Vonage Fraud?

(Originally posted March 9, 2010)

It’s unfortunate that it took these measures to get the appropriate things done. But it appears that matters will finally be taken care of as they should have been taken care of in the first place, at least in the opinion of most reasonable people, I would think.

Today I got voice mails from several representatives in Vonage’s Executive Response Team. Odd. But at least they’re responding. And I got a voice mail from their legal department.

Their legal representative and I actually connected by telephone this evening, and it appears that I’ll get those RMAs for all of the Vonage devices I am to send back – by the close of business tomorrow. Why it took a lawyer to get those numbers, I don’t know. Seems like an expensive way to operate a business. Having said that, if you can systematically charge people for something they didn’t get, there’s a lot of money to be made. Hmm.

As I said, it’s too bad it required such an effort to get the right thing done. Had I simply kept calling customer service, there is no way I would have gotten a resolution that was appropriate.

In my mind, things are still broken over there. Whether it’s intentional or not is for someone else to determine. All I can say is that it sure felt intentional. And from what I’ve read on the Internet over the past few days, the stories all seem to corroborate that perspective. Here’s another example:  http://bit.ly/csQ2nP

I’ve been in situations where company representatives have dropped balls in the process of serving their customers. I know what that feels like. This was not the same feeling. You just need to re-read the postings on this site to get a sense of what this experience was like.

What to do next? I don’t know. Clearly I need to express that my situation was resolved to the conclusion that I felt was appropriate. But it took way too much effort to get to this point. And it involved our new social media environment to help get the job done.

It also took one of my credit card banks to utter the word “fraud” during my attempt to dispute the Vonage charges. I don’t know what will come of that. I suspect that my list of card charges won’t be enough… unless they do a summary review of the number of Vonage disputes registered over some period of time. Who knows. But they were definitely taken aback by the situation. And they were definitely going to look into it.

Back to the use of social networking, it’s been much talked about for the past decade or so. How do you control people’s perspectives, and their right to freely express their opinions, in a medium you also can’t control. By its very nature, it allows people to connect with each other from around the world, let alone from within a country… and even more so within the “boundaries” of a special interest group. It’s too easy to find people who are interested in the same topic as you are interested in, and to bond together very quickly.

No company can stop that. Smaller ones have a chance at communicating with individuals that are expressing themselves about their products or services… because the number of customers is small.

But big companies? It’s a problem that is not yet solved, and may never be solved. And it’s a BIG problem. I’ve studied it as part of what I do for a living. And from what I can tell, the only way to avoid developing a seriously negative reputation in the online social media circles, is to build and maintain a company that does their customers right, at all levels. Just talking about it doesn’t work anymore. It’s not a one way mass communication model anymore.

Customers have WAY more input and power over a brand than before. And, for those of us who have studied brand management… we know that the company never owned the brand in the first place. It is the customer that owns the brand. What we experience defines, in our minds, what the brand is about. It’s just that these days, we have the ability to share our experiences with people we don’t even know… in a matter of days, hours, or even minutes.

After not getting my situation resolved last week, and getting a real attitude from each  person in customer support that I talked to, then not getting a call back from even a representative of Marc Lefar’s office, well, it took all of a half hour to grab an internet domain name, sign up with a blogging service provider, bring the two together, and publish my first posting. Putting up additional postings takes minutes. And making others on the Internet aware of the site is child’s play if you know what you are doing.

By the time Monday morning rolled around, well, a lot of people had already become very familiar with what I was getting told by Vonage representatives, that even though Vonage never got the service to work for me, I was still going to have to pay for the service for the month we tried to make it work, plus, I was going to have to pay a cancelation fee, and they were not going to give me any RMA numbers (permission numbers to allow me to send back their devices so I don’t get charged for them as well).

The traffic build up on the site surprised even me. I guess it’s true that misery loves company.

Opinions can have ground swells. But they don’t all have to be bad. I’ll turn to Apple again. Apple’s products are not perfect either. I’ve had to bring mine in for various reasons. But Apple always take care of me. Always. I never feel like I’ve had to convince them that the problem was theirs and not mine. And even when it turns out to be “user error”, I’m always left feeling even better about the company than what I felt about them as I walked into one of their stores 20 minutes before. So I buy more of their stuff, knowing that I’ll be taken care of if something doesn’t work. And I’m not going to be left feeling stupid if I was the one who messed the contraption up.

And it’s not just my opinion. Comb the Internet and you’ll see that it’s the pervasive opinion. Comb the Internet on Vonage and you get the opposite opinion. Including some story I picked up along the way over the weekend about Marc Lefar, their CEO, getting some kind of new jet or an upgraded one or something like that, in the wake of the company’s poor performance.

Customers may shake their heads at that and think this guy doesn’t care about doing the right thing. What do the employees in the company think??? They must certainly feel like crap about it. And likely become disenfranchised at best. So even if they are not trained to put customers through what I got put through, they may just treat customers like crap because they’re working in a place where their CEO is blatantly draining the place while the company and its people are struggling.

It’s another example of a lack of simple business ethics and decency. Where did that go? Where are the stand up people in Vonage?

To be candid, the lawyer I spoke to this evening did not seem to fit that mold. I wonder what he’s doing there. And as I had mentioned before (or maybe it was in one of my emails to the company), my experience with their technical support person (Margaret) was the best technical support experience I have ever had. Ever. Whoever is training and running that group should be running the company. Unless Margaret is an isolated example. What an outstanding experience. (Thank you, Margaret. My evenings seem empty not talking with you for hours on end!)

What to do next, I don’t know. Just because my situation with Vonage will be solved by the end of tomorrow doesn’t mean other people are no longer going to struggle with exactly the same issues. I’ll figure it out in the days to come.

Maybe Vonage customers need an external forum where they can document what they’re experiencing, and hopefully someone at Vonage is reading it and responding to it. A lot of big companies have completely new jobs that they’ve invented to do just that. Comb the Internet to learn what people are saying about them, and then to channel that towards doing something about it. The danger, of course, is that some people don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong.

That communication filter really should be within Vonage itself. At the customer service level. But there is no way that there is such a filter within Vonage. Nothing but push back there. And from what my initial experience was with Vonage’s Executive Response Team, I’m afraid that it’s broken right now too, and not very helpful.

When people feel like they’ve not been done right, they want to be heard. When the party that’s hurting them won’t listen and respond appropriately, they’ll tell anyone else who will listen. It’s human nature. Just think about your personal relationships. It’s not any different there. It’s also the driver of a lot of marital affairs.

Vonage didn’t listen to me no matter how many people I tried to talk to there. So I told anyone who would be willing to listen. Until Vonage truly listens, maybe customers really do need an external vehicle to express themselves through, knowing that at least someone will be listening to them.

It’s only Tuesday. I’ll figure it out. And maybe the team at Vonage can help figure out how to do the right thing at the right levels within the company first time around. But probably not under the current leadership. From what I’ve gleaned, Marc seems too focused on what HE gets out of HIS deal with the company. Until that changes, there may need to be an external forum for customers who are not being listened to.

And perhaps Vonage customers trying to no longer be customers just might get the representation they need at some point down the line if these experiences continue to be as pervasive as they have been.

We’ll see. Things have a way of falling into place. This is just one piece of that puzzle. And with the Internet, you can much more easily find all of the other pieces to put that puzzle together. It may just be a matter of time.

(Be sure to click on the comment link just below this text. It’s author offers a valuable perspective.)