How to Piss off Your Customers – Ebay Edition

Let me state to begin with:  I don’t think Ebay is a trash-bin company.  It is fairly evident, however, that their senior management is significantly lacking in intelligence.  Or it may be that their intelligence is aimed in the wrong direction.

Most senior management, of virtually any company, seems to forget that if your customers are happy, you make money.  Conversely, if your customers are not happy with you, you won’t make much money.  Although it is right and true that companies are in business to make money, you have to question the prevailing attitude that management should scramble desperately after every rolling penny.  

‘Leaning’ a company (taking out the waste) is a praiseworthy endeavor, but focus should be correct.  Companies examine their processes, look to where they can cut workers.  At no point do they look at their management structure to see how efficient that is.  Management is expensive and it produces no product.  Senior management is even more expensive.

Before I get too far off point, the one area where massive mistakes have been made by virtually all companies is Customer Service.  

Despite the drooling lemming-like behavior exhibited by most people when confronted with marketing, Customer Service is the company’s actual face turned toward the customer.  This is what the customer remembers rather than the emails he keeps hitting delete about.  Let’s face it, after years of marketing, people pretty much have figured out that they are being lied to.  It doesn’t take too many shoddy products to make a customer depart.  Most companies seem to believe that while they will lose a few customers, there are many more out there to deceive and make money from.  Unfortunately for that type of mental deficiency, the pool of the unwary grows smaller every day, mostly due to the internet.  Eventually everyone on earth will know how to search for ‘Your company name+problems’.

Unfortunately Ebay has areas where it exhibits great idiocy.  Fortunately they’re not like AT&T and actually have instituted changes that help their customers, rather helping themselves to their customer’s wallets.  For example, making shipping easier by interfacing directly to UPS, USPS, etc and especially their global shipping program, actually helps sellers.  Their fee structure, however, which increases the cost of shipping and assures that small sellers subsidize the large sellers, unfairly burdens buyers and small sellers.

One area where Ebay has bought into idiocy is Customer Service.  Virtually all companies believe (at the present time) that Customer Service is a money-sink and must be reduced.  To have people on the phone helping customers without generating revenue, seems to be a losing proposition.  This relates to how managers think too short.  While customer service does not directly generate revenue, a good customer service ‘face’ will generate more customers and maintain repeat customers.  However, most management is not that diligent to dig into the numbers to find that out.  Management likes to look busy, but they abhor deep thought and hard work.

Ebay does its part to reduce customer service expenses by making it difficult to get answers.  While they do have an extensive online help, if you have a question about something more complicated than ‘How do I leave feedback?’ or ‘How do I end a listing?’, you won’t find it.  An expedient thing to do would be to update your online help every time a question gets answered by your customer service.  This would eventually build a pretty comprehensive database.  There is no evidence that Ebay has even thought of this.  

This was the situation I was in.  I sold an item and had listed it as being shipped by UPS.  The customer only had a P.O.Box address.  I know enough to realize that UPS can’t ship to P.O.Boxes, so I began to look for ways to change the shipping method.  If I ship by USPS, I remain on Ebay and get a small discount.  If I ship by UPS, I am sent to the Paypal site.  In my mind this has had to have happened before, so I searched Ebay help.  The search on Ebay help leaves a lot to be desired.  I was presented with a list of items that were not even close.  Now I have a dilemma.  To get a discount on final value fees and listing fees, I’m supposed to ship within one day of payment.  Ebay has forums, but forums are a hit-or-miss affair.  You wait to see if someone answers you and if you can trust their answer.  With only one day to deal with, I needed an answer now.  So I jumped through the hoops to contact Ebay Customer Support by phone.  Ebay has modified the phone contact so that you don’t have to search and find a subject before they allow you to get a customer support ticket number and  phone number.  I get my number and call and I get through quickly.  Having to punch in a 7 or 8 digit ticket number is a bit of a hassle, but at least the voice response system is only one layer deep.

I get to a Customer Support Representative quickly and state my case.  He’s eager to help me, listens to everything I say and tries.  The problem is a) He is either untrained on how to search his expert system or b) the expert system is not complete.  He has to run off to ask the question.  The problem is, and I found this out later, he gives me the wrong answer.  He tells me there is no way to change the shipping method and the only thing I can do is to go directly to the USPS site to ship.  This is what this solution does for me:  First I have to go to the USPS site and enter all the information.  Then I pay a higher price.  Then I have to go back to Ebay and enter the tracking information.  If I could stay on the Ebay site, all information would already be there, they would forward the tracking information and all I’d have to do is print the label.  

