a canadian startup

Company vs. Me, The Customer

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Update to this post:

At around 3pm  on the 15th of April, the company I complain about below responded to my complaint. They were nice, making me feel bad for being whiny. For an example of good customer support, read their response to my post in the comments section of of this post.

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There is an unwritten rule about startups that we never say anything bad about other startups. So I’ll be nice. In that light, I edited this so I don’t say the company’s name, but my hint is that it rhymes with Schmobivox.

I received the following email from Canadian Telephony startup, M____x, about 20 days ago:

Subject: M____X – Please make a call, we do not want you to lose your credits

Hi Ali

Thank you for using M____X.

Our records indicate that you are at risk of losing your M____X credits. Unfortunately, our accountants told us that we have to expire inactive credit balances if the account is not used for 180 days. We do not want you to lose your credits, so please make at least one paid call within the next 30 days and your credits will extend for another 180 days. To make a call, dial your local access number, say the name of who you want to talk to or dial their number. It’s that simple!

Your account details:

Balance: US $ 14.43

Expire date: 2008-04-23

To check your account balance, your call history or change your profile, go to www.m____x.com/login.

To ensure you do not lose your remaining balance, we will remind you again 7 days, as well as 72 hours, before your credits expire.

We are always available to answer any questions you have, and interested in hearing what you have to say. So, if there is anything we can do (or do better), do not hesitate to email us at support@m____x.com.

The M____X team

www.m____x.com

I think this is absurd. I know they were trying to be polite when they said “our accounts told us …. We do not want…” but I read it as being facetious. Your accountants told you? I don’t buy it: I think this is a decision you made. So I think you’re lying to me. That offends me as a customer.

When you work on the Internet, the old adage of “the customer is always right” never works. Take it from me, people have crazy, unreasonable demands. At Well.ca we set our standard to “what would a reasonable person who didn’t know about what happens behinds the scenes at our company expect?” We use that as our gold standard. It’s a corollary of the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. For example, just today, someone called because they wanted us to ship a new order to them — their original order is on route back to us because the customer supplied a wrong address. We pay shipping twice when packages are returned to us in these cases, and to ship again, we’ll have to pay shipping a third time. But from the customer’s perspective, nothing happened – so we’ll send new products to them, at no cost, because that’s what a reasonable customer who doesn’t understand our shipping process would expect.

When I bought M____x credits, I expected them to last for years (actually, indefinitely). In fairness, there is precedent for M____x’s kind of behaviour: Aeroplan, for example, recently started expiring unused cards after 1 year (from 3 years).

But even those were points that I didn’t pay for — here, M____x, you’re just going to take my money. Your accountants told you to, eh? Can I talk to them?

Of course, when I tried to use M____x today, the site and phone lines didn’t work (it said they were busy, but since your site was down, I am guesing nothing was working). You could provide us a way to say “I am still here” without making me use credits — if you really want to be able to account for stale credits. Or you could give me more time. And if your “accountants” are really scared about money sitting on the books, you can mail it back to me, or donate it to a charity of my choice, or…

Look, I don’t to be mean, but I do request, M____x, (and all other customer-facing startups) that you try and apply the golden standard for customer care.

Otherwise, you’re sending me a message: Your definition of a customer is as a means to an end — you don’t care about my view from the outside-in (If you respond to me by saying “it was in the fine print,” I will…).

Will this affect your bottom line? I dunno, but I don’t want to use your service again because I have a bad taste. If you take my money, I promise I will never use M____x. So you might be able to make an argument that using the golden standard affects sales — but at Well.ca, we use the golden standard because we never wanted to be a part of a business that did anything but help it’s customers. Our customers are our family, our friends — we serve them..

Anyone want to make a long distance call? I have unused, about to expire credits. Message me.

M____x is a cool idea, and I have met some of the people who are behind it. I think they’re all smart people. I will edit this post with a response from M____x if they reply to my email or this post. I also reserve the right to edit this post and make it nicer cuz I feel really bad saying mean things about another Canadian startup because you’re all my buddies and lots of love and don’t hate me and yeah.