Beware, four weeks ago I purchased a registry cleaner from a Canadian company called Registry Patrol also known as The Post Media Network and is a division of Veritext Media,  the product is useless, and after countless emails without any response except two from support telling me that they will get back to me within 24 hours, I am still waiting.

I tried the trial version of the product which cleaned about a third of the errors on my computer so I decided to buy the full version, the problem is that it continued to revert back to the trial version and was only cleaning a small portion of the errors which needed to be removed. As of today 4 weeks later it is not working at all and I have not been able to get any customer service from the company nor its partners. Read the rest…

I had to write about “ Blog Tech Guy“ one of those rare people who provides the best customer service ever.

I had been struggling with the technical side of Wordpress, yes I know they say its easy, and it is, if you know how or. have a lot of time to play around with it.

I was reading a blog post by Yaro Starek “Entrepreneurs Journey” who had given a glowing report about Joel, owner of “ Blog Tech Guy” and how outsourcing any technical work to someone who knows what they are doing makes a lot more sense than wasting hours trying to figure it out for yourself. Read the rest…

How would you deal with call centers employed by the cash strapped Austrian Justice Ministry?

Seven different jails were using prisoners as call center reps and managed to get away with it until customers complained about their personal data falling into the wrong hands.

Nothing really surprises me when I comes to call centers, but I have to admit to being gobsmacked when I read this article in the Timesonline. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3613754.ece What were they thinking?

Low morale and high staff turnover are epidemic in call centers and we should not be surprised. I doubt that many of us would put up the conditions that these people have to tolerate.

As a call center rep, they are on the phone all day, one minute they are talking with a calm customer who has a simple problem which they have been trained to solve quickly, everything goes smoothly and the customer gets of the phone happy with his result , then the next minute, they are being berated, sworn at, and yelled at by a customer who is mad as all hell, and has the rep in tears within seconds, this roller coaster ride happens every day in every call center. Is it any wonder that the morale is low and the staff turnover is huge? Read the rest…

I like live chat. My hatred of call centers is so great, that I stress out before even picking up the phone because I know it wont be easy, first I will have to listen to a mechanical voice giving me options, then each option giving me more options, and finally, a real person on the line who more than likely wont be able to answer my question or solve my problem and have to put me through to another department.

I discovered that customer service through live chat is a great stress buster, when I come across a rep who doesn’t have a clue, I can yell at the computer instead of him/her. Does it mean I always get the result I am after? No, but having to take the time to think and then write about the issue using live chat, makes it a calmer process for everyone, it can also make it a little longer, but it does remove a lot of the stress.

Many of the major company’s provide “live chat” for their customers, except banks, and customer service is sadly lacking in the online small business sector. If I was selling online, my first priority would be setting up my web site so my customers had instant access to my customer service support.

As a customer I want timely, consistent and accurate responses.

Customer service = customer loyalty, more referrals ,less competition and more profits.

Thanks to Business Week for this report it takes a little time but well worth the read. Look out corporate world we are coming to get you.

Business Week on Consumer Vigilantes: Customer Service, Emotion

Dealing with call centers. One of the most frustrating pull your hair out experiences we can have, and the thing that really pushes my buttons is not being able to find a solution to the problem with just one person. The constantly being transferred,and kept waiting online for another rep, who chances are wont have the answer either, drive me to screaming point.

I called my Telstra call center last week to change my phone plan, a transaction which should have taken just a few minutes, which it did. The next morning I had no internet, so I called Telstra at 8am to be told they could not solve the problem and I would have to call another department which did not open until 9am.  it turned out that when I changed my account, the code for my internet connection was deleted. I can only assume the rep had not been trained in asking the right questions, or she forgot to ask causing inconvenience for me, the customer.

My question is “why could the one person not resolve this issue in one call?” The way I see it, it was a two step deal, change over the plan and make sure the internet code was also changed, what is so hard about that? Read the rest…

I love telling everyone about great customer service. Now and again we come across a company which really does put customers and customer service first, just recently I have been dealing with a company called Hostgator.

Hostgator is a provider of Shared, Dedicated and Reseller hosting solutions. and was recommended to me by a friend. The idea of being able to build my own professional web site without any web hosting experience, or web building experience for that matter, really appealed to me.

Moving from another host was made easy because Hostgator took over the entire process, in fact free domain transfer, free file transfer ,free database transfers, free script transfers are all just a part of the service provided. Read the rest…

It all began in October 2007 with a bill from Telstra Bigpond, my local ISP provider informing me that I owed an outstanding balance of $125.75 plus my new charges of $59.95. I quickly worked out that the $125.75 was two payments of $59.95 plus a $5.95 late fee.

I keep very good records of my Telstra accounts and knew I had paid and was right up to date, so I dug out the bills knowing I would have to give the receipt number details to the call centre.

After finally getting through to the call centre I was informed that the BigPond billing system had been changed and I realised that in the changeover my previous accounts had not been credited, but offcourse the call centre rep would have none of it, I explained that I had the receipt numbers and she said that I would have to fax the receipts to them, I explained that these were the receipt numbers given to me by Telstra pay by phone , I kept trying to explain these were verbal receipt numbers not paper receipts and that I would expect that they would have copies themselves, it was like talking to a brick wall. Read the rest…

“Customer Service Revolution” is a call to action.

Why Start A Customer Service Revolution?

Its time business started resolving problems caused by their product or service .

Its time to refuse to put up with call centres who transfer us, five, six, seven and in my case just recently, to nine different reps, none of whom could resolve the problem and wasted three hours of my time.

Its time to stop being ignored by sales, staff who never smile and look like they want to be somewhere else.

Its time to take on the banks and stop them from charging exorbitant fees for services which cost them just a few cents.

Its time to refuse to tolerate rude and argumentative staff, in any industry

Every time we accept bad service in any form, we are sending out the message that it is okay to treat us with disrespect. Read the rest…