Ben’s Blog

In the past week I’ve had a couple run-ins with customer service that I thought I would share - give credit where credit is due and warn my fellow consumers about the others.

First, the good…Jonathan Stevens Mattress Company

I bought a mattress about 6 years ago from Jonathan Steven’s for the cabin and have been really happy with it - it’s comfortable and has held up really well.

While changing the sheets during our last trip I noticed that some of the threads in the mattress covering were starting to pull a little - this was very subtle and purely cosmetic.  I remembered the sales person telling me there was a ten year warranty on the mattress so I called their HQ in Grand Rapids and was told that the fabric warranty was only one year but they would be happy to help me out if I brought the mattress back to the warehouse.

They left the offer open ended so I waited until a convenient time to bring the mattress home (towards the end of the summer season) and drove it over to the factory location.  I dropped it off in the morning and picked it up later that day - it looks/feels like a new mattress; I really can’t tell if they gave me a new mattress or if they completely rebuilt/re-stuffed and re-stitched the entire deal.

Bottom line: Jonathan Stevens Mattress went well beyond my wildest expectations to help me and for that reason they have earned another loyal customer.

Next, the bad…surveymonkey.com

I guess in the grand scheme of things this isn’t a big deal, but it represents my greater frustration with sites/companies that won’t put a phone number on their site to contact a human for more information.  I was exploring enterprise wide survey solutions to distract me from my to-do list which included creating a ton of surveys in zoomerang.com - I want to let others do this on their own and our internal solution isn’t ready yet.

So, I go to surveymonkey.com spend 1/2 hour looking for enterprise or corporate pricing to no avail.  Next I start to look for a phone number and can’t find anything but a form to submit support related questions.  At this point I’m frustrated, going on crazy, and resort to anywho.com to look up the corporate phone number in Portland, OR - I quickly dial the number only to find that it is a fax/data line.

I resort to the form for submitting support related questions and ask them to please have a sales person call me - I get a response back telling me to email someone else in the company (at least they gave me an address).  After emailing Chris Finley (chrisf@surveymonkey.com for anyone else looking for a contact) I learn that they don’t offer an enterprise version - only discounted pricing based on volume.  Great…fine…not what I was looking for but at least I got an answer.

I determined that if I had to work that hard to have them sell me something I didn’t want to deal with them at all. Hopefully they read this and consider helping consumers spend money with them!

Finally, the ugly…sharebuilder.com

I wanted to help spur the economy by taking advantage of the super low stock prices so I venture over to sharebuilder.com, as I am a loyal ING customer, only to find that their site is incredibly slow and intermittently down.  Being late in the day on Friday I said “no big whoop” and decide to wait until Monday to follow through.  Meanwhile, I find the stock that I wanted to buy on Friday (GM and Ford) both shot up about 30+% in yesterday’s rally - not so happy at this point.  Committed to buying stock I try again and find that while I can log in to my account now the site fails when I try to transfer money from other accounts to actually buy the stock.

In this instance I was able to find a customer service number and gave them a call; apparently they were having a bad day as I was disconnected twice and when I was able to talk to a person they assured me they were working on it and referenced their stellar previous network performance to demonstrate that they would be better in the future.  Seriously…why would anyone want to get to their accounts to dump or scoop up stock in this crazy time - no rush - you guys take your time fixing your site.

Needless to say, I advise that you avoid sharebuilder.com like the plague and go with a company you’re sure can help you when the market is good or bad.  Having completely failed to help me over the phone or make the situation right I think I am just going to pull all my ING related accounts and go back to my local bank.

OK, there it is - thanks for letting me vent and have this customer service catharsis!