You know what really irks me?  Companies that don’t care about being good.  This usually exhibits itself in two main ways: poor/non-existent customer service and dishonest (or not-so-honest) sales/marketing.  Unfortunately I came across both in one day, and found myself quite perturbed at the state that businesses are in.  Why is it the case that those providing outstanding service, great value, and by all accounts “do things right” are so few and far between?  Why is it that as a consumer and customer, I tend to expect that my voice won’t get heard?  I guess that’s why I love small businesses and start-ups, since they do tend to listen and care who I am and what I want.

It started when I came across an issue with Yahoo Mail and wanted to contact their customer service to request a feature be added.  After sending me on a wild goose chase of automated answers and browsing through their community forum, I reached a dead end that didn’t even allow me to email their service department (if they even have one!).  That’s like spending half an hour on the phone going through a tedious menu with robot voices only to get hung up on in the end.  Why waste my time?! Ugh, I was so completely disappointed in Yahoo at that point and almost didn’t even care if I could contact them anymore.  Here I am trying to help them make their service better and I feel like I’m yelling into an abyss with nobody within miles.

Then a couple hours later, I got a phone call from a guy who started talking about setting up a consulting appointment for me.  Excuse me – what??  First of all, what consulting?  I never asked for any sort of consulting service and I certainly don’t have money to spend on that.  Second of all, who are you to offer me consulting?  Then when I asked him what this was about he answered: “Your website” to which I asked, “Which one?”  There was a pause of confusion before he was able to look it up I guess – terrible service.  You’re calling me about my business and you don’t even know the name of it?  Great.  Maybe you should get to know me before you assume you know what I want/need.  So anyway, I hated how he went ahead and assumed I had already agreed to this and just needed to set up a time to discuss details with a consultant.  That sort of sales tactic is too pushy and frankly, dishonest.

I then requested to be removed from whatever list they had me on and the guy basically ignored me, talking on about some other part of his sales pitch or something.  When I repeated myself, he told me there was no need to be testy.  Oh boy!  He hadn’t seen testy yet!  I retorted that I wasn’t being testy YET and made sure he confirmed that he’d take me out of their database before ending the call.  It was so frustrating to deal with him and his annoying assumptions that he could just bulldoze over me and get me to set up an appointment when I knew nothing about his company AND didn’t even want to change my site anyway.

Whew, so now that that’s off my chest, I vow to always strive to provide value, excellent customer service, and honest marketing.  I want my business dealings to engage customers, not drive them away.  I’d rather stay a smaller operation that really takes care of it customers than expand into a multi-national conglomerate that forgets about the little people.  And I hope that I never forget to listen to the customers, pay attention to what they’re telling me, and ensure that they are being taken care of as responsibly as possible.  Nobody should ever feel voiceless against my business.  In fact, I’d love it if we built a community around us, where we’re all like family and everybody contributes to the whole experience.  That’s my dream for my own companies.