Over the next couple of days, I will be doing a series of posts on customer service. Come back daily for the updates!

True story…

Last week I took out my credit card while sitting on a well-known vacation site that allowed you to book hotel and air packages to popular destinations.  And even though I was literally seconds away from purchasing, I didn’t.  I gave my business to someone else.

Why?

Here was the problem: I was booking this vacation for someone else.  Some vacation sites require the person booking the vacation to also be one of the travelers – and indeed some hotels require the guests to show the exact credit card they used to reserve the room.

I scoured this site and read every FAQ, every term of service, and even started through the buying process to see if this particular site allowed a third party to purchase the travel package. 

No dice. 

I couldn’t find a word about it one way or the other.  Most sites let you know up-front whether third parties can book travel, so that alone was surprising that it wasn’t in writing.  But at this point omitting the information certainly it wasn’t a deal-breaker to me.

The solution for me was quick and easy – write to them to inquire about their policy.  They did have a phone number (bonus points for them!), but for such a simple question I didn’t want to jump through phone menus and spend who-knows-how-long on hold.

So I wrote to them…  And then I waited.  And waited.

Four business days later I hadn’t heard anything from them, and the special offer I was prepared to book through them was about to expire.  So I went to another site who had a similar offer, found the terms of service met my requirements, and purchased.

So what happened?

Who knows.  Maybe my email got lost or their reply got lost (I don’t have filters on this account).  Maybe they’re running slow and didn’t get around to it yet (it’s been a week now as of this writing).  Maybe George Bush intercepted the email or it’s reply.

Now while I understand that things can and do happen to emails, I still didn’t purchase the package from them.  They lost my business because of this incident.

“But it’s not necessarily their fault,” you might say.  “Emails get lost and such, right?”

Sure, but this site could have allowed me the convenience of sending an email while ensuring they received it and I got the reply.  How?  By installing a help desk where not only are emails sent, but the exchange is listed in its entirety online too.

Tags: Customer Service, Email, Email Deliverability, Help Desk

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 10:52 and is filed under Customer Service, Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.