I had Vonage VOIP phone service for over a year. I was really happy with it. The Vonage web interface was usable and offered great free features like the forwarding of voicemail MP3s to my email.
I only needed Vonage because I didn’t get cell reception at home, and now I’m moving. Fewer bills and fewer bits of hardware is always a good thing (goodbye Vonage router w/ power supply and home wireless phone w/ power supply) so I wanted to cancel Vonage and go cell only…
So here’s how Vonage managed to flush all their goodwill down the toilet with one phone call:
- There’s no way to cancel from the Vonage website of course.
- It took quite a while to get a human. To be expected, once you select the cancel option their incentives to help you wither up.
- They ran through the usual “are sure you want to cancel” spiel, but it was nowhere near as bad as AOL’s.
- Cancellation mysteriously required the customer rep to repeatedly put me on hold for long periods. The rep kept making technical excuses for this, but com’on, who are we fooling here?
- They tried hard to stick me with a month of service I wouldn’t use. Here’s where I lost my patience. I had just been billed the previous day for that month and I wanted to keep the line for that last month. Apparently the customer service rep misunderstood and immediately canceled my account. Even worse, that last 29 days of service wasn’t pro-rated. According to the rep Vonage policy is that canceled accounts can’t be reactivated and they never issue refunds or pro-rates. After this became clear there were several more holds as they “talked to a manager.”
- Finally managed to get what I didn’t want. I got a manager on the phone and had to convince him that the rep screwed up. After moaning that it was against policy he gave me a refund. This is not what I originally wanted, but I settled. It makes me think their backend system is really brain-dead: you can’t reactivate an account you closed just minutes before? Seriously?
- Final time: ~45 minutes of customer service hell.
I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about profit margins and dealing with customers and clients. One thing I’ve learned is that your margins should be thick enough to have generous policies that build goodwill. What does it say about a company that is willing to destroy a customer relationship for a month’s fee of $18? Before this call I would have recommended Vonage to anyone. Now I’m writing a blog post about how much their customer service sucks.
Before I could post about this Seth Godin beat me to the punch:
I recently had some waterproofing done in the basement. The first date was great. The company was professional and had every single element down, from their AdWords to the web site to the way they interacted on the phone and in person…
…After they finished the job, they left my basement a mess.
Forever, my only memory of the job is going to be the mess. Forever, the only thing I’ll talk about is the mess. The last interaction, in my experience, is responsible for virtually all of the word of mouth you’re going to get, positive or negative.
Think about this the next time you finish a project, quit your job, or stay overnight at a friend’s house.