Saturday, October 02, 2004
Attn: Overture: Customer Service = Communication
OK, I already prefer using Google Ad Words to Overture. For numerous reasons.
One of the reasons is NOT better click-thru rates. Actually in my B2C world Overture seems to get better rates. But everything else about the Overture customer experience lags behind the Google customer experience.
There are things I figured out how to do pretty easily with Google that I can't figure out with Overture. yes. I'll have to go read documentation. Boo. If Google can make it easily intuitive and found in their online Help, then Overture should be able to manage it too.
But here's what my snit is about today:
Google never sends me much email. Overture, on the other hand, seems to send me "helpful" emails every few days. Fine. Some of them actually do look helpful. I'll read them some day.
But since yesterday, from at least 4PM...could be earlier for all I know...Overture has been down. "System temporarily unavailable." Now, NOT their marketing site. That's all working just fine. But if you try to log in...nope, not possible.
And it happens to coincide with the time that I am trying to compile my month-end reports for my clients.
They're so sorry, of course. But sorry doesn't cut it. If you plan to be down for what is now 16 hours for maintenance...then let your clients know.
And if you didn't plan it? At some point, change that damn landing page to give a little more info than "System is temporarily down."
Because I'm thinking 16 hours is no longer "temporarily."
And, all I'm saying is: if you can send me marketing emails all the time...you clearly have my email address.
You still have to worry about your marketing image after you land the customer. And yours is pretty bad in my book right now.
One of the reasons is NOT better click-thru rates. Actually in my B2C world Overture seems to get better rates. But everything else about the Overture customer experience lags behind the Google customer experience.
There are things I figured out how to do pretty easily with Google that I can't figure out with Overture. yes. I'll have to go read documentation. Boo. If Google can make it easily intuitive and found in their online Help, then Overture should be able to manage it too.
But here's what my snit is about today:
Google never sends me much email. Overture, on the other hand, seems to send me "helpful" emails every few days. Fine. Some of them actually do look helpful. I'll read them some day.
But since yesterday, from at least 4PM...could be earlier for all I know...Overture has been down. "System temporarily unavailable." Now, NOT their marketing site. That's all working just fine. But if you try to log in...nope, not possible.
And it happens to coincide with the time that I am trying to compile my month-end reports for my clients.
They're so sorry, of course. But sorry doesn't cut it. If you plan to be down for what is now 16 hours for maintenance...then let your clients know.
And if you didn't plan it? At some point, change that damn landing page to give a little more info than "System is temporarily down."
Because I'm thinking 16 hours is no longer "temporarily."
And, all I'm saying is: if you can send me marketing emails all the time...you clearly have my email address.
You still have to worry about your marketing image after you land the customer. And yours is pretty bad in my book right now.
// posted by ElisaC @ 9:25 AM 
