Internet Disservice

I called AT&T to inquire about Internet service pricing last week.  They slammed me.  I figured this out last night when I got home and there was a package on the porch.  Took it inside.  Opened it.  Saw a DSL modem.  Livid.

This started 10 days ago.  I made an inquiry to AT&T sales.  Wanted to know how much it would cost me to bundle my Internet, phone, and television service.  It was getting close to time to switch from EarthLink.  Though you will not find it anywhere on their Web site EarthLink charges $49.95 for 3.0 Mpbs.  AT&T is $30.  I am loyal to EarthLink.  But they are charging about 66% over market rate for the same level of service.  It was time to switch and it was my intent to do so when Abby and the kids were off on their summer tour.  Anyhow, the AT&T rep told me their pricing for various services and that I could immediately save $10 a month by switching phone service to something called Complete Choice Enhanced.  I said sure and forgot about it.

On Monday night my Internet service went down.  Seemed odd.  Used to do that quite a lot back in the day.  Not so much anymore.  Decided to head off to work and give it a little time.  When I got home it was still down.  So I called EarthLink tech support.  The rep did not speak English well.  Made me do all the obvious things.  Then something not so obvious.  He asked me to switch phone jacks.  Which is not the easiest thing to do in the world.  I pinged.  Googled the word idiot.  It seemed to have worked.  Odd that the jack would just go bad.  But I started moving some network gear around to get all the computers online.  Did not work.  I checked all the jacks.  None of them would give me PPPoE.  Called back EarthLink tech support. The rep did not speak English well.  I was told there was a widespread outage and my service would be down until midnight on Tuesday.  Suggested I use dial up.  Was a bit taken aback when I said that my computers did not have dial modems so that was not possible.

On Wednesday morning DSL was still down.  So instead of calling EarthLink tech support, because the reps tend to not speak English well, I decided to have a chat session.  Was told that the outage would continue to affect me for another 24 hours. And then I got home and opened the DSL modem.  No prior notification that I had an account with them of any kind.  No mail.  Nothing.  Just a DSL modem on my doorstep.  And it's just a simple plug in one computer type of modem.  Would not even work for my setup if I wanted it to.

Livid.  So livid I think I scared my kids.  Livid because AT&T slammed me and made my Internet service go down.  To get semi-technical here, a DSL line can only be provisioned by one telephone company at a central office.  If AT&T has a DSL line provisioned on the switch for your phone then EarthLink cannot.  EarthLink had my line provisioned.  AT&T put in the order to provision my line and essentially took down my DSL service.

Called AT&T.  Asked for a sup.  No love.  Could not even tell me what level of service they signed me up for without my permission.  Said I had to speak with customer service.  Which of course is closed at night when normal people take care of such things (remember that convenient for us not the customer sin?).  Denied that they had anything to do with my EarthLink service going down.  Liar.

Called EarthLink tech support.  The rep did not speak English well.  With a little direction he figured out my line was "inactive".  Transferred me to another phone queue.  The queue that I was transferred to had a recording.  "Not able to handle calls due to system outages."  Great.

So I called AT&T customer service this morning.  Explained what had happened.  Guy was a jerk. Denied that they had anything to do with my EarthLink service going down.  Liar.   Hung up on him.

Called back, got a nice calm lady.  Explained what happened.  Found out I was signed up for 6.0Mpbs service.  That I was currently being billed for the DSL service, and I was being billed $75 for the DSL modem that I did not order.  Made a note in the account that I did not order the service and if I cancelled I would not be billed anything.

I cranked up EarthLink chat tech support.  This is the conversation.

Quickly would be nice.  It's been three days.  I called the EarthLink tech support.  The rep did not speak English well.  He told me it would take five days to reprovision the account.  I said no thanks.  Tired to cancel.  Guy would not let me.  I hung up.

I called EarthLink tech support.  The rep did not speak English well.  Told the lady I wanted to cancel.  Told her pricing was too high.  And I swear it was just like the infamous AOL recording.

I very specifically had to say "cancel the account" seven times.  Once she got finished with that she started to tell me about the final bill that I was going to be receiving.  $49.95 for the period of June 16 - July 16.  I tried to politely explain to her that she could not charge me for a service that was not being provided and that if she did so I was not going to pay it.  She agreed to only charge me $25 because the phone company got the other half.  Told her that was not my problem and that if they charged me anything I would not pay it and would walk down the street to EarthLink HQ and have a chat with the receptionist.  I am not going to get billed.

