Somewhere around 1997 or 1998, a bright young guy named Donald Bond put together my Web site — www.herschellgordonlewis.com. To both him and to me, it was no big deal. The site was straightforward and informative.
(I like to think that mirrors my own personality. A lot of other people don’t think so and have suggested switching to cartoons.)
Last year Donald Bond left for greener pastures, and with his blessing — because I’m constantly adding books and updating some of the content — I transferred the “hosting” to a New York company called Fortune City. Fortune City had been courting me, and, with my usual simple naiveté, I assumed the courtship was backed by genuine interest.
Oh? Once I was in the store, I was a stranger. Reaching the pope would be easier than reaching someone in its tech-service department, assuming such a department exists.
Aha! A year is up, and suddenly I’m real. Every day, over a period of one month, in came an e-mail:
Dear HERSCHELL LEWIS
You have selected to pay by credit card. We will be automatically charging your account for the following:
(Amount and specifics here)
Please contact our Billing
Department with any questions.
Thank you,
FortuneCity Billing
[email protected]
866-638-2489
A dim bulb lit up: All right, you e-mail mafiosos, gotcha. My credit card number has changed. You’ll have to contact me for the new number.
Wrong. Each day, that identical message appeared in my e-mail, and that was the only attention I warranted. So I called the toll-free number (operational only from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays) and found the toll-free number to be an answer-free number. This was the automated pickup, in a neutral feminine voice:
“Due to unusually high call volume, all of our billing specialists are currently helping other customers. Please stay on the line for the next available specialist. If you’d like to leave a message for our billing staff, please press 1.”
This message was repeated at one-minute intervals. After 12 minutes I pressed “1” and left a message.
Right. The next day and the day after that, in came the familiar e-mail. So I called again and once again was trapped in Fortune City’s electronic cesspool: “Due to unusually high call volume, all of our billing specialists are currently helping other customers. Please stay on the line for the next available specialist. If you’d like to leave a message for our billing staff, please press 1.”
This time I let the message repeat itself for an even twenty times before I pressed “1” and left a blistering message.
The effect was the same as blasting away at an elephant with a pea-shooter. The daily messages continued, and replying by e-mail to the sending address ([email protected]) paralleled sending Standard Mail to the Dead Letter Office. My wait-time before leaving the next “You %$#@ phone phonies” message ranged from seven to 25 minutes.
Eventually I figured that at the worst, I could get a column out of this. So, late lunch at deskside, I decided to press “1” and see how long the ultimate wait would be.
I was sitting here slowly sinking into an uncomfortable doze an hour and fourteen minutes later, when suddenly “All of our 1/3-person staff is currently at work helping to prevent access to us” gave way to…mirabile dictu!…a live voice, a quiet and understated young woman (who after some prompting identified herself as Delni). OK, what to do? If I unleash my corporate attack on her I’ll lose the game of “Gotcha!” because they have the codes for the Web site, and dumping them means starting from zero with another supplier.
Delni’s explanation was the expected standard boilerplate explanation — they’re upgrading their phone system, all will be chocolate in a couple of weeks, this isn’t a standard situation, the surge of inquiries is unusual, we ordinarily answer quickly. I did ask her what upgrading their phone system had to do with having customers hang on the phone for over an hour, and why didn’t they hire another 1/3 person for her department…but she just dutifully repeated the party line — all will be well, just you wait and see. She also insisted that everybody representing the company, including Delni, was in New York and not Delhi.
Coward that I am, I gave her the new credit card number and she clicked off to tend to another angry caller. So a nasty confrontation was averted, at least temporarily.
But is that the optimal solution to an easily solved problem? For me, yes it is, because I can vent my spleen in print. For others, it can mean a company’s overattention to recruiting new customers and underattention to holding existing customers is a revolving door with as many clients scooting out as wandering in. Certainly I’m not about to recommend that company to others…and just as certainly, they don’t give a rat’s behind whether I do or I don’t.
And that’s what’s so sickening: It typifies the gap between suppliers and their quarry in the year 2005. The arm around the shoulder has become the impenetrable armor plate.
But at least I kept their mitts off the content of my site: I found Donald Bond, who updated it. That gives me a whole year to gripe about something else.
HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS (www.herschellgordonlewis.com) is the principal of Lewis Enterprises in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He consults with and writes direct response copy for clients worldwide. His curmudgeonly titled 28th book, “Asinine Advertising,” has just been published. Among his other books are “On the Art of Writing Copy” (third edition), “Marketing Mayhem” and “Effective E-mail Marketing.”
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