I have not written a “Clay’s Rant” in a while because I’ve just not been in a ranting mood. Besides, my rant over SHRM’s choice to host the last HR conference in New Orleans did not go over well. I did, by the way, admit I was wrong on that one so please don’t beat me up again. Well, it’s time to rant again.
I was having a problem with one of our pay per click campaigns for CompareHRIS.com and attempted to get in touch with the provider for a solution. Now mind you, this is a vendor we pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to for advertising.
I started out by clicking on the help option. This took me to a knowledge base of possible solutions to my question. After searching around for close to 30 minutes, I could not find my solution. I needed to chat with someone. If I did, I knew it was likely I could get my question answered quickly. Or maybe if I could just send an email and hear back three or four days later, that would have been fine too. I clicked on a link for contacting someone and I was returned to the previous screen of help topics but still no ability to email or call anyone to get assistance with my issue. I looked around that site for an additional thirty minutes and could not find any email or phone number contact information.
How on earth do companies work like this? It’s absolutely maddening. If I had a choice, which I really don’t, I would refuse to pay this company another dime. I guess they know this and it’s why they choose to treat their customers this way.
Here’s my advice to the HRMS software industry. Don’t go down this road. Make it easy for your customers to contact you with support issues. Knowledge bases for tech support information are great features but don’t for a minute believe that this replaces the ability to email or call someone to get an answer to a problem. Besides, you never know if your customer is an angry blogger.