E-mail Support FAIL (long)

[Chanlin]

EDIT:: I have removed some of my earlier editing hopefully making this easier to understand. I re-read it and even I had problems understanding the exact situation While this may make it much easier to identify my company, it makes the situation much more clear. ::

So as I have mentioned in a previous post we recently opened up the ability for our customers to send support requests from our website. This little gem came our way recently.

I'm not sure whether to classify this as fail, or epic fail. I will leave that up to everyone else.

Below is the text of the support request and my reply in its entirety.

Background: I work for a nationwide(in the USA) Prepaid cellular provider. The basic concept is you prepay for a set amount of airtime and then pay for more airtime as you need it. You must add airtime at within a set period of time to avoid account cancellation, but the customer is not obligated to pay us anything unless they want to use the service.

The Support request:
“In my opinion, your "unlimited nights and weekends" is a complete total GYP!!! You're kidding, right? a person would be paying NINTEY DOLLARS A MONTH!!! PLUS the activation fee!!! Like I said... you MUST be joking...Are you guys expecting people not to know what a math problem is? How about 30 days times $2.99? NOT INCLUDING text messages, which you charge separately at $ 0.15 a minute... 3 cents a minute MORE than with the normal rate? Therefore, if one text messages with the alleged "Unlimited Nights and Weekends" Plan... one would have to get an ADDITIONAL card to supplement the price!! Insanity!!! Doing the math on that aspect ALONE is around $160 ($20 for the activation fee, $89.70 for 30 days worth of $2.99 daily fee, plus for text messaging purposes, a $50 card) Wow.”


A few things the customer had glaringly wrong I address in my reply. There are a few other points that just boggle my mind. First we actually charge $0.07 per text more on the unlimited plan than off the unlimited plan, why i don't really know the powers that be (read the company CEO) just decided this. So far as I know its not an arbitrary decision and has to do with bean counting. The other mistake I pointed out in my reply which follows. I'm also trying to figure out where they think they need an additional $50 for text messages.

My Reply:
Hello Ms. SC

Thank you for your concern. The plan you have described above is not our “Unlimited Nights and Weekends Plan” but instead is our “Unlimited 24/7 Plan.” The major difference in these two plans is that the Nights and Weekends plan only allows airtime free calls between 9pm and 6am on weekdays and from Friday at 9pm until Monday at 6am during the weekends. The Unlimited 24/7 plan allows calls to be made airtime free all day.

Both plans have a daily fee which is charged. The Unlimited Nights and Weekends charges a daily fee of $0.99 and the Unlimited 24/7 Plan charges a daily fee of $2.99. The fee for the Unlimited 24/7 Plan has also recently been lowered from $2.99 to $1.99 to make it more marketable.

In any case, both of these plans are marketed to customers with very specific usage needs. The Unlimited 24/7 plan which you have described is marketed toward are heavy phone users, or those customers who use their phone for more than 1 hour every day or use more than 1800 minutes per month. For these customers they save money vs our $80 card which only gives them 1400 minutes (1400 divided by 30 = approximately 46 minutes per day). With the rate now lowered to $1.99 per day customers who use their phone an average of 25 minutes or more per day can save money vs our $50 card which gives 700 minutes (700 divided by 30 = approximately 24 minutes per day).

(Our company name) is committed to providing choices for our customers that will fit the needs of their phone usage. Obviously not every customer uses their phone more than 25 or 60 minutes every day. For these users the Unlimited 24/7 plan is not going to save them any money, and thus we have our standard $0.12 per minute rate which is our default plan for all new users. They then have the option of upgrading to the Unlimited Nights and Weekends plan for a one time fee of $10 or to the Unlimited 24/7 plan for a one time fee of $20. Also customers are not required to stay on this plan once they purchase it. If they find these plans do not fit their needs they are able to be changed back to our default plan free of charge upon request.

If you have any further concerns please feel free to let us know by replying to this e-mail or calling our customer service line at (our 800 number) and we will do our best to address them.

[rerant]

$0.12 a minute! Damn! I'm paying $0.25 a minute and I that's as low as my provider goes for the pay as you go deal.
Some people shouldn't be let out of their houses without supervision.

[gunsage]

There are a couple of fun ones I could post here. They evade me currently, but yeah, e-mail support can be quite humorous. Oh, actually...there is ONE I can remember, but I don't know if I posted it up somewhere here previously or not. Well, anyway...

When Wifey Comes A Knockin'

Before I begin this one, I, as a male, have nothing against pr0n and I have an awesome wife who also enjoys it, so there you go. A customer writes us, basically trying to rip us a new one because he/she (hadn't determined whether it was the wife/husband yet) couldn't figure out why the bill had increased so much in the course of one month. These people, I should add, had no itemized listing on their bill...thus it was just "Late, current, bill."

Anyway, one of my fellow coworkers answered the inquiry by asking for more information to verify the account holder. Now, at the time, I didn't know why...I just figured it was for security reasons. I don't do a lot of billing e-mails...mostly just basic support. Anyway, the account was verified and whoever it was writing the e-mail reply gave us an earful (or would that be eyeful) for it. Yeah...he writes the customer back...

"Good morning. It appears the reason your bill increased so much was that during the hours of 1 am - 3 am on several days the prior month, these movies were rented..."

He then proceeds to list off about 10 hardcord pr0n movies. Oh, but it gets better. The husband writes back...

"Yeah, I remembered those..."

AND THAT'S IT. I can only imagine what kinds of torture his wife was inflicting upon him after that.

[Chanlin]

$0.12 a minute! Damn! I'm paying $0.25 a minute and I that's as low as my provider goes for the pay as you go deal.

As I understand it Cellular service in general is more costly in Canada vs the USA. I could be completely wrong on this, I'd have to research it to say for sure

In any case what I would have liked to have said to this lady, especially on her comment about the math problem.

"I would expect any reasonably educated person to do a math problem as simple as the one you have demonstrated your prowess at. However, I would not expect the average consumer to be able to do a marketing problem of which you have demonstrated your inability to grasp. Furthermore, I would expect any reasonably educated consumer to be able to read and understand the pamphlets carried by our retailers and the information on our website to be able to reasonably discern between the various plans that we offer as the Unlimited Nights and Weekends plan, which you have completely failed to describe, is clearly marked on every piece of literature we distribute as being $0.99 per day."

Needless to say I opted to go with a much more polite response as is evidenced in my original post.

[Broomjockey]

As I understand it Cellular service in general is more costly in Canada vs the USA. I could be completely wrong on this, I'd have to research it to say for sure

I'd say that's a real possibility, since the entire country has a population similar to New York state, but is larger than the US in its entirety, meaning with a comparitively small population, but the infrastructure needs for adequate coverage is greater. So the costs of creating and maintaining a larger network is spread among fewer people.