Make Yourself Clear: A Tale of Two Billing Issues

I started doing some analysis on multiple years of personal technical support requests I have made to the various providers that Explain Everything uses over the past year. That data and analysis will be shared soon. In particular, I was looking to see if there were any patterns across the types of requests and type of responses provided. Variables that influence the patterns include: incident type, date request made, date request closed, addressable by user, addressable only by provider, message included image, message included GIF/Video, message included link to article, message included attached document, and so on.

As I was doing this, I stumbled across one frustrating example which also served as a reminder that there is still an open loop that hasn’t been closed by the provider.

Provider 1: An Email was sent to the billing email to mention that we were still getting charged (to the credit card on file) for a service that was supposed to have been canceled 3 months prior. There are days between responses and often a response only after I send a follow up. I ended up Cc-ing their support team so that it could also be logged as a ticket. Almost a month later still no resolution despite my providing a paper trail on the dialogue that confirms that this was meant to be canceled. The other part is as a user of this service, we have no means to turn off the service ourselves.

Provider 2: A similar thing - a reduced rate for a service had been negotiated, which was mediated by waiving the second of two milestone-related payments. When the second milestone hit, we were issued an invoice and an automatic charge to the card on file. I sent a request to the contact and the support team, along with the paper trail, and within 24 hours the issue was investigated by the support team and accompanied by an acknowledgement of the error and an apology (albeit a few days later) from our account rep.  

In both cases, there are system-side automated elements that end up preventing a human being from always being able to ensure that what they intended is actually executed. The human part comes in when the issue is noticed and immediately - and authentically - addressed.