Crazy Amazon Cutsomer Service

December 20, 2006

Customer Service note makes no sense The reindeer are running the asylum over at Amazon I'm afraid. Pardon the insult my reindeer friends. I placed an order a few days ago. Amazon said it would ship in two packages. One item was available from several sources but I went to the trouble of making sure it shipped from Amazon and not a third party. I paid extra to buy it from them.

Long story shorter, one item shipped as promised. The others continued to show they would be delivered December 20th. Oddly enough it showed them as not shipped so I sent an email asking about it. Customer service sent back the email pictured above. Funny that something which hasn't shipped by 5:30 p.m. on the 20th will arrive by the 20th. Must be using super fast reindeer to get the packages out. Espresso, check, teleporter, check.

Signs

September 28, 2006

Traveling today for a vendor demo. McCarran is a great airport in so many ways. Free wireless, a great new terminal and even long security lines seem to move quickly. There is, however, one major gripe. There are no signs as you enter the check-in area stating which airlines are in either direction. Inevitibly I'll go the wrong way. It would be very straight forward to fix which makes the problem all the more annoying.

And another thing... Why play a message telling passengers not to check-in bagage from people they do not know once they are in the gate area and no-longer able to check bags?

State of Nevada

September 21, 2006

A few days ago a notice arrived. The state of Nevada wanted to know why I hadn't been providing insurance on my 2001 Volkswagen Passat for a little more than a month. There was a website and it was easy enough to go online and state my reasons. The reason being, I sold the car.

Not a big deal to fill in the form but then they reply with the status of the vehicle registration surrendered. So they sent me a notice even though they already had it in their system I'd turned in the plates. Yup, great to see our tax dollars at work.

Help half.com

August 19, 2006

Having recently sold a book on Half.com I encountered a problem with their system. Something has gone awry and they are sending the notice once an hour. When one ventures to their help desk, however, it's anything but helpful. Eventually if the customer is persistent they find out that the customer goes through the help wizard to get to contact support. Mind you the help wizard has no canned questions that are remotely related to the question at hand. So for a problem with the order system one is reduced to submitting the question about I received an order, but cannot find the shipping address for the buyer.

Chase angles for end-run around credit card companies

August 6, 2006

Browsing the Apple Store there is a new payment method available. Buy Now Pay Later appears to be Chase's end run around the credit card companies. The terms are little different from your standard high-interest credit cards. Conveniently for Chase they forget to mention how long the grace period is before the high rates kick in. Over and over the frequently asked questions it makes the claim that fraud protection is "like credit cards" with no liability for fraudulent transactions.

One is left to wonder how many banks will setup similar end-runs around the big credit card companies in an attempt to keep more of the processing fees for themselves.

Audible deactivation tool

August 4, 2006

Downloading the latest audiobook purchase from Audible I got the dreaded message that I have too many machines authorized for use with my Audible account. Off to the Audible website to look for the deactivation tool. Using the help and search functions leads to no joy but a recommendation to email customer support. That must have been what I did last time I thought, and sent the email. I get back a note saying it was done and then it goes on to say:

You can always deactivate your account within AudibleManager in the future by simply click here http://www.audible.com/adbl/store/deActivateEntry.jsp and follow the instruction to deactivate your device if you come across this message.

Now I would have loved to have that link come up when I did a search for that very information. And it would have been nice without the little suggestion that I should be able to do this myself in the future. I should have been able to do it myself this time but for the broken website.

Pages