Smarter Messaging [Mike Jones, UK]

Sometimes I’m amazed at how incompetent large companies can be. Example:

1. Take a large UK based hosting company which claims to be the biggest in the UK
2. Set-up an email only account with them because they do nice cheap Exchange boxes
3. Decide you’re happy with them so open another one for a related company
4. Decide you’re happy with that too and want to add hosting to the domain too
5. “Sorry sir you can’t do that. You have to create another account, delete the old one, re-set up the old mailboxes on the new one, and apply for a refund because it’ll charge you again for the mailboxes”
6. Decide that seeing as they’ve not started using the mailboxes and won’t loose anything its worth the hassle.
7. Do it.
8. Phone the “Customer Service” team to get the refund
9. “Oh no sir they’re different accounts, we don’t give out refunds for that as a policy”
10. “But the man in sales said you would”
11. “No the person is sales would have said you ‘could try’”
12. “Err no”
13. “I’ll put it through to management as a request and we’ll have to take it from there”
14. “Can I make a friendly request that you can put to whatever person you do internally that you make it possible to upgrade an ‘email only’ account to include hosting?
15. “No we can’t do that because they’re different systems. Different servers do different things. So even if we wanted to we couldn’t”
16. [try and explain that it’s not a server problem but a problem with their system]
17. “No sorry you need to understand its not possible”
18. [silence as you contemplate if its worth fighting an idiot]
19. “OK. So you’ll but that request in for me?”
20. “Yes”
21. “OK, thanks. Bye.”

I can so see why the point I mentioned before sits so well:

… some enormous percentage of calls to call centres (or is the correct phrase “contact centres” now) are because something has gone wrong. However, they rarely are logged as “complaints” they are just handled. We have armies of people whose only job is to deal with exceptions that if they were captured in a coherent manner could probably be dealt with to stop everyone else suffering the same fate. Of course if you product or company is so dire that it can’t change in response to issues you might as well just give up now!

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