Don’t Put Off For 31 Days What You Can Do In 30

Eying the date of my last post, there’s no denying that if there’s one thing that I’m good at, it’s procrastination. So let’s have a chat about one of my very favorite marketing deals – the 30 day trial.

Do what the little yellow post-it says.

There are a couple of ways this can work, so your first order of business is to be aware. The first, and probably more common, way is the automatic billing. This means you provide a credit card up front and you’re automatically billed on the 31st day.

Now, I’m going to gloss over those of you who cried “SCAM!” after getting billed after one of these trials (to recap, 1)Keep reading after you see the word free, 2)If you didn’t do step 1, the credit card entry should have tipped you off) and go straight to the literally hundreds of you who groused to me every day about how we should wait until you called us to charge you.

On the surface, I can see what you’re getting at. The idea is we, the company, should do whatever is in our power to make it easy and convenient for you, the customer. This is exactly why you’re charged automatically after the 30 days. After all, the reason I had so many of you grumbling on the other end of my phone is that you had forgotten to cancel on time. It’s reasonable to think, then, that if you had wanted to keep the service you would have been even MORE likely to forget to call and let us know that. So, since we can’t have it both ways, which way do you suppose a company is more likely to lean – making it convenient for the customers that want to give us money, partake in our fine services, or those who aren’t interested?

Give yourself enough time for the cancellation to go through long before a charge even thinks about hitting your credit card. I know I put a lot of culpability on you, the customer’s, shoulders, but that’s because you’re the only one you can actually control. Of course, companies are not perfect. It’s quite possible the company you work with hasn’t ironed out the kinks in their cancellation process, or perhaps they have a sluggish billing team. Just keep in mind that your idea of proficiency is different from Joe Blow down the street so one of you is going to end up disappointed. Keeping track of the 30 day trial and when it ends is no one’s responsibility but yours, and honestly, in most cases the only one who’s going to get a headache over your hooting and hollering about your charge is – you. If a company has been around for any decent amount of time, it’s safe to say that there are more people happy with their service, their trials and the way they do business than are not.

I know you’re a busy person. Pardon me, but we ALL are. No one wants to spend a precious few minutes of our life on the phone. Remember you do have other options. A lot of companies are just as effective, if not more-so, by E-mail, and e-mail has the added benefit of being a hard copy of your request – never a bad thing. In the end, you can usually get a lot of value, absolutely free, out of a 30 day trial. Just be conscious of the date!

The Buck Stops Where?

I’m going to let you in on perhaps the biggest tidbit of insider information you can ever know. Realizing this one fact, believe it or not, can save you countless otherwise fruitless hours of frustration and anger. However, I’m telling you now, you’re not going to like it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Ready?

The customer is almost always wrong.

Since you’ve been hearing the exact opposite all of your consuming life, let me give you some credentials, if you will.

When I was 18 I worked for ConsumerInfo.com, otherwise known as FreeCreditReport.com. For all of you who just scoffed and said, “Free credit report my ass!” you would be one of the legion of the wrong. For those who haven’t had the pleasure let me explain. You can get a truly, 100% free credit report from FreeCreditReport.com. The vast majority of the calls I received in the 2 years I worked as a customer support e-mail and phone representative focused on one thing.

“You bastards said it was free, and you charged me!” Bait and switch was thrown around a lot. So was the word scam.

For the moment, I digress. Let me tell you where I wandered after I left ConsumerInfo.com. I spent the next year doing customer support for an alarm company that I won’t name, and I’m fairly certain you haven’t heard of them anyway. They were relatively small time players, and I believe they’ve since thrown in the towel.

From there I spent 6 months each doing customer support for AT&T/Cingular/AT&T, and a fancy bath fixtures company. I’ve been at my current company for about two and a half years now and while I’m FINALLY done with customer support (sorry, can’t say that I miss it), I did answer phones and e-mails for Realtors whose websites my company hosts.

I’m like McDonalds over here, 15 billion customers served. One wicked case of headset hair later, the universal truth is that the customer is almost always wrong! The problem lies in the fact that they’ve been told over and over again that just by the virtue of being customers, they must be right.

In the ever wise words of Jedi Master Yoda, “You must unlearn what you have learned.” The reasoning here is simple. You can’t be open to a solution or explanation your hapless customer support rep is going to give you if you go in with the preconceived notion about whatever you think the problem is.

Remember the supposedly free credit report and the extremely peeved customers who were scammed? They were all wrong. There was no scam. Essentially, every single one of them had read the words “Free credit report!” and then had conveniently forgotten how to read. The rest of the website, save the one sentence, was entirely about the service ConsumerInfo.com provides: the credit monitoring system. You got a free credit report and 30 days, cancel anytime. It was all there in plain English on the homepage as well as on the sign up form, ABOVE WHERE THEY REQUEST YOUR CREDIT CARD INFO. I don’t mean to yell, but honestly, even if you missed the whole homepage, one would think that as you’re happily typing in your credit card number, you might be concerned as to why.

I tried to explain countless times, after I’d processed a full refund (no questions asked), but time after time my customers worked themselves into a tizzy of curses and ranting. That can’t be healthy. I guarantee you they hung up the phone with a foul taste in their mouths, convinced and traumatized that they’d been taken when in actuality they’d made a mistake in not reading what they were signing up for and I’d issued a refund within the first 5 minutes of what turned into a 20 minute call.

How about the 4-5 Cingular customers I’d get every day who called to dispute the random charges on their teenager’s cell phone. “My teen would never run up text messages like this!”

Um, yea. They would.

“No, I already asked her, and she swore that she didn’t do it.”

She lied.

When I spy a random charge on my bank account or my credit card, my first thought is not “What’d they do!?” it’s, “What’d I do?” All being a constant victim is going to get you is frustration, anger and more time, which my customers always screamed was so valuable, out of your life. These companies aren’t out to scam you, or make your life miserable. Not to be cliche, but help them help you. I can’t help a person who’s telling me what the problem is and what the solution should be when reality dictates something completely different.

Swallow your pride, and at the very least admit that it’s entirely within the realm of believability that you made a mistake. The buck stops with you.