Tag: annoyances

Categories
annoyances technology

Some more about bad ideas

Working with client who recently lost his web sites due to some complications I have discovered yet another great example of how stupid ideas can make it all the way up. There’s this provider I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with, cox.net – especially on West Coast. In order to figure mail server names I went to their support pages…

Guess what? The “customer friendly” web site has all the help articles and forms to open via JavaScript. So if you finally made it to the article you were looking for and wanted to bookmark it (yes, some people do that) – tough luck, sorry, dude, can’t help ya. Oh, and if you were hoping you can just copy-paste the URL and at least get to the tech support index page – no can do, nope, nicht, nein, nyet. If you try that you simply get an error. Sometimes I wonder if people who do this do think at all… reminds me of a centuries old anecdote about a letter writing clerk who didn’t write letters to destinations he wasn’t willing to go. Reason – his writings could only be read by himself…

“No way out”. On the bottom of the page is says “Powered by Support Soft”. Good job, folks. Keep it soft, we’ll take it from here.

Categories
annoyances personal technology

Credit cards

Years ago when I was very young, not as young as I am now, but still pretty young – I often thought that when store clerk swiped the card at that “magic credit card reader” money somehow manage to get transferred into cash register through the wires. Only recently, after acquiring merchant account for my own purposes had I found that purchase by credit card is indeed a credit given by merchant, since he gets the funds with significant delay. In fact the delay could range from 3 days to a full month.

Updating bank info at credit card processing company can be a real pain in all the places you can think of. In my case – it is.

Categories
annoyances outsourcing

Thank you, Joel!

Thank you! Thank you, Joel! I am much younger then you, I am much less experienced in ways of business, but finally I’ve found another business owner saying same thing I was saying since same 2001…

If you’ve ever had to outsource a critical business function, you realize that outsourcing is hell. Without direct control over customer service, you’re going to get nightmarishly bad customer service — the kind people write about in their weblogs when they tried to get someone, anyone, from some phone company to do even the most basic thing. If you outsource fulfillment, and your fulfillment partner has a different idea about what constitutes prompt delivery, your customers are not going to be happy, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because it took 3 months to find a fulfillment partner in the first place, and in fact, you won’t even know that your customers are unhappy, because they can’t talk to you, because you’ve set up an outsourced customer service center with the explicit aim of not listening to your own customers.

That’s why both the 866 number and main company phone number are tied to my line. If there’s a problem – I must know about it first. Hopefully we’ll never be big enough to loose customers, especially – due to bad customer service.