BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Years ago when I was very young, not as young as I am now, but still pretty young – I often thought that when store clerk swiped the card at that “magic credit card reader” money somehow manage to get transferred into cash register through the wires. Only recently, after acquiring merchant account for my own purposes had I found that purchase by credit card is indeed a credit given by merchant, since he gets the funds with significant delay. In fact the delay could range from 3 days to a full month.

Updating bank info at credit card processing company can be a real pain in all the places you can think of. In my case – it is.

For just $50/month I now have the ability to log on to all messengers and see all web sites I have a need to from any place with native Verizon network. However, whenever it says “Extended Network” it means – oops, you’re out of luck. Last (Memorial) weekend we rented a house in Poconos. Phone reception (Verizon) was excellent, Sprint was okay, for T-Mobile we had to get out of house (apparently wood blocks the signal). One little exception – the carrier required 1 to be dialed before are code (most carriers in NYC don’t). However, *777 – access number for Verizon data – didn’t work at all, so I was stuck with plain old and painfully slow dial-up via POTS line.

Thank you! Thank you, Joel! I am much younger then you, I am much less experienced in ways of business, but finally I’ve found another business owner saying same thing I was saying since same 2001…

If you’ve ever had to outsource a critical business function, you realize that outsourcing is hell. Without direct control over customer service, you’re going to get nightmarishly bad customer service — the kind people write about in their weblogs when they tried to get someone, anyone, from some phone company to do even the most basic thing. If you outsource fulfillment, and your fulfillment partner has a different idea about what constitutes prompt delivery, your customers are not going to be happy, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because it took 3 months to find a fulfillment partner in the first place, and in fact, you won’t even know that your customers are unhappy, because they can’t talk to you, because you’ve set up an outsourced customer service center with the explicit aim of not listening to your own customers.

That’s why both the 866 number and main company phone number are tied to my line. If there’s a problem – I must know about it first. Hopefully we’ll never be big enough to loose customers, especially – due to bad customer service.