Emily writes:
So I'm a regular reader and big fan of Consumerist, and I thought you guys would appreciate a positive customer service interaction.Back story: Carbonmade.com is a [design] portfolio building website. They offer 5 projects for free, or $12/month for an unlimited number of projects. I'm a paying member.
Not totally on my toes, I did not notice that both Carbonmade and Paypal were charging me $12/month on my credit card, making it a $24/month expense. My most recent bill, being dramatically slimmed down, had these two charges next to each other, which caught my attention. So, having spotted this on my current bill, I looked back. To what I could see, this had happened six times. Previous bills, which had a lot more charges, had the items sporatically seperated.
Having had a fast response from Carbonmade when I had an unrelated question a few months ago and not having much hope in Paypal, I emailed the main Carbonmade contact email at 12:30pm today. Not only did I get an email back 20 min later saying "Hey, we're looking into it," but by 3:30pm, they emailed me with an apology, explanation, and a Paypal refund was processed through. Not only that, they found that the mistake had occured not six but eight times, a $96 refund. Except they rounded it up to an even $100 for my troubles!
While we know $4 is not much, considering the state of the economy, I was not only impressed by the small act of generosity, but the quick response of this company.
Lessons learned: some companies don't think customer service and profit are mutually exclusive terms, and check your bank statements monthly for errors like this. This may be unfair to PayPal, but we think you should be especially vigilant when a small business uses PayPal for transactions, based purely on anecdotal evidence we've seen where small businesses run into problems processing payments through them.
]]>On the other hand, I think some of these companies are using long-term strategies because there isn't anything they can do in the short term that will let them beat their numbers, anyway.
]]>Do you have compromising pictures of Ebay/Paypal execs?
Because having dealt with them personally and hearing the stories from friends having to deal with them, I have concluded that their personnel are the least helpful, rudest and singularly incompetant pack of $#^&heads to wander in out of the rain.
BUT I'M NOT BITTER!
\NO I WON'T FAX IN ANOTHER PHONE BILL! FIND THE LAST THREE I SEND IN!
]]>@Michael Fricke: Exactly, whether a business is incorporated or not has no refelction on it's size. It just reflects how responsible the owner is, personally, for debts.
]]>LLC = limited liability company. It's technically a different form of business entity than a corporation.
But Chris was still wrong to write that line because being a "corporation" has no impact on the size of an organization. Most small businesses are corporations.
]]>Last time I checked, an LLC is a corporation. In fact, it is a limited liability corporation. Which like other corporations limits the personal liability of those that run and own the corporation.
A corporation can be as large as GE and as small as your next door neighbor. Snarky comments such as the one above don't educate and spread an irrational dislike for the "corporation."
]]>Most do a good job, unless you're talking about any company in the telecom industry. They are all terrible and incompetent when it comes to customer service. Every single one of them.
]]>Over the years I have found many errors on my credit card statements. One error was for $ 365.00 charged on two different statements.
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Hmm, I've never had a problem with PayPal and I have had a business account with them since 2001. Not one single problem, period. Every time I needed assistance they were quick and courteous and took care of the issue immediately.
]]>Had he wanted to get the opposite type of story he could have tried getting the refund through Paypal.
They would have seized the funds in his account, drained his bank account, held all the money for 180 days while Carbonmade would have their account held for fraud.
Neither side would get their money back, and the semi-evolved simians at Paypal would be patting themselves on the back for busting "fraudsters". ***
*** this is a highly exaggerated story. Comparing Paypal fraud investigators to semi-evolved simians is highly insulting to the simians.
]]>Most small businesses and even large ones do a good job on a day to day basis... those that don't fail in the long run as we have seen here time and time again.
]]>Just coming home from a week long annual company meeting, you can bet that the slowing economy was mentioned several times. One of the things that was constantly pushed to us was that customer service could not, would not, and should not ever be cut.
The customers that you have after the economy picks back up are the customers that you retained by being good to them even when they weren't buying anything due to not having the funding.
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