What Ever Happened to Customer Service?

04.12.07 | Site

Throughout my AdSense woes, I’ve touted Text-Link-Ads as the best alternative to monetizing a website. I’ve even referred a person or two to sign up as publishers and/or advertisers. I wouldn’t say I’ve been a top notch publisher for them, but then it turns out there’s really no way we’d be able to know.

Houston, We Have a Problem…

I recently discovered that my TLA listing for this site has — shall we say — issues. It has for some time. Actually, it’s totally borked. For some reason, changes I make which directly affect my available link inventory get reset at the top of the hour without fail. Once it resets, my listing says that I don’t have any links to sell, when in fact I do.

Additionally, my listing does not display under the categories I’ve chosen. In fact, it won’t appear under any category at all, nor can it be found when searching for it by any keyword I use. That’s not good. No wonder I’ve not been selling any links. No one is able to find me.

I contacted Text-Link-Ads through their online form asking for help. The next day I got a response that read “…are you hitting the ‘update’ button after you make these changes?” Now, I may not always be the sharpest tool in the shed — but I am pretty darned savvy when it comes to clicking buttons, especially those that read “Update” — so yeah, I’m sure I’ve clicked the update button. More than a time or two in fact.

Silence is Golden. Or Is It Just Tin Plated?

Being confident of my button clicking abilities, I did some legwork and gathered what I thought Patrick Gavin would need in order to resolve my problem fast, allowing us both to be back on our way to filling our pockets with TLA cash. I sent it off to him in a friendly manner, then did a little more fact finding and sent those results to him as well.

That was four very quiet days ago. Ever since his “are you so dumb you can’t even click a button?” response, I’ve heard nothing. No “we’re looking into it on our end” email. Not even a “I don’t have time to bother with your problem right now” type of reply. Nothing. Not a peep. Is that what Text-Link-Ads thinks customer support is supposed to be? Bad news for them if they do.

One Unhappy Customer Makes a Mob

My work demands I provide support to users for both my day job, as well as my WordPress themes & silly little Mac applications — even if I don’t feel like it, or think their support question is stupid. No matter how trivial, I always make a point of addressing support issues quickly, within minutes if possible. Were I to wait 4 days (or more) to respond to the needs of a user, I’d either be fired from my day job, or my online reputation would be shot to hell by word of mouth.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s a little of my own word of mouth; Text-Link-Ads is great when everything is working and Mr. Gavin is making money. I’m sure most of his clientele would give the service high marks. I probably would too if I were able to sell links and make money myself. Heck, I’d give it an even higher rating had my support issue even been acknowledged.

However, when something goes wrong, it would appear Mr. Gavin’s idea of customer service is to ignore the problem and hope it goes away. That’s bad business. I wonder if it would be the case if my site had higher traffic, or if my name was “known” in the blogosphere somehow?

Conclusions

I know what it is to be busy. I’m aware that sometimes you’re just not able to get back to someone right away. However, I’m a firm believer that if you can’t help someone right now, you should at the very least acknowledge them. That’s good customer service, even if the problem hasn’t been solved yet. That didn’t happen in this case.

So whatever the deal is at Text-Link-Ads, since I’ve been pretty much ignored after multiple friendly attempts to get their support, I’ve chosen to remove all banners and links from my site and post my experiences with their customer service — or lack of it — here. Man, am I getting grippy in my old age, or what?

So, Sonny boy, what’s been your experience with Text-Link-Ads?

[Update] - See this post where I thank Patrick for helping me if you’d like to see a more humble side of my persona.