In the past week I have had issues with two businesses that operate exclusively online and needed to get in touch with customer service. In both cases, when traditional customer service channels failed I turned to twitter to contact the company (& found better success).  This has implications for entrepreneurs that want to convey a positive company image online.

As Twitter becomes more popular people can increasingly vent their frustrations with companies or products in a very public way. In my situation, I attempted to contact Amazon Payments and DimDim through their more traditional customer service channels.  First I tried email:

• Amazon Payments did not reply to my email for 36 hours and when they did reply it was clear they had not read my email nor looked at my account history.
• DimDim never replied to my email.

Next I tried phone:

• Amazon Payments has no published phone number and when I called their corporate customer service representatives they indicated they had no phone numbers for anyone in the department.
• DimDim's only listed phone number would ring once then give a busy signal for the two hours I called.
  

Finally, in desperation, I tweeted them.  In both cases my tweet was responsible for my only meaningful support contact with the company.

• @DimDim responded to my tweet almost immediately. Asked clarifying questions about my situation and made a YouTube video showing me how to solve my problem within an hour.
• @AmazonPayments was slower to repsond to my initial tweet (allowing me time to post 5 additional complaints about the company's responsiveness) but eventually initiated an investigation which resulted in fixing a bug in their system and two apologies from the customer service department about how they handled my initial complaint.
  

From a consumers perspective my experience this week was both frustrating and empowering. It is frustrating when companies limit your ability to get meaningful assistance from them so much that you are unable to get serious issues heard. However, it as empowering because  I was able to use social media to get the attention of companies that would not listen to me when I tried to talk to them more privately. 

As an entrepreneur myself, I know finding adequate time to respond to promote your business, build your product and respond to emails and phone calls is challenging. But, you need to recognize that any failures in your offline customer service are likely to come back to haunt you in the Twittersphere!

Labels: amazon payments, customer service, dimdim, twitter

I had not planned to write my first post (for a long time) on Amazon Payments but sheer frustration with this new service has driven me to write on this topic. Amazon Payments is a new service introduced by Amazon to compete with PayPal and the new Google payments service. These types of personal payment services are great for entrepreneurs because they allow small businesses to take payments over the internet without having to manage the payment process themselves.

My company switched to Amazon Payments a month ago (from PayPal) because they were offering a few months of service without fees and because they allowed us a few programming options that PayPal did not. Specifically they allowed us to redirect subscribers to our site where they could complete an application form to set-up their account with us all in one step (PayPal required us to send a confirmation email to take the subscribers to the correct account set-up page).

The Amazon Payments service worked very well for us when it came to setting up and taking our first few payments. However, when it came time for us to withdraw the money Amazon and put it in our bank account we ran into problems. A bug in their system would not allow us to withdraw funds even though we had received the funds 3 weeks ago and had waited their 14 day wait period for withdrawals. Given that we were beta testing the software, I am not complaining about finding a bug in the system. My complaint with Amazon Payments is that they were not equipped to respond to complaints that were about bugs.

Flaws with the Amazon Payments Customer Service Process:

1. They only allow email complaints using their form. They do not provide users with either a direct email address OR a phone number.
2. Their customer service reps DO NOT read either the email you send or your transaction history when responding to your complaint.
• In my case they kept responding to my email by telling me that I could not withdraw my entire balance. I could just withdraw the amount tha thad been in the account for over 14 days and never noticed that I was complaing that I could not withdraw the balance that had been in my account for 14 days AND I had multiple transactions in my transaction log that showed I could not withdraw the amount of money they said I should be able to withdraw!
3. When they have an error in their response you cannot reply to their email and tell them that they have made an mistake. You must go through another online form (which they do not read when you send it to them).
   
4. There is no phone number anywhere for Amazon Payments! I finally called the Amazon Corporate office and could not get the number or name of anyone in the Amazon Payments department. All the customer service reps in the corporate office could do was send an email to the amazon payments office to get them to address the bug in their system.

When someone has your money and there is a bug in their system that keeps you from getting it a company needs to have some recourse to allow customers to report problems and talk to someone that can actually help them. In my case not only did one customer service rep ignore my transaction history and tell me I just needed to log in and withdraw my disbursable balance. When I replied that that rep had not solved my problem A second rep ignored my history AGAIN and gave me the same response.

The only way I was able to get any response from them was to Tweet them on Twitter - and then I finally got someone to look at my account.

That is not the way for any company to do business!

Labels: amazon payments, customer service, payments, twitter