I tell him I realize it’s not his fault, but thanks for nothing.  I do tell him to inform someone that this type of situation can arise where shippers have to be changed.  I know why Ebay makes it impossible to change shippers.  They believe they are saving the buyer from being switched to a cheaper, longer time shipment by unscrupulous sellers.  The main problem here is the most unscrupulous sellers are the big guys that Ebay panders to.  If you don’t believe me, look for the sellers with the most ridiculously high shipping rates and you’ll find that they are big sellers.

Now, in case you did not know, Ebay and Paypal are the same company.  They are joined like Siamese twins.  And here is where I found the information I was given was wrong.  I went to ship the item to see if there was somewhere else I could change shippers.  I was transferred to the Paypal site and after logging in, I easily found a drop-down box where I could change from UPS to USPS.  While I was embarrassed at my own stupidity, I was more irritated that Ebay could not tell me that information.

Why couldn’t the Ebay customer service representative tell me this small piece of information?  It really comes down, again, to bad management.  If the customer service rep had not gone off to ask a question, I would have attributed it to just one rep who might have forgotten.  However, now having dealt with not just first line, but the second reference line, I can probably state that some senior manager somewhere decided to save money by making sure the customer service people only received minimal training.  

There will always be problem employees.  Too many of them.  However, management should be bright enough not to blame employees as a knee-jerk reaction.  Ninety percent of the problems I have seen in business have been the direct result of bad management decisions.  One of the best quotes I’ve ever heard, and this was from a minister, is that ‘Thinking should be the loudest sound in your business.’  

Now imagine what the boardroom of AT&T sounds like.  You can take it from there.

How to Piss off Your Customers – PTC Version

As an engineer, I’m always looking for tools, software or hardware, to make my job easier and faster.  This is necessary because management never can grasp the fact that every time they add another status report, it takes time out of your job.

Anyways, I saw a small article on Design News that PTC had released a freeware version of Mathcad, called Mathcad Prime.  This was probably a previous version of the Mathcad software, and if I can get something to make the algebra easier and less error prone, I’m all for it.  There are times when you need to do the S transforms (for example, adding filtering) and algebraic manipulations (partial fraction expansion anyone?) are very cumbersome by hand, and error-prone.  Generally you know when the result is wrong, then you have to churn through the whole thing again to find out where you made your mistake.

Mathcad Prime promised to make my life easier.  Since my workplace has IT Nazis, the quickest way to review the software was to install it at home.  Both work and home are Win7 64bit, so whatever I encountered at home, most likely will be the same situation at work.

One day I’ll write an entry on IT departments, but suffice it to say that most don’t realize there is a difference between your ‘administrative assistants’/accountants and engineers.  Engineers can work with (and many times, need) free software.  The time frame usually cannot be the glacial timing reserved for managers and accountants.  Engineers need to get the job done now, not 3 days later.

To give you an idea on how back the IT Nazis here are, I have to put in a Help ticket to remove icons from my desktop.  I can’t even do that.

Back to PTC’s Mathcad Prime. 

I find the free page, download the software and install it.  Upon start-up, I get the splash screen, then a window that announces that Mathcad Prime has stopped working and will be closed.  No option to see what the error was, just a nice ‘close’ button.  I figure that I need to reboot.  So I reboot and get the same result.  Now I have no illusions about support for freeware, so rather than call and complain, I head to PTC’s website.  

Now I encounter the first problem.  The only way to get to the FAQs and troubleshooting on their website is to have an account.  The problem is, it isn’t just a registration, you must have support contract.  They have dozens of Forums, but all the troubleshooting and help is locked up behind a paid support window.  This idea must have taken some kind of serious brain damage.  Now, instead of helping myself on this free software, I have to contact their support.

Since I’m working from home, I send their support an email.  I also used my work email to ‘register’ this lump of unworking dreck, I ask them specifically to respond to my home email.  Of course, I put that at the bottom prefaced with the admonition that I really don’t expect them to read that far.  And guess what, they don’t.  I have to wait to Monday to get the support response. 

