exactly what’s necessary to fix their problem, however scary it might seem. Although not all our products involve few enough pieces to send a 3 page PDF to solve most customer issues, I think we must all remember that the customer often outwits us by finding problems we didn’t, finding uses of our products we’d never imagine. It’s always important to embrace the customer’s ingenuity and empower them to solve their own problems no matter. Sometimes it will take extra effort on our side to boil down our problem-solving strategy to a series of ‘teachable’ steps, but the reward of reduced calls and people blogging about the excellent service are probably worth it.

[tags]customer service, orb[/tags]

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