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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Deal With Unreasonable Companies?
New submitter Ash-Fox writes: I recently ran into troubles trying to get reasonable quality of support from an anti-virus vendor, where they are attempting to cop-out of providing any reasonable support and then refusing to offer refunds under the guise of their EULA does not allow it. However, their EULA does not implicitly say that they cannot provide refunds in other circumstances, as the support tries to imply, and further living in Europe (as is the anti-virus headquarters), this EULA for sales is only valid if that was provided as the terms of sales contract, which it was not. How do other Slashdotters look to address companies that behave poorly and seek to only provide at best their minimum legal requirements?
When I was out of work for two years (2009-2010) and before I filed for a Chapter Seven bankruptcy, my credit card debt got sold to three consecutive debt collection agencies. The first two responded well when I pointed out to the notes that indicated I was filing for bankruptcy and ceased taking action against me. The third one did not. So I played hardball by calling their phone line every minute. After 15 minutes of repeated calls that tied up their phone line (and deprived them of earning money), they took a look at the notes about filing bankruptcy and ceased taking action against me. Bullies don't like being on the receiving end.
That's even better - it means he just has to file a complaint under the Sale of Goods Act or equivalent enforcement agency which actually has teeth to force the company to respond.
I start by being reasonable. That includes giving them enough time and opportunities to understand the problem, and then work on a fix. I also don't expect commercial products to be compatible with beta releases. How in the world can they even provide support for something that is under development?
1. Be nice to them. Occasionally this gets you better service.
2. Know what your agreement says. Insist on following it.
3. Plan to switch vendors. At least be ready to. If a problem repeats itself or a second one arises, pull the trigger.
4. Publicity. Parent is right; a lot of places will have issues on their public wall or twitter feed get elevated support. Many of these places will only pretend to elevate support in public and then will ignore you, but sometimes they actually follow through.
5. Call a lawyer. Even just a quick letter from a lawyer often makes a difference.
Real lawyers write in C++
I appreciate your advice, and offer a little story of my own:
I pay $50 a month for an assigned parking space in my apartment's underground garage. Several years ago, the building management painted all the walls in the garage, and stenciled stall numbers for each stall... Except for mine, and 3 adjacent stalls. I don't know why they omitted the stall number for just those few. Maybe they ran out of paint, and then just forgot to follow up.
I made a couple of requests to the rental office to have the numbers placed on my stall, but to no avail. The stalls were unnumbered for about a year.
One night, I arrive home, pull into my garage, and find another car (it was the first of the month - a brand new tenant) parked in my stall. I wrote up an official sounding note, making it look like it came from the building management company, notifying the offending car owner that they were illegally parked in stall #20, and that their license plate number has been recorded, and they will be fined $50. Any questions, ask at the rental office.
Sadly, I wasn't present in the office when that new tenant tried to explain to the building management staff that the stall wasn't even numbered. The next day, the remaining stalls (including mine) were stenciled with proper numbers. That's all I ever wanted anyway!
THE MORAL OF THE STORY: If you ask nicely, and nothing gets done, use their own customers against them.
Not sure if my experience is typical or not I had a fairly good experience when dealing with the US Federal Consumer Protection Bureau (CFPB), MN Department of Commerce, and MN State Attorney General's Office when I was dealing with a shit bag debt collection company and I gather now that all 3 agencies now have an open investigation into them.
The debt collection company was trying to collect a student loan debt from someone who only shared my first name. The collection company started calling and when ever I would answer there wouldn't be anyone on the line. When they would call caller ID would always list the caller as "Toll Free Call" and when looking up the number online I didn't see anything indicating who was calling. When I would answer the phone I would inform them that this is harassment, that they have been told previously to never contact me ever and that I am informing them to never contact me again. I started recording the calls (video recording) and after having them call me multiple times in the same day and being told the line above. After about a week of this and after the day when they called me 4 times and were told I filed a complaint with the MN State Attorney General seeking relief and providing what limited information I had received. A few days later the Attorney General's Office responded and provided detailed information on the company and information on who else I should be filing a complaint about a shit bag debt collection company. Additionally the Attorney General's Office had sent a demand to the company indicating that they were to no longer contact me that also demanded that they respond to an inquery now started by the Attorney General's Office.
So at that point I filed complaints with the CFPB and MN Department of Commerce. A day later I received confirmation that the CFPB had contacted the debt collector and that they were to no longer contact me by phone. Unfortunately the debt collection company disregarded this and continued to call for a couple of more days. This caused me to file additional complaints with the CFPB and MN Department of commerce about their continued harassment at this point as well as forwarding all of this information to the Attorney General's Office. A bit later I get a response through the CFPB from the debt collector in which they provided all of the information they had on the loan including the loan application (this included mother's maiden name, previous addresses current addresses, employer at the time, wage information, social security number, banking information), copy of the person's drivers license, copy of their social security card, and a letter directed to me informing me that I had 7 days to to work out payment details otherwise they would be suing me and seizing my assets. The problem is that the information I provided to the CFPB clearly demonstrated that I was not the actual owner of this debt, which they could have figured out from public records even before hand having never been in the states where the person who the debt belonged to, not ever having a drivers license from that state, having a different middle and last name, having a different birth date (over 15 years different), and attending a different school. In their letter they also indicated that they had no record of me ever answering the phone let alone being told to never call me as well as stating that they never called me after being contacted by the CFPB.
I responded to their letter with one of my own informing them that any attempt to collect this debt from me by them or any other company I will view as an attempt to defraud me and that I would also consider them a co-conspirator in the action and would be filing a criminal complaint. I explained to them that they had broken the law several times including their outright lies and that I had recorded a number of their calls and can provide evidence showing that I had told them multiple times to never contact me in the same day as well as provide evidence of them continuing to call me after being to
Time to offend someone
Dell is awful when it comes to reasonability.
The 3D card on my out-of-warranty Alienware laptop died. Okay, I figured I'd just go onto Dell's web site and buy a replacement. Strangely enough, there wasn't one. I called them up, and they said that they were available, but I'd have to pay for a technician to come over and replace it. Or, I'd have to ship my laptop to Florida. They refused to sell the card by itself.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)