{"id":650,"date":"2011-07-21T06:37:34","date_gmt":"2011-07-21T11:37:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2011\/07\/21\/110721-randomthursday\/"},"modified":"2024-06-29T15:45:25","modified_gmt":"2024-06-29T20:45:25","slug":"110721-randomthursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2011\/07\/21\/110721-randomthursday\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thursday &#8211; The Customer Service Complaint Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some random thoughts about some puzzling and odd &#8211; OK, let&#8217;s be honest: they&#8217;re <i>annoying<\/i> &#8211; business practices that have caught my attention:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Budget asked me to complete an online questionnaire about a recent car rental. I found it odd that the survey offered only check boxes and radio buttons, and provided no option for submitting feedback via text boxes. I think companies that craft surveys like this are fooling themselves into thinking they&#8217;re really getting into the minds of their customers. Those companies may believe they&#8217;re asking all the right questions, but invariably, they don&#8217;t. Allowing for some freeform feedback should enhance the value of the process, but perhaps it&#8217;s too much work for them to process. Why even bother, if that&#8217;s the case?<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">Then there&#8217;s the US Postal Service, who also asked me to submit feedback. They sent a printed questionnaire (I guess they get special postage rates) and provided an option to complete an online survey. A week later, I got a reminder postcard providing the URL for the online survey. Here&#8217;s the odd thing: the survey requires a username and password to access, and I assume that combination is tied back to my identity. OK, I can live with that. But they also included that login information <b>on the postcard<\/b>. Now, I know my letter carrier and have no doubt it would never enter her mind to fill out that survey herself, but when you&#8217;re asking for feedback about an individual&#8217;s performance, this doesn&#8217;t seem to be a very secure way to ensure that such feedback is coming from the right source.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">My and Debbie&#8217;s alma mater, Texas A&amp;M, is updating its Former Students Directory, and has hired a company to compile that information. Said company, instead of providing a convenient online process for doing so, is requiring us to make a phone call to update\/confirm our information. And they&#8217;re sending each of us a weekly reminder postcard. We&#8217;ve gotten about ten of them between us, all of which have gone straight to the trash. Sorry, folks; we live in the Internet Age, and if it requires a phone call, it ain&#8217;t happenin&#8217;. This is especially odd considering that the university does provide an online method of updating your contact information for ongoing purposes (like donation requests).<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">Ever notice how some companies are quick to charge your credit card, but slow to credit it if you return a product or cancel a service? We recently made a reservation at a hotel, then canceled it the next day due to a change in plans. The charge hit our account the same day we made the online reservation; the credit arrived two weeks after we canceled online. The result of those two weeks was that we&#8217;ll have to pay the credit card bill this month, and wait until next month to get a credit, instead of getting offset transactions in the same month. Yeah, it&#8217;s a valid business practice, but it doesn&#8217;t build any goodwill with your customers.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some random thoughts about some puzzling and odd &#8211; OK, let&#8217;s be honest: they&#8217;re annoying &#8211; business practices that have caught my attention: Budget asked me to complete an online questionnaire about a recent car rental. I found it odd that the survey offered only check boxes and radio buttons, and provided no option for&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2011\/07\/21\/110721-randomthursday\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Random Thursday &#8211; The Customer Service Complaint Edition<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-random-thursday","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8374,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions\/8374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}