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Is the customer even important anymore? I can’t tell from all the runarounds some companies send you through. Bad customer service is one of the biggest reasons to stop doing business with someone. Nine times out of ten I’m contacting the customer service because I have a question or there’s something wrong with the service. It would seem they would be in a more compassionate mode eager to find a clean resolution.

Instead this is what these companies do:

1. Ask a bunch of unnecessary questions
2. Reword the whole dilemma to make it seem like I’m the one at fault
3. While some companies don’t even have a real live person…it’s an answering machine or one of those virtual agents.

One company thats been ticking many people off is Ebay. You would figure it to be simple for a multi-billion dollar company like Ebay to properly handle the concerns of their customers,yet they purposely take the position that you need them more than they need you and so they treat you accordingly. Ebay acts like emperors oblivious to the knowledge of who put them on top - the customer! Here’s an excerpt from CipherSearch regarding their customer NON-service:

Things go wrong, then you get an email from them which has numerous links. If you see this, this is the  of the runaround. They have a goal to retain their account receivables, what they earn for your listing. If they help and pay a claim, I think it is up to $200 now, then that depletes their earnings….

Actually,I too have had a customer complaint before. It was an affiliate program promoting an advertising ebook. Although I had sold many of these without any problems one customer claimed they never received the download. I alerted the author/manager of the program to no avail. As time went by the customer grew highly impatient with me,so I ended up giving a refund along with another ebook of the same caliber. This was suppose to be handled by the affiliate program team - not me out of my own pockets. So I naturally discontinued my affiliation with them…they showed no care for the customer nor me their faithful affiliate.

After going through that little fiasco I realized I could have just given the customer a copy of the ebook I originally purchased -as it’s always a good idea to first buy the products you intend to promote. Big “duh” on my part. Oh well,at least I got a good learning experience out of it. Now I see it can prove to be very prudent to test out the customer service of a company before deciding to do business with them. This can be done by using their ‘customer service’ system to ask questions seeing how long it takes for them to respond as well as if the info is helpful or just another runaround.

This is extremely necessary before deciding to promote an affiliate program as well. You don’t want to be stuck with without a chair once their customer NONservice kicks in. That customer will blame you alone because you just happened to be their immediate point of contact. And if you do end up in this situation please don’t try explaining the concepts of affiliate marketing to the customer as it will only seem like you’re scapegoating which adds more to the ruining of your business reputation.

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