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BookmarkCalling executives at home, or publically embarassing companies in order to get support?
Sometimes we have to do it. We make the mistake of buying from a company who is either grossly incompetent, or just hates their customers. It starts by a phone call here and there ending in frustration. Frequency increases to every other week, then every week, finally every day.
All of this is in vain. The low-level support in the Phillipines or India are incapable of handling the problem, or even worse in my case, they're told not to handle the problem. They refuse to escalate to a supervisor no matter which approach you take or who you ask because they don't want to get fired.
The only recourse you have left is an expensive lawsuit, public embarrassment, or turboing (http://www.macwhiz.com/articles/art-of-turboing.html).
Recently I found myself going through this ordeal with 1and1.com, a domain registrar. From my research of similar experiences ,this is par for course for them. 1and1.com is the US subsidiary of 1und1.de, a large german hosting company owned by an even larger firm "United Internet AG". They do not care about you.
For a while now 've been struggling with trying to deal with 1and1. About 9 months ago I registered two domains with them, they charged my card, but never gave me access to manage the domain. Two months later they charged my credit card again just for fun. A while later, attempted to charge it a third time, but I had recently changed it # due to some unrelated fraudulent purchases.
Of course, rather than email me or call me telling me they had failed in illegally triple charging me, they canceled my account entirely, locked my domains, and sent me to a collections agency. There were no phonecalls, emails, or letters whatsoever to alert me to this.
A few months back (5, 6?) called 1and1 to get access to my domain. I was referred to billing who is on east coast hours , so I gave up after a while, calling every few weeks when I'd remembered.
I'm trying to close out the lingering items on my todo list, so I started calling up 1and1 every morning last week, trying to get this sorted out. Billing finally fessed up to the collections account, which I paid rather than arguing. I called tech support twice a day for a week to get them to allow me to transfer my domains out. No dice.
Frustrated, I went to Google and LinkedIn to research 1and1's executive teams, see if I could find anybody. I sent a LinkedIn InMail to the CEO asking for help. Their CEO, Andreas Gauger (http://gauger.de) rejected my InMail as "inappropriate contact". My response to this yesterday was to find his office address, and mail him a copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto.
Finally I found the home phone number for their general manager in the US, and googled him. I told him clearly, before he had a chance to say anything, that I was a frustrated and persistent customer who would not stop until my stolen property had been returned to me. He responded professionally, giving me his office phone # and email address, promising to deal with it. So far that appears to be going well.
The irony here is this isn't the first time I've had to do this with a domain registrar. The first time was 2001 with namesecure.com, who was even worse than 1and1.
It's sad that I've had to resort to these tactics to get a problem solved.
So, let's dish. What other companies have made you resot to social engineering?
