This has recently become a personal pet peeve of mine.

If you are selling something or providing a service you need to provide a way for a potential customer to contact you if they have a problem or question.

More important is that you need to have a responsive support system for your customers.

I had two incidents recently that I will recap for you and you tell me if this is the way you want a business you are thinking about becoming involved with to work.

I recently was told about a URL tracking service that was supposed to be the new best thing of free tracking services. So, I decided to check it out. I went and signed up and as I expected I was told I had to confirm my email address before I was provided access to the site. This is all normal and I don’t mind this one bit, I went and checked my email and the confirmation had not arrived yet. So, I spent a little while working on another site and came back to my email about an hour later, still no confirmation email. It was late so I said forget it and went to bed.

The next morning when I got up I did my usual routine of checking my email and still no confirmation email so I went to the site and tried to login. The response I got was, “Username/Password are incorrect. Please try again. Or your member status is waiting for approval”

OK, maybe I made a typo entering my email address, not very likely since I usually use saved data and an auto-filler to enter my information so I signed up again and it told me, “Please correct the following error: Your Email is already registered in our site.”

Since there wasn’t a typo in my signup and I had not received my confirmation email I looked for a link to send the confirmation email and I couldn’t find one.

Then I looked for a contact page or a link to support and guess what I couldn’t find one.

This is a site I was looking at to promote if the quality of the service was good but since I couldn’t test its service I just said forget it because I had already wasted enough time on the site.

But then in my email, later that day, I received an email from them that said this:

You are receiving this message because you are a valued member of (Removed by me). Removal instructions are below.

Hi Randy,

Congratulations and welcome to (Removed by me).

We know you’ve already received your login info when you joined yesterday, but we wanted to personally let you know that you’ve made a very, very wise decision by becoming a (Removed by me) client.

Then it went on some more finally ending in this:

To remove yourself from this list – you must delete your(Removed by me) account.

So, they are telling me that they are going to keep sending me email unless I log into an account that I can’t log into because I never received the confirmation email from their site and they have no contact information on the site. Plus they are telling me, “They know” I received information that I never received. At least this email gave me a way to maybe contact them by sending to the email address it came from but I haven’t received a response yet.

Remember this is a company that is supposed to be able to handle the technological needs of my tracking but they can’t even figure out how to set up a resend on the confirmation link or set up a support desk.

Would you want to do business with them?

Now on to number two. This is a product that I purchased but my access didn’t work to the product. Not an extremely expensive product but it was $197.00 and I couldn’t get to the download. They did have a support desk and I submitted a ticket, make that a number of tickets and I never did get access to the download so I requested a refund for the product I never received.

Guess what, I never received the refund and I never received the product. They kept telling me that it was a problem on my end. Now anybody that has know me for any length of time will tell you that if the problem is on my end I will fix it. I know for a fact the problem wasn’t on my end because I tried to get to the product from a number of different computers (Windows and Macs) with a number of different browsers and I never got to it. I wrote this off as another internet marketer that is more interested in their wallet then they are in their product or their customers.

But guess what that wasn’t the end of it just recently I was billed for annual support on the same product that I never received! Now this is just insulting. They did refund the support payment and gave me access to a downgraded version of what I purchased but so far I haven’t received access to the actual product I purchased.

So what is the major take away from this?

For me it is never do business with these two companies again.

For you it should be:

Make sure that prospective customers can contact you either through a contact form or a support site. If you don’t you might be losing customers and you could also be creating a bad reputation for yourself.

If a customer asks for a refund give it to them. What would you rather have another couple of bucks in your pocket with someone calling you names and blogging about how bad you are, or a customer that just might purchase from you again?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Online Business . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.