Categories
Retail Email

Illiterate Customer Service Reflects Badly on the Product

I recently received a promotional email from T-mobile telling me about the great deal Rhapsody.com was giving to T-Mobile customers: unlimited streaming through the T-mobile network for $4/month without affecting my monthly data allocation.

I decided to check it out on my T-mobile enabled tablet. The streaming was fine. Then I wanted to add my own URLs for private streams I already had off my own personal audio server.

I could not find a way to add a private stream.  So, in desperation, I wrote to Rhapsody customer service asking if there was a way to add my own URL streams. The response:

“Thank you for your feedback. I will pass it to our product teams. Our development team will work research on this and will do the needful available in future. ”

What’s the problem with this response?

1. It is illiterate — check out the third sentence.

2. The response does not directly answer my question.

This kind of communication tells me a lot about Rhapsody:

a. The corporation does not have much regard to potential paying customers

b. The corporation does not have much regard for its own product

Further, I am familiar with the Rhapsody headquarters in Seattle. HQ is located on floor 31 of the Columbia Center.  Rent at this location is not cheap. I can easily see that money for HQ is more important than money for the people who actually deal with customers. So, I add another item:

c. The corporation puts customer service  — and happy customers —  at a low, low priority.

I decided to pass on the offer.

Categories
Security

American Express: Faulty Security

The night I called to activate my new American Express card I was asked this question to verify my identity: “Name a relative over the age of 18.” I provided my father’s name. “Sorry, that name is not on the list.” Huh?

So much for identify verification when they have incorrect information.

Another security breach in my mind is attaching a phone number to the account that I never provided. I got this message: “I see that the phone number you are calling from matches your account.” Wrong. Turns out that American Express will collect phone numbers on you without your knowledge and associate them with your account. This certainly is not secure because it is an action behind the customer’s back.

There can be no security without accuracy.

Categories
Retail Email

RadioShack.com: Electronics a front for Jewelry?

I wrote to RadioShack via the web form asking why a product was not showing when I clicked on the link.  The response came from a Jewelry web site. Could this be a clue that RS is outsourcing to 4th world countries for very cheap, non-responsive email? I never did get an answer to my question, which was time sensitive.

The response:

=======
Thank you for contacting RadioShack.com Order Center.

We do apologize for this inconvenience. We ask that you please contact our customer service department at 1-800-843-7422, as they may be able to further assist you in this matter.  In the meantime, we will forward this to our supervisor to have [sic] thie researched as soon as possible.

We do apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Please let us know if there is anything else we can do for you, and thank you again for contacting RadioShack.com Order Center.

Sincerely,
Fine Jewelry Ambassador
www.BaileyBanksandBiddle.com