David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

I’ve been a loyal NewEgg customer- until now. Their recent customer service blunders have made me reconsider for the future where I’ll take my business. Here’s a rundown of what happened, and what should have happened

The Background

Friday

Last Friday, August 27th 2010, I placed an order to NewEgg for a handful of small items;  USB cables, ink and a mouse. Total of $151.05. One of the major reasons I order from NewEgg is that their processing and shipping is really fast. When I lived in Boston, if I ordered something prior to noon and did their UPS ground shipping, I’d generally have it the next day.

9:47 AM – I get a confirmation email. I’m hoping that I’ll have it Monday, but I’m unsure of how long shipping will take since I just moved to Ohio.

9:55 AM – I get a payment rejection email. I had used my stored Visa information, but somehow I messed up my CIV/CCV number. I go in and correct the information immediately to get the order back on track. Frustration level: 0/10

10:39 AM – Another email from NewEgg. Payment failed again due to billing address. While I’d updated my shipping address, I forgot to change my billing address. My bad. I log in and correct it. Frustration level 1/10, but really its all my fault at this stage. This stuff happens when you move.

I figure since its before noon that the ‘Processing’ status will soon update to ‘Shipping’ like it normally does. At the end of the day, there is no change. Oh well, stuff happens. I’ll wait until Monday.

Monday

After breakfast, I check my NewEgg account, since I didn’t get any other emails or phone calls from them yet. The order is still in ‘Processing’ status. Frustration level: 2/10. I’m sure contacting customer service will fix this quickly.

Via their Live Chat feature, I contact their customer service. Often Live Chat isn’t perfect, but at least there is a log, and there’s no dealing with poor phone connections or non-American accents.

I give him the needed information. Didn’t I give them this information prior? Oh well, surely he’ll take care of it.

Ok, so there’s a department taking care of it. I’m confident that it will resolve soon.

1PM – No change. I’ll contact them again and see what’s up. Surely, they were able to push the button and send verification to my bank again.

For a company that normally resolves stuff so quickly, this is taking quite a while. I don’t like being told to just ‘wait’ with no real feedback. Putting through a credit card verification doesn’t take that long. I’m confident that by the end of the day however it will be fixed or someone will contact me. Frustration level: 4/10. Zero updates at the end of the day.

Tuesday

I wake up early and find that there’s still no change. Surely, a representative will help. At this point I wonder if I should have ordered on Amazon instead. Their prices are comparable often, I’ve got a Prime account for free/fast shipping. The Friday when I placed the NewEgg order, I had also placed Amazon orders and they had arrived on Monday.

I think to myself, “I’m frustrated, but things happen. Surely, since the delay is on their end and I’ve spent good money in the past with NewEgg, they’ll be up for switching me to Next-Day or 2-day shipping from UPS Ground right? Seems a small price to pay for keeping a customer happy.” I know Zappos employees are able to do anything within reason to make a customer happy, and that the trend is being lauded as a great customer service method. This doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask for at least.

A few major points to highlight here.

I’m clearly frustrated, but trying to be polite and I’m not accusing this rep of poor service or making mistakes. I let them know that I am aware I could have purchased from elsewhere, and that I will cancel my order if resolution is not had today. This seems firm, but reasonable.

They claim my bank was closed when they called. Bank of America has 24/7 verification lines, and I had provided them the BofA number in my profile.

At first she doesn’t understand what I’m asking for in speeding up the shipping. Then when she realizes it, she thinks that I want to pay for faster shipping. She doesn’t even consider for a moment that I’m frustrated, and that adding next day shipping would have made me perfectly happy and this blog post would never have happened.

Finally, since I’m not getting anywhere, I ask for a manager. This is a fairly standard request in customer service, which is always to be met with, “Of course, one moment please.” Instead, she says there isn’t one available, and doesn’t even offer to note my frustrations to them, or have them contact me back later. I was hoping that a manager would want to know of their customer service issues in that department, and also might be able to resolve the issue.

Her apologies ring empty.

Frustration level: 8/10

1:06 PM – I get a email that they have successfully verified my card. w00t! My frustration level subsides a bit. Progress! 6/10

1:10PM – Payment charged. Ok, its moving. Now when will they ship? Did a manager end up upgrading my shipping? 5/10.

5:17PM – I get my shipping notifications. Three of them. All from different locations- NJ, TN, and CA. Why are some of the ink carts coming from different states? I get keeping different types of parts in different areas but I’m confused. Never before had NewEgg shipped from anywhere buy NJ. All UPS Ground. Two of them set to arrive Thursday, one on Friday. No email/phone calls from a manager. Frustration Level: 6/10. Whatever, the stuff is coming. Lesson learned.

