Is your customer experience this bad?!?!
It's been a few years since I've been around. I even had to change my login because I couldn't remember what my old one was or even what email I used. I've been thinking about coming back for a while and something happened today and I thought coming to share this would be a good excuse to come back.
Today was the culmination of a four month long bad customer experience for me. I had signed up for a monthly continuity program by someone that used to be a big name in IM. I haven't really been following what other people have been doing lately, so I can't say how true that still is. Anyway, I tried it and really wasn't impressed. I had some problems with delivery in the beginning and that didn't help, but I really thought the product wasn't up to stuff either. So I cancelled.
"Oh sure no problem. We'll take care of that for you." Except sure enough next month I was billed again. So I emailed again. "Oh so sorry about that, we'll refund your money and get that fixed." OK I got refund, no big deal. Then I get really busy for a couple months and wasn't looking at my billing statement on my credit card. When I finally did look at, I found out I was still getting billed for the last two months. Email again. Again, "We're so sorry." Refund money. "This will never happen again." Blah Blah Blah.
We'll see if it's actually fixed, but then today I get an email, because I'm still on their list, offering the same product but with a way better (like 10x better) sign up bonus. I'm not going to sign up because I don't like the product and I don't want to go through the hassle of trying to cancel again, but now I'm pissed because I could have gotten a way better free bonus if I had waited.
And I sort of had two realizations from this:
First, why would ever buy premium business training from a company that was so clearly incapable of handling their own business? Bad product fulfillment. Bad payment system management. And IMO bad marketing system.
Second, it really hit home for me just how important customer experience can be to your bottom line. One epic fail customer experience was enough to ensure I never even looked at an email coming from a company that I'd spent a lot of money over the years.
Anyway, thought I'd share. Anyone else have some absolutely horrible customer experience stories to inspire us all to make sure that our own customers never go through that?
The 2nd Amendment, 1789 - The Original Homeland Security.
Gun control means never having to say, "I missed you."