How Not to Treat Prospective Customers

I recently decided to take the ClickTracks Hosted free 14 day trial. Imagine my surprise when at one of the sign up screens I’m told it’s a 61 day trial. Wow that’s even better, enough time for me to really figure it out and enough time for them to really hook me in.

After sign up I received my first “invoice” which again stated I had a 61 day free trial. So off I went trialing it.

To cut a long story short, as I’m known to ramble, after 14 days I receive the thanks for trying our software, to continue using it you’ll need to pay email. So much for 61 days!

I decided to email them querying the dates and whether I was entitled to the 61 days as my invoice stated. I also suggested that hooking me in for that long makes my continuing all that more guaranteed.

3 or 4 days later I got a email saying the 61 days was an error and it’s actually 14 days. At least they thanked me for bringing it to their attention LOL.

Now ok it was a mistake, but where I come from if you make an offer which for some reason is incorrect you must honor that offer. With the internet being global I guess the same laws don’t apply. The laws of customer service do and for me as much as I like the program it’s left me feeling a bit pissed off. How hard would it have been to say we were wrong and we’ll honor what we told you. What would it have cost them? And I guarantee I would have been hooked after using it for 61 days.

Right now I think I’m gonna keep looking around.

One thought on “How Not to Treat Prospective Customers”

  1. That does suck a bit Sophie, but I know some companies have been held to honour errors in the past.
    In the UK a couple of companies put wrong prices online, the decimal point was in the wong place. obviously, as soon as people found out, the entire stock was ordered!
    They tried to get out of it, saying only people who paid the correct full price would have their orders honoured, but were forced into selling at the incorrect price by the courts.

    Doesn’t fill me with confidence if you start getting messed around before you’ve even bought a product….

    I had the opposite effect with Sane Solutions (as they were then anyway) about NetTracker.
    Think that was a 30 day trial, but after installing it, I couldn’t get it to work with our log files (was only the basic log crunching version), I was going to give up as I didn’t expect to get the budget to buy it for the company anyway, but a few days later, I got a call from their sales team, asking how I’d found it etc.. if I needed any help. Usually I find thse kinds of calls really annoying, but in this case, I mentioned the problem, and he went away and emailed me later with the fix.

    NetTracker didn’t like the compression format, so a bit of a pain, but I was then able to rezip the logs, and it all worked, and I ended up being very impressed wiht the product……

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