Recently in customer service Category

Another example of web site stupidity.

When she finishes at university this summer my step-daughter is planning to go travelling. To make this a bit easier for her we decided that we'd give her one of our credit cards. That's a pretty standard thing that parents do, isn't it?

I decided to make her an additional cardholder on my Egg card. The process seemed easy enough. I just had to fill in a simple form on their web site. There were no problems and the site told me to wait seven to ten days.

Seven to ten days passed. And then another week. The card didn't arrive. Yesterday I decided to email them to find out what had happened to the card. Today I got a reply. Apparently you can only have two cardholders on an Egg account. And because my wife is already on the account I can't add anyone else.

That seems like a rather silly restriction to me, but I suppose they have to draw a line somewhere. But given that this restriction is in place, surely it should be reflected on their web site. Checking again today, I see that the option on their site is labelled "add a second cardholder" and not, as I assumed previously, "add an additional cardholder" - so that should be a big clue. But that's not really enough is it? They've got the details of my account. They know the account already has two cardholders. Why even offer me the option to add another one? And why allow me to go through the process of adding a new cardholder and tell me at the end that everything is fine and that I should expect the new card to arrive in ten days? I hadn't bothered to chase them about it I could still be under the mistaken impression that the card was on its way.

Here's what they should really do. Leave the "add a second cardholder" option, but when someone who already has a second cardholder on the account chooses that option, display a message explaining why they can't add a third cardholder. Doesn't that seem simpler? I wonder how much time their customer service team have wasted answering queries like mine.

I've now applied to add my step-daughter to my Virgin credit card instead. Currently I'm the only person on that account, so it shouldn't be a problem. They say the new card will be with us in seven to ten days...

Like, I suppose, most people in London we live in a controlled parking area. To park on my road you must either have a resident's parking permit or buy a ticket from the machine (£1.80 an hour, maximum stay four hours).

We don't have a car, so most of the time this doesn't bother us at all. The only time we even think about it is when we have visitors. For those occasions Wandsworth Council allow us to buy one-day visitors parking permits. You buy them from "parking shops" around the borough. Our closest one is near Tooting Bec.

Last weekend we had friends coming to stay and had run out of visitors permits, so I needed to go and buy some more. Before setting off I realised that as only residents are allowed to buy these permits I would probably have to prove where I lived. A quick rummage in my filing system and I wandered off bearing my passport, a letter from the council, a mortgage statement and something official from the Inland Revenue. All pretty impressive stuff I thought.

Not, however, impressive enough for the man at the parking shop. He has a list of approved items and no matter how important your pieces of paper are, if they aren't on his list they don't count. His list contains a driving licence, a current council tax bill, a home contents insurance certificate, a benefit book and a rent book. I tried hard to convince him that my paperwork was just as good as the stuff on his list but it was to no avail. He had his list and he was sticking to it. I went home empty handed.

I appreciate, of course, that Wandsworth Council need to be careful about who they sell these permits too. But I can't help thinking that they're going a bit too far here. Why is a rent book acceptable but a mortgage statement isn't? What makes a benefit book more convincing than a letter from the Inland Revenue? Why won't they accept letters from the council?

Why can't they do checks themselves in the shop? Surely the people in the shop could be given access to a database of the names and addresses of everyone on the council tax list. Or maybe the council don't trust their employees with that kind of data.

Or (and let's get really radical here) maybe they could make it possible to order these permits over the web. Take names, addresses and credit card numbers on a web site. Check that the name matches the names on the electoral register at that address. And then send the permits out in the post. To an address that you know to be in the borough. I think that would be far easier for everyone.

We got our permits in the end. My wife went down a few days later with her driving licence.

Oh, and our friends arrived a little later than expected. They turned up in the evening. About an hour after the parking restrictions had been lifted.

One thing I've often written about is the decline of customer service. I don't often get the chance to praise good customer service so I'm going to grab the opportunity that I got yesterday.

Yesterday morning I got up to find two mail messages from Ebay in my inbox confirming that my items had been successfully listed. This was surprising as I hadn't listed anything. My initial thought was that these were phishing attempts and that I should just delete them. But before I did, I took a closer look and found that they were real messages from Ebay. They contained both my username and my real name and all of the links in the mail went to the real Ebay site and not some phisher copy[1].

At that point I got a bit worried and tried to log in to my Ebay account (by typing the URL in my browser's location bar, not by clicking on any of the links - always a good idea in cases like this). I found that my password wasn't recognised. It seemed that someone had managed to get into my Ebay account, change the password and start listing items for sale - listings that I would be charged for.

Then I noticed a third mail from Ebay in my inbox that I had previously missed. This is what it said:

Dear davorg,

It appears that a third party accessed your eBay account and used it to list items without your authorisation.

At this time we have taken several steps to secure your eBay account, including cancelling the unauthorised listings and crediting all associated fees to your account. We assure you that your credit card and bank details are kept encrypted on secure server and have not been viewed by anyone.

It then went on to list links to pages that would allow me to reclaim my password and give me advice on how I could make my account more secure.

The two messages about the unauthorised listings were sent at 4:35am. The message informing me of the problems and what had been done to fix them was sent at 4:53am. In less than twenty minutes Ebay had spotted the problem and done all they could to correct it. All while I was fast asleep.

I call that pretty good customer service.

Of course, now I need to work out how someone got access to my account. I admit to having been a bit lax and using the same password on a number of sites so it's possible that one of those other sites was storing my password in plain text (we all know how common that is) and someone got hold of their data. Or perhaps it was some convoluted XSS attack.

I've learnt a lesson though. I'll be far more careful with passwords from now on.

One question still remains. How did Ebay identify that my account was compromised so quickly? I'm sure it was some kind of automated response, but surely it's possible that I was on their site at 4:30 in the morning trying to sell some Ugg boots that were an unwanted Christmas present.

