Battlemouth

I’m a fairly patient individual. Or I’d like to think I am. Obviously, there are those things in which each of us have no patience for. User/Customer appreciation is one of those things that I not only have no patience for when it’s done wrong but it also irritates the hell out of me.

Case & Point.

Text Link Ads (link) while from the outside looks like a great service has the worst user support people I have ever encountered. Yes, there are some folks who make a killing with their product and that’s great. I’m happy that you have never had an issue with them. I on the other hand have had nothing but problems since first contact with them.

The Story

On September 2, 2008 I got an email from one Brock Boser who is the COO of TLA explaining to me that for some reason the TLA that was sold on Battlemouth wasn’t displaying. I hadn’t yet replied to the email and on the 4th got another one from the same Brock Boser explaining to me that the issue hadn’t been resolved. After my /slap forehead moment of not responding to his first email I replied to the one he had just sent.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I appreciate hearing from executives at companies regarding issues. It shows me that there are real people running the company and not just names. So naturally I was happy to see that Brock Boser had taken the time out of his day to write an email to me about the issue. Cool, right? Nope. I got an email response to my reply that I sent to Brock from some support dweeb that has no clue how to treat a user. It turns out that TLA was using the wrong page addressing on Battlemouth. Instead of actually going to the site and checking it out themselves and possibly solving the issue they proceeded to start a fire with the issue instead. The knucklehead who responded back told me that he had disabled the ad. Why not going into your system’s back end and change the url you are using for the ad? It can’t be that hard and I am sure you have a back end for that kind of stuff.

I then responded back to this asshat of a support person explaining that I’m sure we’re going to be pulling our account with TLA because they’ve done nothing for us. I get an IMMEDIATE response back with “I’ve gone ahead and deactivated your account.” There was no asking me what the issue was, no asking me how TLA can better serve me, the user. Nothing. Just a straight up kick in the nuts cancellation. My response back to them was something along the lines of “It’s nice that you literally don’t care about the people on your network.”

So my question is for this “Brock Boser” guy. Whoever you are. Is this the kind of person you employee for your company? If so you aren’t going to get very far. Did you even email me or was it one of your Lachy’s? I found it rude of you to email me and have some moron get back to me. I’d like to thank TLA for giving me an example of perhaps the worst customer support I’ve ever had in my life. You are worse than what Dell used to be and that’s saying something. You ought to teach your employees how to make each and every user/customer happy and teach them that the user/customer is always right even if they’re dead wrong. Arguing with me or anyone else who uses your system is the wrong way to go about things. Thank you for caring and appreciating your users & customers and thank you for giving me an example to write about for companies to know what not to do.

This post cross posted at my own blog (link)