In my email, I carefully outlined the situation, even to the extent of telling them that it’s the free version and I’m previewing from home.  The response I get immediately proves that I’m dealing with an idiot.  He gives me a link that’s behind the paid support wall.  I get a very nasty page directing me to go pay for a support license.  I copy this, send it to him, again telling him that I’m working from home and send this to my home email.  The response, two days later, goes to my work email.  At least now he outlines, in the email, what I should do.  It involves replacing a file.  Easily done, the problem is, it doesn’t work.  That happens, if everything worked after the first fix, you probably would not need engineers.  However, the idiot still cannot seem to understand where to send his responses.  I email back the negative result and wait.

Now things get interesting.  I actually get a call at work from the regional sales manager.  He makes all the right noises about how things should be handled and says that he’ll get my problem resolved, hopefully the same day.

You can guess the results.  I have not heard from either the sales manager or support for over two months now.  After a month, I uninstalled the software, documented my experience with PTC and recommended that my company never deal with PTC for the main reason that you can’t rely on their support.

Maybe if we paid for support, the company would be more responsive, but the support person I dealt with gave me no reason to think he was even remotely intelligent.  That’s not a good sign.

Will PTC lose customers over this?  I hope they lose enough customers to give their brain-damaged management a kick in the ass.  Releasing old software as freeware can be a good inducement to get customers, when they can see the good stuff you can do with their software.  However, you have to be intelligent about this.  It would have been fine if the software came with the caveat that there was no support.  Or if I was told that in either an email or on the phone.  Of course, without support, some of the inducement to upgrade (pay money) is lost.  It would have also been fine if they stated that the program does not work under my operating system.  Stuff like that happens.  HOWEVER, when you ask for help and they run and hide without a word, that does not say good things about the company.

The problem is, at this point, the brain-damaged management of PTC will probably pronounce that they will never, ever, release free software again.  Instead of fixing the problem.  And it’s an easy problem to fix!  All you do is state that the only support for freeware is the online troubleshooting, create a forum for getting the freeware working and you’re done!  And, duh, you have to let people have access to the troubleshooting.

This is why PTC management is brain-damaged.  Of course, they can prove me wrong, but I doubt if they are smart enough to figure out how.

Cheat Your Employees --- It's Good Business!

I’ve noticed recently that there are several unique management seminars being offered.  Now seminars and webinars are not really unusual.  The unusual part about management seminars is their cost.  They are generally expensive.  There is a good reason for this:  The people who give these seminars have to get as much money as possible up front because most of these seminars are useless and they’ll never get repeat business!

By ‘useless’ I mean that most management seminars are either exotic theories akin to perpetual motion or free energy, or they present just common sense like ‘treat your employees right and they won’t leave’.   Which brings me right to the unique seminars.  These new seminars focus on retaining your best employees.  To me, this is common sense.  You treat them like human beings, not like human resources.  Most of all, you treat them fairly and with respect.  This is extremely difficult for businesses to do.

It is extremely difficult for the top management of any company to think of employees as people and not as resources.  This fallacy contributes mightily to a loss of productivity.  If you think of an employee as no more than a desk or chair, that is the productivity you will get.  Logically it is pretty stupid to expect extraordinary effort from a worker who knows that no matter what he accomplishes, he won’t get any credit, respect or reward.  In general, it isn’t all about money.  In fact, when workers complain about pay increases or monetary rewards, that is usually evidence of a more deep-seated management problem.  When workers feel appreciated and that the company is looking out for them, then money fades as a problem.  However, when the company takes every opportunity to increase their profits by reducing 'employee' expenses, then worker loyalty declines.

General George S. Patton put it succinctly:  “Much is made of loyalty from the bottom to the top.  However, loyalty from the top to the bottom is much more important and much less prevalent.”

When management ceases being leaders and become accountants, the company’s fortunes decline.  With the general low intelligence of management, they don’t recognize what they’ve done wrong, but become bull-headed and do more of the same.    

Since I’ve been a considerable amount of time with two different companies in two different markets, I have seen the same stupid management tricks.  For example, when the job market gets tight and it’s hard to find jobs, every company I’ve been with has cut employee benefits.  It’s almost like clockwork.  As soon as the employment market is down, the company begins to cheat its employees.  

In contrast, I have never seen a company come out and cut management bonuses to save money.  I’ve been at some companies where they announced that, but you find out later that they never did or intended too.  My guess is that they thought their employees were stupid.

