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Poor Customer Service: EXPOSED!

My saga of bad customer service continues…

The Charter Fiasco

A couple of months back my monthly bill for internet service at home changed from $34.99 to $39.94. Raises in fees are a fact of life and I never gave the $5 monthly increase more than a couple of seconds thought. That was until I got my bill last month which added an additional $15 to my newly increased monthly bill.

After being a customer for several years Charter has suddenly decided to charge me a $5/month fee for use of their modem. OK, not a big deal. That’s a standard charge and I had often wondered why I wasn’t paying that to begin with. But the real kicker is the other $10 they added because I don’t subscribe to cable TV.

Huh?

I have to pay for cable TV because I don’t use it? Tell me what marketing genius thought of this! How in the world, this makes any kind of sense? Is this some sort of “upsell” technique. After all, Charter cable TV only costs $15/month!

Sorry, this just isn’t working for me. I’ve got DirecTV and I’m not giving that up.

The marketing team at Charter has it all backwards! If they wanted to charge me $50/month for internet I’ll be happy to pay it. If they then want to offer a $10 per month discount to cable TV subscribers that also use Charter internet, I would applaud them for a great marketing strategy. But to frame this as an additional charge to Internet users that don’t subscribe to cable TV is just dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

It’s YourMusic, Not YourCustomerSupport

I’ve been a subscriber to yourmusic.com’s music service for over a year now and I love it. I get about 2 CDs each month and I pay $6.99 for each and no shipping charges. You can get stuff that is still selling at Best Buy for $18. Its a great way to get music cheap, provided you’re willing to wait a few months after the original release date.

But my beef with YourMusic started a month ago when I didn’t get one of my shipments. My card was charged, but my shipment never arrived. I contacted customer support via their web form and waited for an answer. It never came. I contacted them again and again no answer. I contacted them a third time and still no response.

YourMusic doesn’t provide any phone numbers or email address but I pulled the domain registration information and called their parent company, BMG music. Of course the fine folks at BMG don’t help YourMusic customers and I was referred back to the online form. At this point I asked for a manager and was told pretty much the same thing, though they did forward my request to someone over at yourmusic.

A couple of days later I got an email from someone at yourmusic confirming my address so they can track down the package. They also noted that sometimes it can take a week for customer service to respond.

Um, it’s been a month!

That was the last I heard back from any support reps. I have since submitted another couple of customer support requests via the form as well as multiple emails to three different support email addresses I managed to glean from my brief contact with a customer support individual. For good measure I keep calling and leaving messages at another number that I found at the domain.

After about a month and a half I finally received an email telling me that they would be reshipping my order to me. Great. My customer support request got answered a few days after I had decided to re-order the product myself. Of course, they could have looked at my order profile and seen that for themselves and just refunded the money. But that’s what happens when there is zero communication with dissatisfied customers… you really don’t know how to resolve their problem and just make something up. Customer satisfaction? What’s that?

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