I recently switched my home phone service from Vonage to Earthlink. Unlike other stories I’ve heard, this transition was pretty seamless.
There seems to be one last hitch though. Earthlink wants me to update my account information. How do I know this? Their automated system calls me daily and leaves a fairly dry message. Since I had already gone online to update everything, I happily ignored and deleted this message every day. Given my friend’s miserable experience with calling Earthlink customer service, I was avoiding the phone call to them.
A few days ago, in an attempt to end these annoying calls/messages, I phoned up Earthlink. Surprisingly, I found myself speaking to someone relatively quickly. I only needed to jump through three or four menus and I was through to “Andrew”. He was a cheery fellow that seemed more than happy to solve my problem. Unfortunately, either Andrew didn’t really listen to what my actual problem was, or it was not within his power to correct it. His advice: “Just disregard the messages, you’re fine.” Thanks Andy.
I hung up the phone fully expecting to get yet another call from Earthlink’s automated system the next day. Now, if the performance of Earthlink’s customer service division is measured on accuratly setting customer expectations, they scored an A+ on this one. I got another call from Earthlink the next day. It was time to try another path here.
Even though all of my account information was correct and I didn’t owe Earthlink any money, I decided to go online and change my credit card information. The idea here was that by changing some key account information, their system would stop calling me. No luck though, there was a another call. I ignored it thinking that it might take a day for their databases to sync up. Still no luck, this morning (Saturday), at 8:00, I received another call.
You might see how this annoyance is moving me from satisfied customer to irate customer. Luckily, Earthlink cares enough about its customer service to ask me how my phone call with Andrew went by way of a satisfaction survey. The survey they emailed to me was short and included the standard multiple choice questions. It also included the obligatory comments section.
I took the opportunity to explain my problem, again:
Your automated system calls me daily and states that I need to update my account. The fellow I spoke to on your customer service line confirmed that my account has been updated for weeks. His solution to the problem was “disregard the message”. He then moved on to the part of your call center script that indicated he should attempt to sell some more of your services. I continue to get an automated call each day. If anyone actually reads this comment, I’d love to know about it. Shoot me an email at xxxx@xxxx.com.
We’ll see if anyone at Earthlink is actually reading this stuff. Once again, my expectations are low so they should have no problem meeting them. My next step will be to test out Earthlink’s call blocking feature to see if I can block calls from them. It might not even work, but it is going to be worth trying if they can’t get it together over there.
Update 2007-04-10: Earthlink customer service called me bright and early this morning. This time I actually picked up the phone and talked to someone. It was a very informative call. He told me I have a zero balance on my account. Thanks. Hopefully, that will end the daily calls.