eFax customer disservice, part 2
As mentioned in Part 1, my wife asked me to cancel her eFax account, and it seems that the only way to do that is to telephone the company or engage in a live chat. This is unacceptable: I was able to sign up for the account entirely online, why can’t I cancel the same way I signed up?
Step 3: Contact via live chat. Result: Success, we hope.
In any case, I did the live chat. Here’s a verbatim transcript. Note that “Howard P.” sent back his responses in far less time than it would take to type them. Don’t you love boilerplate customer service?
Welcome to chat.
The session has been accepted.
{Carole Zeichick} Hello?
{Howard P.} Hello, Carole. Welcome to j2 Global online support. I am Howard, your online Live Support Representative. How may I assist you?
{Carole Zeichick} Hello. Please cancel my account, ##########
{Howard P.} I am sorry to hear that you wish to cancel. Can you please provide me with the PIN for verification?
{Carole Zeichick} ####
{Howard P.} Thank you for providing your information. Please give me a moment while I go through your records. In the meantime, please type the number corresponding to your reason for cancellation:
1) Moving to another provider
2) Bought a Fax machine
3) Business or role changed
4) Short term project completed
5) Financial reasons
6) Problems with Faxing or Billing
7) Dissatisfied with Quality of service
8) Too Costly
{Carole Zeichick} 9 – Because I want to cancel
{Howard P.} I understand that you may not be using our service much at this time, but in the long run, it is always helpful to have a faxing service at hand, as you never know when the need for it may arise.
In the current situation as a special consideration we will waive off the monthly fee for two months. You can use the fax service with no monthly fee for the next two billing cycles. Please feel free to contact us at any time. This way you will be able to keep your local fax number, which will enable you to send and receive any pending faxes with your number.
{Howard P.} Your eFax account will be credited with $33.90 so that you may utilize our services without being billed our monthly fee for the next two billing cycles.
{Howard P.} Since you will not be charged any monthly fees for the next two months you may keep the account till then. If at all you find that you need our services during this period, then you will still have the account. If however, you still feel that you do not have any use for our services by the end of the two months credit period, then you can get back to us back anytime.
{Carole Zeichick} Please cancel the account.
{Howard P.} Carole, I completely understand your wish to discontinue, since you have already paid for the month, I suggest you to retain this number at least till the end of two months credit offer as you will not be charged any monthly fee for the next two months.
{Howard P.} As a goodwill gesture for our further association, I would also provide you with an additional gift usage balance of $10.00 with which you can send up to 100 pages of faxes for free (per page per minute within US & Canada) along with the monthly credit.
{Howard P.} All you need to do is to just contact us once at the end of your 2 months credit period. There is certainly no obligation to stay back with our service. Since we are available here 24 x 7, you will have no problem in contacting us. We will process your request immediately without any further delay.
{Carole Zeichick} Please cancel the account (third time that I’ve asked this)
{Howard P.} Okay, I understand and respect your decision for cancellation. I will cancel your account with us immediately.
{Howard P.} Is there anything else that I can assist you with at this time?
{Carole Zeichick} You’re doing a good job cutting/pasting the boilerplate, but just cancel the account.
{Howard P.} As stated above, your account has been canceled.
{Howard P.} Anything else I can assist you with.
{Carole Zeichick} No, thank you.
{Howard P.} We would appreciate if you could spare a minute in filling the survey form as it would give us your valuable feedback which would help us to improve our services. Here is the link where you can fill the Survey.
http://www.endusersurvey.com/default.asp?project_code=j2cxlc&code=5060
{Howard P.} We are sorry that you have decided to leave eFax, but if your faxing needs do change in the future, we would be more than happy to have you back. Thank you for being with us and for using our service. Goodbye and take care!
In retrospect, I should have let “Howard P.” keep making offers; we might have ended up with a set of Ginsu knives or something.
I completely understand what you mean by poor customer service these days.
It’s a real shame more people don’t know about great alternatives such as MyFax (www.myfax.com). MyFax does not outsource their support which means you’ll always get a live, helpful person without any boilerplate responses.
Their prices are also more reasonable and you get more free pages included.
I would highly suggest you check them out and give their live chat a test while your at it to see what I mean.
You missed my point, which is that one shouldn’t have to contact “live” customer service at all in order to cancel an account.
That’s unacceptable in today’s Web era — especially for a service that is entirely Internet-based. After all, they didn’t require a human interaction for signing up.
That’s what I meant by customer disservice. They weren’t trying to serve me better.
eFax’s only reason for demanding that I talk to their customer service department is so that they could try to talk me out of doing what I wanted to do. That’s not service. That’s disservice.
Of course, if I had taken them up on the free two-month extension, they’d hope that I would “forget” for a while afterwards to cancel again.
To me, this is morally indefensible behavior.
I’m glad I found this site before I tried ending my account with efax. I signed up for the service a year and a half ago and used it once! I know I’m an idiot for not ending sooner, but when I did want to end it, the process was much harder to end the account the start the account.
I didn’t feel it should be necessary for a big company like efax to have to call them (no 800 number) and the live chat was slow and frustrating. They also offered 2 months free and 10 dollars credit. I followed suit with the blogger and kept asking to end. Finally, after the 4th or 5th time she agreed.
Thank you Alan for the helpful tip on how to end the account. This should be on there faqs site.
It’s growing like a weed these days. A business model that replaces the concept of “treat others as you want to be treated” with “manipulate others for your own short-term gain”. Customer Disservice is a great label for this unsustainable model – which will fade over time as competitors recognize the disconnect and deliver genuine value. The business leadership at eFax, like many others, will either evolve or fade into obscurity.