While at that major medical manufacturer, there was an incident that demonstrated the duplicity of management.  This particular year, sales were down.  The company usually netted a half billion dollars in sales, and their usual ‘big’ sales month was September.  Because they usually raised prices in October.  This particular year, even after September, sales were down by 90 million dollars.  This is an almost 20% decline in sales year over year.  That September I was in the bank that was just down the street and I overheard a teller and a manager talking saying how they had trouble cashing the bonus check of the vice president of sales.  They actually mentioned him by name.  From the implication, they had trouble coming up with enough cash.  I was stunned.  Here sales were down by 20% and the vice president of sales, whose job it was to get sales in the door, was getting a bonus check.  You would bet that if it had been a bonus for the employees, they would have yanked it immediately.

That same company, the second year I was there, cut employee benefits.  During the presentation of the new benefits plan, the presenter kept saying how this was a considerable improvement in the benefit plan.  The problem was that everything that was a considerable improvement was a cut in benefits.  Finally I got it. It wasn’t an improvement for me, but for the company.

The plain fact is that managers cheat employees because they believe they are doing the best for the company.  This distortion of mind makes it easy to rationalize making employees pay more for health insurance, because they are lucky to have a job in this economy.

The plain fact is that management, even the president, CEO or whatever they call themselves, are supposed to be part of a functioning entity.  They are people (or human resources) that have a job to do to make the company successful.  Once they begin to think of themselves as feudal lords guarding their divine rights, the company falters.  As soon as management begins to think of themselves as more than just a common worker, things go wrong.  This is also the behavior that causes workers to create unions.  This is a whole another subject.

Another area where management works earnestly to cheat their employees is the yearly review process.  We’ll take that up in another blog entry. 

How to Piss Your Customers off --- GoDaddy Edition

If you have ever tried to read your mobile phone billing statement or you ever tried to renew some subscription online, you know that there are all sorts of money traps lurking just beneath the surface.  Despite the protests and the periodic messages you get about how they are ‘improving their statements’, what they are really doing is hiding all the relevant information.  Over the years I have seen perfectly readable (and itemized) monthly statements (I’m looking at you, Cox Communications!) become more and more obscure so that you have very little chance of understanding what you are being charged for.  

This, of course, is because the company you are dealing with does not want to explain to you why they are charging you.  It is also the reason they hire phalanxes of idiot customer service representatives.  The worse these people are, the more likely you are to hang up without having to be told the truth.

My current problem is with GoDaddy.com.  Yes, I do have a vanity website (which I won’t tell you where it is) and, although I haven’t updated it for years, I still do want it available.  It was created with Microsoft Frontpage (about 2001 I think) and since I no longer have that program, it would be a hassle to try and download the whole structure to being to work on it.

So I’ve been hosting with GoDaddy for a number of years and it was only last year with I noticed that the marketing weasels had gotten a hold of the company.  

The first evidence is what I mentioned above.  When I got a notice from them for renewal, I noticed that the webpage I arrived at, was close to unreadable.  The page was very busy with advertisements, my ‘bill’ was in a small section at the center of the screen with a large amount of money required and my only option was to go to Checkout.

This, of course, was the old magazine subscription scam, where you get a decent price as a new customer, but, as a loyal renewing customer, you have the privilege of paying two to three times as much.  

At that time, I managed to argue them down to a semi-reasonable amount, however, it took a lot of my time to call ‘Customer Service’ and again, waiting for them to run back and forth to the person really making the decisions.

So, recently, I got another email alert from GoDaddy.  GoDaddy is very careful about informing me when I have to update credit card information.  I’ve also noticed that they are not very good about informing me when my website hosting is down, or if I’m not taking advantage of benefits I’ve already paid for.  GoDaddy is also one of those myriad of companies that will flood you with emails on sales or just about anything that will cost you more money.

