PhotoDude.com

Sun. Sep 22, 2002

The Oxymoron of Customer Service

The Oxymoron of Customer Service – One of the prime examples in this article is my Internet Service Provider, Earthlink: "Ironically, two weeks ago, J.D. Power and Associates rated EarthLink as the nation’s best Internet service provider in terms of customer satisfaction. Yet here in Atlanta, the Better Business Bureau has tallied more complaints about EarthLink—728 so far this year from across the country—than against any other business in metro Atlanta. Over the last three years, 1,224 customers have complained against EarthLink. It’s a sign of what a joke customer service has become that a company can be No. 1 in a customer satisfaction poll and also rack up the most consumer complaints in the region."

"What made MindSpring so different was that it actually followed its values—values conceived and championed by Charles Brewer, who founded the company in 1994 out of his Ansley Park home. Matt LaPrairie, who worked in technical support for MindSpring in Harrisburg, Pa., remembers that customers really did come first. Technicians were told to fix the customers’ problems, even if that meant calling them back repeatedly [...] But in 1999, in a $3 billion merger, MindSpring was absorbed into EarthLink, the second-largest Internet service provider (behind AOL). Things changed quickly."

As a customer of Mindspring since February of 1996, I can tell you the change is stark. As I said back in May when Mike McQuary left as President of the merged company, "In reality, the passing of Mindspring as a consumer choice came long ago, but this is like having the headstone delivered and placed on the grave." I’ve watched the Usenet service deteriorate to the point of uselessness, and their web hosting fall far behind competitors in most basic ways (Earthlink still runs PHP3, several years after the release of PHP4). And customer service? I avoid it like the plague. If a problem crops up, I used to have a form I could fill out online to report the problem directly to the engineers at the Network Operations Center. That, apparently, was too efficient, so it was removed with no warning or alternative.

Now, I can send an e-mail that will be answered a day or two later (last time, when e-mail forwarding was down, they sent me instructions for configuring Outlook Express … which I don’t use, and had not mentioned), or I can spend my time waiting on hold to speak to someone who will want me to reinstall my DSL software, my IP stack, and possibly my operating system, when it’s their Redback server that needs rebooting.

The problem is always assumed to be with the customer, not the service.

And I’m hardly alone in that assessment: "Today, LaPrairie no longer works for EarthLink. But he hasn’t forgotten his old employer. He’s the proud founder of earthlinksucks.net, whose tone is captured neatly in its home page introduction: ’EarthLink: If we don’t help our customers, maybe they’ll stop calling.’ "

But don’t take a customer’s word for it, or even a former employee’s. Take it from the founder of Mindspring, Charles Brewer, who ended up leaving in frustration after the merger with Earthlink: "When we merged, I was planning on being there a long time. My role ended up being a frustrated one. It just wasn’t a good job for me. I did have some disagreements with the rest of management, both about strategic things and values kinds of things. But I didn’t have power [laughs]. I was trying to be persuasive but I wasn’t being as persuasive as I would have liked. And short of some sort of World War III, there wasn’t much I could really do about it."

I’ll leave you with the advice of "Tom Garman, professor emeritus at Virginia Tech University and author of over 20 books on rip offs and consumer protection [...] ’It’s a nasty world out there. You absolutely have to be a cynic today. If you are not, you are going to get ripped off again and again.’ "