A bad customer experience will always be communicated to 100x more people than a good one. Until this response my customer experience with WPD had been a good one.

Like I said, many of us see the product and the deal as worthwhile. Your customer service still needs some work though, and that is constructive criticism and not an attack.

edit: on re-reading your response, I am going to withdraw my business and my recommendations of your business (which was mentioned in the video on my site … the Ed Dale one).

First off, I don’t think any company would knowingly “cut its own throat” as you say for $120 a year. It would be a stupid thing to do, obviously.

It was through the support tickets being filed that we discovered the issue of Immediate Edgers mistakenly using the wrong signup link and getting charge $10 more.

In all these cases we are retroactively extending the previous Silver subscription offer.

Sometimes in real life, things are not as clear as you would paint them to be. In this case, we were dealing with Paypal receipts clearly showing one thing, while the customer was telling us another thing. And it took a while to see a pattern in the tickets since they are mixed with other issues being filed by customers.

We eventually figured it out. I think it took us about 6 hours, and again, in all these cases we are retroactively extending the previous subscription offer.

You received an answer in the early stages of diagnosing a subtle problem – and the actual answer is now different than what you so hastily posted. While it appears to you that this is some great ‘conspiracy’ to defraud the customer on our part, nothing is further from the truth – and it shouldn’t be generalized or presented as such.

We love our customers as much as Brent loves his. And we try to do the right thing in all cases when we can.

@Brent – you might be standing on the shoulders of some awesome people, but you look good because of those awesome genes (lol). I agree and I do hope that the whole team understands how awesome we think they actually are!

@Liz re “I see no value in a recurring monthly membership in that, do you?” Actually I do and there will be a later post about it (and I think Ed and Dan will also be tackling the subject in the Immediate Edge).

There are many other plugins out there that do a lot of the same things as well. Once you have set up one or two WP blogs, you realize you don’t need the “autoinstaller” pieces. Yes, it takes about an hour to activate and set your preferred plugins into place, but once they’re there, you’re set. I see no value in a recurring monthly membership in that, do you?

I am really sorry that someone got a raw deal with a well know business. It really does hurt both the consumer and the company for reasons that could have been avoided.

I know way back in the day, if a business tried to cheat you or treated you ill in any way all you could do was tell your neighbors or write a letter to your local paper and many big businesses could not have cared less. Now with the internet in so many homes it only takes 1 tweet to spread the ‘bad’ word from your house in Australia to mine in Nevada (USA).

I would think a company, that makes it living online, would be the last to push that issue enough to start a complaint.

No, I do not believe that the customer is always right but, a company does need to make sure they hold tight to their end of any agreements that they have made. They also need to have a trained and competent customer service staff that has the ability to work with an individual to come to a happy ending for all. I think most times it is the company policy to have their customer service people treat everyone with a standard answer for every problem. This leads to unhappy users if each person’s complaint is not looked at but, rather thrown in a general pile.

As for your GREAT example of customer service – wooohooo to the Market Samurai group!!

I was just on skype with my friend that bought his Samurai yesterday, on my recommendation. He was having an issue with some stats that I could not figure out how to help him. I told him to send in a support ticket & I assured him it would be handled ASAP. He was excited to say the least when he had a reply within a short while.

I will say that from watching Brent on the 30DC forum, I am amazed at his patients!

I do hope that the other company will take a look at what companies like Market Samurai do and learn how to build a great customer relationship.

I have hopes it will be fixed, same as the “bad” as well.

What a way to waste the boost the 30DC could have given them!

Noble Samurai is only as good as our team – and we have some fantastic technical and support staff – Warwick, Nick, Mark, David, Andrew, Levi, Eugene – plus about a dozen more staff who have worked on the Market Samurai project.

It means that when I send an email out to all users, I get to stand on the shoulders of giants and look good because of all of their hard work.

Brent