So back to AT&T to see if they want my business.  Explained to the rep what happened.  Said if they did not do something to make up for this mess I would cancel all my AT&T business and go to Comcast.  I got transferred to a specialist. Nina.

Nina from Atlanta.  Nina in Atlanta. Nina in the office park where I take the kids to Taco Mac.  Nina was nice.  The first person I spoke to in this whole ordeal that was nice.  Nina understood the semi-technical issue I described.  Nina had empathy that I had been without Internet service since Monday.  Nina cut me a deal.  Nina is overnighting the proper modem.  Nina fixed the problem.  Nina kept me as a customer.

Nina was service.  Service gets and keeps customers.

To Quote or Not to Quote

That is the question. 

One of the mainstay features on FoG over the past two years has been the "quote of the week".  It is a post that appears every Friday at noon (I tried 3:14 for a period, but noon works better).  It started as a throwaway, something to get a quick and easy article up at the end of the week.  Quotes are easy to find if you are looking for them. 

It has evolved into a pretty popular series.  One of the quote of the week posts generated more comments than any other article in the history of FoG.  Heck I even used the quotes to create a presentation called "Startups in 12 Quotes" that generated over 2,700 views, 18 favs, and 9 embeds on slideshare.

But with the break from FoG I have also been thinking if I wanted to continue with the quote of the week feature.  But instead of deciding by myself in some misguided self-absorbed vacuum, I thought I would ask the audience via a poll.

Please take a moment to take the poll. And comments beyond the poll are of course welcome.

"Happiness As Your Business Model"

I woke up to a little tweet from Tony, the CEO of Zappos, yesterday.  The @missrouge refers to is Tara Hunt, who specializes in community marketing.  Running 197 slides and introducing terms such as homo-feelgoodomicus, this presentation is amazing and a must view for anyone looking to build a successful business, be it online or off.

According to Tara the key to a successful business is helping homo-feedgoodomicus feel good. She goes on to outline seven reasons that happens is the key to success:

1. happy customers talk to more people about their positive experience;
2. unhappy customers talk to the MOST people about their negative experience;
3. happy customers are repeat customers;
4. happy customers will pay more for an awesome experience;
5. happy customers are loyal;
6. happy customers will drive your marketing for you;
7. happy employees are more productive, creative, and loyal.

Tara then lays out the pillars of happiness (autonomy, competence, relatedness, and self-esteem) and gives specific ways that you can increase each of these incorporating great case studies along the way (including Zappos of course).

The basic takeaway is that if you are aware of the principles of happiness when designing your product or service you can become an agent of happiness.  And who wouldn't want that?

My summary does not do the presentation justice.  While 197 slides may seem daunting, you can blow through them in 10 minutes.  Putting them in action could last a lifetime.

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iTarded Cubed

I got this note from Apple today:

Dear Lance,
Thank you for being a member of .Mac! Your .Mac membership is set to renew on September 27, 2007 PDT. Your credit card will be charged the day before your .Mac membership anniversary date and your account will renew for another year.

Please take a minute to review your account settings. If you want to change any of the details regarding your account, click here to update your Renewal Settings first.

I want to cancel my account but can not do so via the "click here" link. iTarded.

Why do I want to cancel. "Because it is not possible to simply change your .Mac member name." iTarded.

"If you activated or renewed your .Mac account within the past 30 days through the .Mac website with a credit card, you can cancel your .Mac account for a prorated refund." So what exactly I do when you send me an email with no option to cancel? Let them bill me and then cancel? iTarded.

There is a big big difference between being a hardware company and a service provider. Not sure if Apple gets that just yet.

Some GoDaddy Love

This little surprise showed up today:

Dear Lance Weatherby,

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN®) recently agreed to reduce their Registrar Transaction Fee from $.25 to $.22. What does this mean for you?

Good news. You have been credited $.03/yr for each domain name you registered or renewed dating back to July 1, 2006* -- $.60 has been placed into your Go Daddy® account with this customer number:

Me thinks that most companies would have just kept this in their own bank account.

Nice move. While the $.60 really means nothing to me (and based on the 20 million domains GoDaddy has this is costing them about $500,000 on the bottom line), I feel like I am dealing with an honest company that is treating me fairly.

