For those of you who have been following my blog you know that my youngest daughter recently moved to New Orleans to take her first job. The whole process of getting the job and getting her moved proved to be a great source of inspiration for several of my posts. Well believe it or not this gift just keeps on giving.
When we were moving her in she asked me to try and order her internet service. As it turns out she only had two choices. Both of the choices were about equal cost wise and both were big reliable companies. One was a cable company and the other was a phone company. I ordered the service from the phone company and placed the order via their web service.
The first issue I ran into was that her address was not listed as a valid address. The only way I could get it to go through was to pick the apartment next to her and put in the special notes that it was for apartment 101 and not 102. The web site automatically sent her an email back saying that she would have internet on July 8th and someone would call her to schedule a time for installation. It was a Friday night when we placed this order and she received a call back on Tuesday.
This is where it starts getting interesting. The phone company told her that it would be two weeks before they could schedule someone to come out. Much to her disappointment, she scheduled the time to take off work to meet them. Two weeks later, the installation man met her but told her because the order was for apartment 102 instead of 101 it would take another two weeks. The only reason he knocked on her door was that he noticed the special instructions note that said it was apartment 101.
The good news (if you are really search hard for a silver lining) is that she would not have to meet anyone at her apartment to get it turned on because he was able to do all the onsite work that day. The two weeks came and went and she still didn’t have internet access. She called several times and spent what she says is hours on hold just to find out that it would be two more weeks. She told them to forget it and called the cable company.
The cable company said that they could come out the next week to get it installed and that she would not have to be at her apartment. While they didn’t get it turned on when they said they would it was only a few days late. When she called them they always answered the phone and never put her on hold for more than a few minutes.
Last night she sent us an email saying that she finally had internet. Can you believe this all started on July 2nd and ended on Aug 9th? How do companies stay in business with this kind of customer service? Is there not enough competition? Do they just not care or do they just not care about small accounts?
In the CRM market that Salesnet competes in, there are almost too many competitors to count. Even with all this competition, I still hear stories of bad support as a reason for companies switching from other CRM products to Salesnet. Sometimes this bad support is due to the company’s lack of resources in customer support, they may just be overloaded with quality issues, or it might be that they really don’t care about the smaller companies because they have so many large customers.
While Salesnet support isn’t perfect, we do everything we can to make the customer experience positive. Almost all our support questions are really training questions and yet we answer each one. Salesnet has a large installed base of customers from all sizes of companies and (as long as I have anything to do with it) we will support our customers no matter the size of the company. While our product superiority is important to getting new customers, our customer support is the key to keeping them as Salesnet customers.
Good Selling
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