Wednesday

I think to blog about this. Pretty frustrating experience. Could have all been fixed if they had called me on Friday and did the verification right then on the phone. Or had one of the reps upgraded my shipping. I contact NewEgg for the chat logs. I had only saved one of them.

Did Leah freak out and drop intentionally? Seemed odd. I expect the logs soon from Vanna and trust that I’ll have them soon. I check my email and spam box an hour later- nothing. Frustration level rising…

Thursday

Well, asking a third time for the chat logs should be the charm right? Sure enough, I get another rep and I have the logs within the hour.

Overview

What has NewEgg done here? What did they do wrong? What did they do right? What should have they changed

Right:

• Having a LiveChat line – Customers know that a phone call will involve hold times and might take up too much time. This is a good move.
• Keeping good records

Wrong:

• Not empowering staff
• Not connecting a customer with a manager on request
• Constant apology without action
• Not following through on promises (chat logs)
• Slow verification department with no way to speed things up

Result:

• Probably lost a customer that spends around 2K/year with them
• Lost referrals to friends (already my girlfriend ordered her new monitor through Amazon instead)
• This blog post

What should have they done:

• Phone call when first verification failed
• Faster re-verification process
• Don’t tell customers to ‘just wait’, without feedback
• When all else fails, offer faster/free shipping
• Try to make the customer happy
• Try to show some real understanding, not robot voice
• Connect a customer to a manager instantly upon request
• Followthrough with promises to deliver things, like chat logs and other requests.

TL;DR – I screw up my card information. NewEgg takes forever to get it together afterward and provides poor customer service. Shop elsewhere.

I love games. Don’t get me wrong, I just don’t have time these days to play them as much as I’d like. I work in the gaming industry at imVOX, and prior to that at gamerDNA.

Gamers at large clamor for the newest hot game to come out as soon as possible, but I have to wonder how many of 18+ gamers just don’t have time to play them. I’ve got probably 40+ modern PS3/360 games on my shelf and two dozen more in Steam. I have a World of Warcraft account, but I haven’t logged in over a month. I wonder if my guild has kicked me out yet, but I don’t have the time to really check. A friend gave me the Warhammer MMO and I never even loaded it up. Many other games I’ve only played for a few minutes or haven’t loaded at all. All of the best intentions to play them have fallen to other daily tasks.

So what gets in the way? I’m sure the list is different for everyone who has grown past their teens. I don’t have any kids to take my time, and my wonderful girlfriend doesn’t mind me playing as long as I don’t completely neglect her. Yet, life isn’t as open and sparse as it once was. Work eats a good portion of the day. General household tasks. Working on my motorcycles. Roadtrips. Playing guitar. Reading. Dining out. Spending time with friends.

It isn’t just the growth of responsibility, but also the joy of finding more in life that interests me and takes priority. Riding a motorcycle in real life beats riding one in GTA:IV. I couldn’t have done that when I was 13. Older people (I’m only 27) don’t hate games. Your parents probably don’t hate games or find them silly, but just have a hard time really fitting them into their day in a responsible way. Massively long games like Final Fantasy XIII just don’t stand a chance on my schedule. Portal or Heavy Rain are much more fitting for my time.

Gaming is a very attention intense activity. Few great games play well as a background task. I can’t cook dinner, hold a decent conversation or read a book while playing Halo ODST. I can listen to music or NPR however.

Back in the day games could include ‘feelies‘ to enhance the gaming experience (and occasionally as copy protection). No matter the cost of a game the one feelie I wish was included with every game was a spare 20 hours to enjoy it. I’ve got 3d Dot Game Heroes and Red Dead Redemption coming in the mail today and yet I know that I won’t get as much use out of them as I’d like.

Is this just  sign of getting older? Perhaps. I know some gamers just a few years older than myself who are able to dedicate more time to the pursuit, but it becomes something you must consciously choose and you make sacrifices elsewhere.

How does Apple’s iPad fare against its own first incarnation of the tablet computer- the Apple Newton? Let’s find out.

Screen

The iPad is the clear winner here, with its large 9.7 inch color display. The Newton screen however isn’t all that bad and does support multiple screen orientations and has a low power draw.

Input

The iPad brings us a large version of the iPhone keyboard, along with now popular multitouch. However the iPad completely lacks handwriting recognition. You can’t use a stylus and (most) gloves are out of the question. This is a bit of a draw. Both Newton and iPad support external keyboards.

Connectivity

The iPad offers Wifi and when they eventually get around to shipping them, 3G. That’s great, but what if you want to send a fax? Well the Newton does the job rather well here. The Newton offers a standard 8-pin Mac serial port for connecting to a variety of devices. The Newton also offers an infrared interface to talk to other Newtons. The Newton can even dial a phone by holding its speaker up to a phone.