How Bad Is Yahoo! Alerts?

This bad:

From: y-alerts@reply.yahoo.com
Date: April 13, 2007 1:04:27 PM EDT
To: my email address
Apple delays launch of operating system

Notice the time date stamp. Apple issued the press release announcing this at 4:30 PM EDT yesterday. It showed up via RSS very, very shortly thereafter. Yahoo! Alerts has over a 20 hour lag time. How alerty is that?

Not very. And it is the reason that I have been trying to cancel them. I have a little problem though. According to the Web interface I do not have any alerts.

Well I obviously do because they keep showing up every day. I have been going back and forth with Yahoo! customer support about this for about a month now. After blaming it on 1) me, 2) timing, 3) my browser, and 4) my Internet connection this was their final resolution:

From: alerts-feedback@cc.yahoo-inc.com
Subject: Re: Feedback - How to turn off my Alerts (KMM92622784V50476L0KM)
Date: April 8, 2007 12:41:35 PM EDT
To: my email address
Reply-To: alerts-feedback@cc.yahoo-inc.com

Yahoo! Alerts Customer Care

So they know there is a problem, are basically telling me thanks for telling us about the problem, but that is all we can tell you. Yuck!

Technorati Support

Part of the auto-reply from a Technorati support submission:

Dear Technorati User,

If you don't hear back from anyone within a week, please accept our apologies for the delay as we may be experiencing a backlog in Support. Please feel free to send us a reminder of your ticket.

Nice. Violates four of the deadly sins of providing good consumer Internet services.

Here's a little advice for the yet to be named new Technorati CEO. Once you decide what you want to focus on as a business, focus on the customer. Or maybe, just maybe, it should be the other way around.

Why?

Do credit cards have digits to represent the month of the year and nearly every web site requires that you select the month by its proper name?

Is it a fruad detection test to see if you are smart enough to do a conversion and thus worthy of a credit card?

Some people even think that putting the number and name on a pull down is a major coup:

Another score for 37signals: when entering credit card information during the Basecamp subscription purchase process, the dropdown menu for selecting an expiration date contains both the numeral and name of each month. Similar widgets in other checkout forms tend to list only numerals; I tend to think with one or the other and rarely both, so it’s nice to see them put together.

I actually see the named month much, much more than the numbers.  There has got to be a reason for this  It can't be that hard to present a number like what is on the card.  I am curious.  Why do Internet merchants do this?

Bye, Bye Wall Street Journal

I have been a loyal subscriber to The Wall Street Journal since 1987. Or I should say a loyal subscriber until last week. It seems that the WSJ has decided to reward my loyalty by charging me 76% more then what they charge new customers.

As a new customer I can get a deal where I pay $99 for a year of service plus eight weeks free. As a subscriber of 20 years the best deal that I can get is $353.62 for two years. When a sales rep told me that the only way I could get the deal was to cancel my account, I did. My thought at the time was that I would just start over in 90 days

But now I don't really miss it that much. I might not renew at all.

Moral of the story; don't take advantage of your most loyal customers. If you do, they will find out, get annoyed, perhaps come to the conclusion that the value is no longer there, and then tell all their friends about it.

Know Your Customers!

As I mentioned last week, Nelson Chu gave a great presentation at the Q3 MoneyTree meeting.

The title of his presentation was Tips for Entrepreneurs: Know Your Customers! Nelson was kind enough to share his presentation with me. From Nelson's point of view are are three reasons to get close to your customers. It enables you to identify big waves, it drives focus, and it creates value.

Big waves are important. Many thing the most important element to success. By knowing your customers it enables an entrepreneur to be specific about the target customer. To know:

Who is going to sign the check?
What is their burning problem?
Why your product is a need to have and not a nice to have?
When they are going to buy due to urgency?
Where you are going to sell it and the implications for the business?

Focus really does two things. It builds excitement among investors and sets the business focus. The latter enables you to build the right team, build the right product, and build early customer validation.

When you combine the above you create value. Big waves drive investor interest and exciting valuations. And actually having customer traction typically, but not always, drives valuation reality.

Nelson gave good food for though for any entrepreneur wanting to start a company. He is also the type of VC that I think any CEO would want on his side. He is smart, strategic, and most importantly measured. I have a hard time seeing Nelson blowing up if things are not going as planned.