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One day last month, Kansas City resident Victoria Tane's Google Fiber Internet service stopped working.
It turned out that Google Fiber cut off her Internet access because she owed 12 cents after an odd series of events involving an unused e-mail address, automated customer account systems, and a sales tax increase. Google Fiber quickly restored her connection and forgave the 12-cent balance after she called customer service, but the incident highlights a problem that Google Fiber may need to fix in order to prevent other customers from losing service over similarly trivial amounts.
The Kansas City Star of Missouri detailed what happened in a story yesterday. Tane has Google Fiber's basic 5Mbps Internet service which has no monthly payment and required only a $300 construction fee. Google Fiber no longer offers that package to new customers, but those who signed up for it and paid the construction fee can use the service with no further payments for a total of seven years.
Tane "paid the total upfront" a year ago, the Star wrote. "$300 to connect, plus $25.08 for taxes and fees. Transaction done. Free for seven years."
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday September 18 2017, @02:43PM (2 children)
It would have been better to just apply the payment in full right off the bat. The balancesheets don't care whether you're short 12 cents or 12k$, and proposing to write some fuzzy algorithm to determine "how much is too much" is just laborious and a waste of time.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Tuesday September 19 2017, @09:44AM (1 child)
First off, you're obviously right in this case.
Secondly, the point of the marketeer was that converting someone who is not a customer into a customer takes effort, which can be expressed (as all things done by companies) in a monetary amount.
In general, it would make a lot of sense for companies to make sure they don't annoy customers over what amounts to negligible trivialities, but will hurt the relationship with the customer. Shutting someone down over 12 cents is something that should not be done automatically, or probably ever -- irrespective of whether the customer is at fault or the company did silly bookkeeping that led to this deficiency.
So, once again, in this situation (get lump sum for deal), you're right: handling it in one go would have prevented any problems years down the line. But in general, accounting shouldn't be annoying customers over tiny amounts of money, because annoying a customer is far more costly than the tiny amount of money. Basically: don't expend effort to do things that will end up costing you more money than if you didn't spend the effort.
Seems like a no-brainer.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 19 2017, @03:04PM
Oh, sure--from a marketing perspective, it's definitely not worth it to bug them over 12 cents. I was speaking from the perspective of the programmers who have to write the software to do it because the business logic doesn't want to just do a simple one-time lump sum for some reason.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"