Pay-per-Click Observer

A follow up to my earlier post on customer satisfaction surveys. I mentioned that I was cynical about the MSN customer satisfaction survey I’d filled out. It was one in a long line, typically with the same result: nothing.

This time, though, I actually got a call from a person. Wow. Very confidently, his message said “we saw that you have some concerns about how your account is performing with MSN, and I’d like to talk to you so we can fix those.” OK, now we’re talking. Someone actually looked at my survey and wants to know more about why I’d sound like I should be calling a crisis hotline rather than filling out their survey.

So, I called him back, and we talked for a good long time. I mentioned their capricious editorial policies, their almost unusable interface, and my experience in trying to get invoicing set up for a very major client and being told that the committee that decides such things wasn’t meeting right now. He was aghast. Clearly, just knowing who the client was should have pushed us to the front of the line. There’s a group for handling such cases. He’d never heard of this committee (I had, many times).

In any case, he’d be putting this on the desk of the people who could make at least the account management and billing issues go away.

He’d call me back.

Or he said he would.

But didn’t.

So, many days later, I called him. He’d pushed it upstairs and assumed that someone had done something with it, but since that hadn’t happened, he’d follow up and make sure that it got taken care of.

He’d call me back.

Or said he would.

But didn’t.

So I did again. He was… well, less aghast. He seemed mostly to be tired of hearing from me.

He’d call me back.

In the end, all that happened was that I learned that either some of them are terribly misinformed or others of them lie to the their customers. Nothing was fixed. I wasted, probably, a couple of hours all told pursuing this brief moment of hope. A couple of days later, I received a bulk email from their VP of sales thanking us for our participation and telling us that they were looking forward to doing another survey next year.

Yeah, me too. Can’t wait.