Expandability

The iPad offers a lot of nothing here- since you can’t even easily swap in a global Sim card. The Newton however rocks it. All models had at least one PC Card expansion slot, allowing anything from CompactFlash memory, to wifi cards, to bluetooth cards.

Battery

The iPad has a nice battery that can last quite some time. The Newton is powered via AAA batteries, which don’t give it a lot of battery life here. However the Newton allows you to swap out batteries, whereas the iPad does not. Even when your iPad battery is dead and unchargable, the best you can do is go to Apple for repair. The Newton? CVS will fix you up.

Price

The iPad might seem like an expensive toy, but the MessagePad and Newton series were expensive too! Varying on model they were between $500 and $1000 1990′s dollars!

Winner

Wait, you’re really wondering who won here? Clearly the Newton… not! The iPad has 20 years of development time on the Newton and is a great piece of hardware. Despite the fact that Jobs has it locked down tighter than a Federal Prison and expansion isn’t exactly its strength, everyone has come to expect that from Apple

Comcast has a 250GB cap per calendar month for transfers made over their home cable modem services. They claim that this meets the needs of 90% or so of their users and that the other 10% is damaging the network. Perhaps this was true for 2009, but I don’t feel that it is true for 2010 or the needs in the future.

What is this Cap? I thought it was unlimited?

Having a bandwidth cap means that you can only download a certain amount per month before Comcast gets upset. The amount is currently 250Gb and has been unchanged since they initially instituted it in 2008. Comcast does often advertise that their service offers unlimited usage, however this simply isn’t the case.

250GB ought to be enough for anybody

Just as the quote often misattributed to Bill Gates of,”640K ought to be enough for anybody.” shows faulty logic, so does the cap imposed by Comcast. Perhaps this best describes their ideal user who pays for their service, but rarely uses it. This probably does reflect a large portion of the population. My mother does little more than check her email and Facebook with her cable modem.

Yet for a small but strong portion of the population this is simply insufficient. Those between 14-34 are using the internet in a far different way than an older generation. I am one of these.

Common Uses

Everything is streaming. We live in households with several roommates who are all similarly connected. We have not once computer, but multiple. Even if our needs are currently met, we are always pushing the edge and using more and more services. A quick look at some of the bandwidth heavy services that those of this generation use.

• NetFlix- My household has all but stopped using our physical Netflix movies. Waiting a day is too long. Instead we use their streaming service, often watching several films in one night between all of the house residents. NetFlix is soon to start streaming along with 5.1 Surround Sound. 1080p which will use 2x as much bandwidth as the current 720p library is surely also just around the corner
• Hulu- Another video streaming service, which also streams in 720p.
• YouTube, Vimeo and Blip.tv- Streaming HD video content over the web has become daily activity for many people. While a few years ago this was a very small portion of people’s behavior, this is only increasing.
• Bittorrent/Usenet- Not that I would ever admit to downloading something that isn’t public domain, but I’ve heard that downloading 1080p movies with full surround sound in Bluray quality takes around 10-30GB per movie. Queuing up a dozen or so of these is trivial and commonplace these days.
• Large downloads- I recently reinstalled my laptop and I must have downloaded at least another 15GB of legitimate applications to get it up and running again as I like it. Lets say there’s a new operating system release and you do this to 8 computers in a household. Boom, 120GB used.
• Streaming Music- Pandora is constantly streaming high quality audio to the house, if not several streaming in parallel.
• Rich websites- Websites now are larger and more complex than ever. I shudder to think about using Facebook through 14,400 baud modem which was commonplace 10 years ago in many households.
• Backup services- If you’re using something like Mozy to backup your entire computer and you multiply this by 8 or so, then you’ve got a problem with Comcast suddenly. Yes, the backup (after the initial) should only do diffs, but still the initial usage is a problem.
• Professional use- I work from home often. VMWare images, Photoshop files, huge amounts of code, video, logs, Skype calls and audio go over my connection daily. This has got to add up.
• Gaming- Xbox, Playstation and PC games eat bandwidth as well from gameplay but also patches, downloads and voice chat.

I do think that a single individual would have to try pretty hard to use up 250GB/month, but a common household in the Cambridge/Boston area of 20-something tech professionals can tear through it like we can a keg. A typical evening might be something like this:

• Roommate A is watching Lost streaming from Hulu in HD in their bedroom.
• Roommate B is downloading software updates on their computer
• Roommate C is downloading some public domain/open source torrents
• Roommate D is chatting on Skype video and playing WoW
• Roommate E is playing the Xbox 360
• The Playstation 3 is Folding
• 6+ smart phones are connected and doing their thing

8 Computers?

That number is actually low. We’ve got 6 fulltime people living in my house. Add in three significant others that are often here, and the fact that most of us have more than one computer or computer-like device and we’ve actually got around 20 devices on the network. When we’ve had friends over we’ve probably hit near 50-60 devices on the network before counting everyone’s iPhones and laptops. Game systems, netbooks, an OLPC, iPhones, security cameras, sometimes some servers and a ton of laptops. It all counts.