 The fun began immediately with the email.  Under the bright red banner announcing ‘Credit Card Expiration Notice’, was a dire warning that I should renew my products now and not have to lose all my stuff.  The email did not include any convenient links so that I could update my credit card info.  Of course not, that would not net them any money.  To update your credit card info, you have to log into your account, at which point you are confronted with a page full of advertisements and the only link relevant to what you want to do is a small black box, ‘My Account’ in the upper left.  Then you are confronted with a menu that includes a lot of stuff you don’t have.  You have to click on the payment tab, click on the small link that says ‘View Payment Types’, then click on the Visa or Mastercard link next to the last four digits of your account number.  As you noticed, there is no simple tab or link to ‘My Account Information’ or ‘Update My Account Information’, nor do they tell you what link to hit to update your credit card info.  There is, however,  a large box for ‘ExpressCheckout’.

The interface is damned awkward!

Now I got myself into trouble, unknowingly, by noticing a menu tab for expiring items.  I clicked on that so that I could renew without having to come back to this abortion of a web interface next month, or so I thought.  The renewal button brought me to a statement that gave me the one (1) option of paying a horrendous amount of money for 2 years of hosting.  But then it did something else.  It presented me with a list of options for hosting.  Noticing that there was an option for half the price they were expecting me to pay, I click on that, and, like a smart consumer, removed the higher price at the checkout.  I proceed to checkout and suddenly I’m confronted with a ‘Getting Started Page.’

Hmm, why should I get a getting ‘started page’?  After all I’ve been hosting with them for ten years!  So I click the button.  I’m asked which domain to attach to the hosting.  When I try to enter my domain, there is a quick flash of some red text, too fast to read it and then I’m back to the same question and the same blank box.  Finally I try enough times to read the error message.  It tells me I can’t attach my domain to that hosting.

I’ve tried really hard not to have to call customer support.  If you’ve read what I’ve gone through with various customer support systems, you understand that  a) I won’t get anywhere, b)There will be a distinct last of expertise on the other end of the line and c) I won’t get anywhere.

I call GoDaddy support.  It’s a little shorter set of menus, I only have to enter my customer number and I get through to a support person surprisingly fast.  However, he doesn’t identify himself, this may not be good.

The first piece of information I discover is that the hosting I’ve just paid for is only for new hosting (remember the magazine scam I mentioned earlier).  He says that to use the new hosting, I have to cancel the old hosting then attach the domain to the new hosting, but, before that, make sure I backup my website and then upload it to the new hosting.  Wait a minute!  You mean that this technology company can’t move my website over?  I ask this knowing full well that my website does not really have to move, all they do is make some changes to my account.  The harddrive it’s on makes no difference.  I go after the hosting also:  “Why doesn’t the page tell you that the low price is only for new hosting?   Why doesn’t the page tell you that?  You mean I supposed to happily pay twice as much for a renewal?  That’s stupid!”

The response I get is crass:  “I’m sorry you feel that way, sir.”

EXCUSE ME?  I SHOULD FEEL THAT PAYING TWICE AS MUCH FOR THE SAME ITEM IS NOT STUPID?

Of course, this customer support person is pretty much unarmed when it comes to an argument.  I state my case without yelling.  His only response is to go running off to his supervisor.  This is the usual scam that you find in car dealers where the sales person sympathizes with you, however, his boss says….

He comes back with a couple of alternatives:  Yes, they can move my website for me, but it would cost $150.  I laugh in his face.  I would be paying $150 for nothing.  Of course, that is the whole idea to make money off the customer with a return of almost nothing.  This is GoDaddy’s customer service at its best.  Do for the customer only if it’s lucrative.

Then, of course, I’m misled.  He tells me they are willing to update my hosting for an extra 18 months for nothing.  That’s what he said, but that’s not what the meaning was.  What he should have said that he’d transfer the purchase I just made to my old hosting which would calculate out to 18 months at the inflated renewal rate.  Unfortunately I didn’t catch that until I got off the phone.

I always wondered when the mission of customer service switched from helping the customer to tricking the customer into paying more.  Yes, a company is in business to make a profit.  Years ago, companies would invest a certain amount of money and expect a certain percentage return.  Now, it seems that we have company officers desperately running after every rolling penny.  That’s not a pretty sight.

Of course now that I’ve had this ‘wonderful’ experience with GoDaddy, I’ll be looking for alternate hosting.  Maybe I’ll leave then come back.  Then again, I’ve never gone back to AT&T.

The unfortunate part of this is that when someone from GoDaddy reads this, the customer service person I talked to, who had nothing to do with the policies that caused the problem, will probably get a reprimand.  The ugly marketing SOB that created this mess will never think about it has he flies to his 2^nd vacation home.