Never thought I'd be praising Ebay for their customer service!

[1] I read all of my email in plain text mode so it's hard for people to send me disguised links.

Anyone who has anything to do with customer service in their organisation should read and learn from Joel Spolsky's article on the subject. It's not just software companies he's talking about. Anyone who deals with customers could benefit from taking his advice.

I particularly liked point 2, "Suggest blowing out the dust".

Microsoft’s Raymond Chen tells the story of a customer who complains that the keyboard isn’t working. Of course, it’s unplugged. If you try asking them if it’s plugged in, “they will get all insulted and say indignantly, ‘Of course it is! Do I look like an idiot?’ without actually checking.”

“Instead,” Chen suggests, “say ‘Okay, sometimes the connection gets a little dusty and the connection gets weak. Could you unplug the connector, blow into it to get the dust out, then plug it back in?’

“They will then crawl under the desk, find that they forgot to plug it in (or plugged it into the wrong port), blow out the dust, plug it in, and reply, ‘Um, yeah, that fixed it, thanks.’”

Many requests for a customer to check something can be phrased this way. Instead of telling them to check a setting, tell them to change the setting and then change it back “just to make sure that the software writes out its settings.”

Why are American companies so determined to confuse the rest of the world with their illogical way of writing dates?

Yesterday I got an email from register.com reminding me that one of my domains needed to be renewed. They said that the current registration expired on "12/07/2005". "Bloody hell," I thought, "that's over a month ago." Except I was wrong. It's over three months in the future. It's just a confusing American date. Checking with "whois" confirmed that the expiry date is "07-Dec-2005" (which is far less confusing).

For some reason I thought it was worthwhile dropping them an email explaining the problem. I pointed out that as their reminders went to an international audience then it would be a good deal less confusing if they either used ISO standard dates (2005-12-07) or showed the name of the month.

This morning I got a reply. It included this:

We implement this type of format since we provide services to various type of customers that comes to us worldwide

Even ignoring the appalling English (if you can), it still makes no sense. It boils down to me saying "your date format is confusing to an international audience" and them replying "we use that format because we have an international audience."

But I've got my determined head on. I'm going to make them understand this.

The previous entry about Rojo (and, in particular, Aristole's comment) reminds me of big complaint that I have about pretty much all web sites - which is that they like to make it incredibly difficult to close your account with them.

Oh, I understand completely why that is. If you've registered with a web site then they have valuable information about you. And I can see why they'd be loathe to give that up. But wouldn't it be great if every web site had a "forget about me" button which you could press and then all of your details would be removed from the site's database. I realise that there are probably legal reasons why Amazon, for example, would need to keep records of all of your previous orders. But they have mountains of marketing data on you which isn't at all necessary. I'd love to have the power to nuke all of that data. Wouldn't you?

And it isn't as though I'd want to press that button very often at all. It's just that it would be good to know that you had that power should you want to wield it.

Some companies already do it. I can think of Backpack who not only have a "cancel my account" button, but also the facility to export all of your data before you do it. Of course, that's data that you've originally stored there rather than marketing data that they've been hoarding by monitoring your surfing habits. But it's a start?

How about a campaign to get a "forget about me" button added to web sites? Who's with me?

The new Dell computer I recently ordered has been shipped. I predict a weekend of Linux installation.

And remember my complaints about their customer service and how I didn't get the free delivery I thought I was entitled to? Well that's all been sorted out and they're refunding the money.

Not only do Dell have a terrible web site but it seems they're also in the running for the worst customer service that I've seen for some time.

When I ordered my new computer on Tuesday there were four special offers listed for the model I bought. They were double the amount of memory you paid for, a free printer, buy now pay next year and (most importantly) free delivery. I was interested in the memory, the printer and the free delivery charge.

Once I had gone through the configuration process and chosen all the options I wanted I was ready to check out. At that point I was surprised to see that a delivery charge had been added to the invoice. I realise that I should have cancelled the order or got on the phone to them or something like that, but it was late, I was tired, and I'd wasted enough time on the purchase already so I just went ahead and placed the order.

Immediately, I started to regret doing that, so I decided to complain to them and see if I could get the delivery charge back. After a couple of false starts with contact forms that didn't work I found a way to email customer support and explained what had happened. I suggested that either the offer didn't exist (and therefore their web site had incorrect information) or that their ordering process had some kind of bug in it.

The next day I got an email telling me that my order didn't include the free delivery offer.

See, this seems to be becoming a common tactic with customer support. On the first response, just tell the customer something that he already knows in the hope he'll just go away and stop bothering you. I knew that my order didn't include free delivery, but I wanted to know why it didn't include free delivery when the web site clearly says that it should include free delivery.

Oh, actually there was a bit of extra information in their email. It told me that the reason my order didn't include the offer was because the offer "had expired before or was introduced after you placed your order". Which was nonsense as the order was placed on August 2nd and the web site said that the offer finished on the 3rd.

So I wrote another email. Explaining in what I thought was an almost painful level of detail what the problem was. I pointed out that the offer was listed on the web site as I placed the order and that I the invoice gave no indication as to why the offer hadn't been applied to my order. I got an email back pretty quickly saying that my case had been passed on to the "concerned department" who would "have your query looked into and resolved effectively".

And just now I got a phone call. From someone who told me that the special offer had not been applied to my order, but was unable to explain why. I explained again, everything that I had said in the email and she reacted as this was all new information to her. She even asked my if I had a copy of the web page with the offer on it - which, of course, I don't.

So anyway, she's gone off again and has promised to ge back to me with more information as soon as possible. I'm starting to suspect that they'll just deny the offer ever existed.

But if I don't get this £57 back then I'll never buy from Dell again.