250GB Cap Workaround

From what I understand  you can’t ask them to upgrade your 250GB home package to something higher. They’ll give you faster packages so you can burn through it faster, but not bigger. You can’t buy two packages either and load balance in a single household. But there is a workaround, although I haven’t tried it.

If you call and order a small business package, it will cost you a bit more, but they won’t bug you about needing cable TV and the top speed of the package isn’t as high- but you are free of bandwidth caps.

Moving to the Future

While I don’t have any hard numbers on this, I feel that I use approximately 2x as much bandwidth online every year as I did the prior year. This has been a fairly consistent path for the past 15 years that I’ve been online. My usage goes up, but so does the complexity of the content that I’m downloading. With upcoming services like OnLive that promise 1080p gaming streaming into your household, more HD streaming, the release of 2K/4K video to the consumer market, more connected devices and greater cloud computing this problem isn’t going away.

I realize that Comcast needs to protect themselves, but it isn’t like they are on the edge of profitability. They are massively profitable in fact. Yet, they should also realize that this is a system and market that is quickly growing and will continue to do so. Equipment is getting faster and cheaper too so the upgrades shouldn’t be too painful to keep up with the curve. 2011, we will need 500GB/month and in 2012 we will need at least 1TB/month of transfer available.

I’m on my fourth Apple laptop, but I think that’s where it will stay for a quite some time. Apple doesn’t have anything new that interests me.

I’ve had:

• G4 iBook 800
• Macbook Pro 15″ 2ghz
• Macbook Pro 17″ 2.4ghz (gamerDNA provided, and thus i sold the 15″)
• Macbook Pro 15″ 2.5ghz, mid – 2008 model(purchased after gamerDNA)

This isn’t the monobody slick new one. Yet- I think it is far better than what is currently offered. The good news is that you should be able to pick these up for under $1,000 easily if you look in the right places.

Why is it better? So many reasons:

• Far better keyboard – The keys have more travel, the keys are curved inward and provide better feedback.
• Real mouse button – I often don’t use it, but when I want it it really is nice.
• ExpressCard/34 slot – The 17″ is the only model to offer it now, which is $3K
• Firewire 400 and 800 ports, two USB ports – The new ones only have a single FW800, which is backward compatible, but annoying since I have a FW400 audio interface and several hard drives that don’t like being chained with an audio interface
• Matte Screen – I hate gloss screens. You can pay more for the 17″ model to have a matte these days, but it isn’t worth the cost.
• 512MB Video Memory – I know the new ones have a slightly faster graphics card, but the memory is only 256MB on the 15″ models.
• Same processor – The processor is still an Intel Core 2 Duo. They offer the 2.53ghz standard now. Mine is ‘just’ 2.5ghz. Big deal.
• DVI Output – Sorry Apple, but DisplayPort isn’t as common as DVI. I carry around adaptors anyway for VGA, but I don’t see what DisplayPort buys me today. I do rather like that the new 27″ iMac allows you to use the screen as an external monitor for another computer. I hope they do the same on laptops soon.
• Easier to play Operation – I really can’t imaging that the Monobody is all that easy to get inside or work on. I haven’t tried, but it is probably either really easy, or really hard. I’m guessing really hard. I’m thinking of hacking mine to put in some SSD drives instead of the optical drive soon. Or maybe I’ll just get the ExpressCard/34 SSD.
• Removable Battery – I don’t buy the argument that everyone will carry about extra batteries. They don’t. How many people do you know carry charged extras? Yet, it is nice to be able to replace yours easily. I threw a new one in mine and rather enjoy being able to do so without a reset even.

About the only thing I like about the new ones better is that I can pay out the nose for 8GB of memory in them instead of the 4GB that I have in mine. If you’ve got 2GB in your Macbook Pro you can upgrade for around $100 from Crucial and installation takes about 3 minutes. I recently put a 500GB 7200rpm Western Digital drive in mine, which has made for a nice speed boost in loading applications. They haven’t upgraded the stock hard drive size since mine was purchased either.

My Macbook Pro does everything that the new ones do and more. They’ve done firmware updates lately and added in things like 4-finger mouse controls and such. I’d like an 8-core Mac Pro with 24GB Ram and 4 video cards, but really this machine does 99.9% of what I realistically need on a daily basis. Oh and it plays modern games just fine!

If you do happen to pick up one however, try as hard as possible to find one with Applecare. I had my keyboard/mouse die the other day and because of Applecare I was able to get a repair within 48 hours. 100% worth it.