Flexible Web Services Info Tech Support

Setting up web sites is a lot of fun. Trying to find a customer portal where customers can leave comments is even more fun, especially when your testing them out to see how they will perform. Customer Lobby is one of those types of sites. They are great about setting up a free account and giving you the widgets to plug into your site so customers can leave comments. But, during the 30 day trial, the account rep is so eager to help up sell the product that he disables your account forcing you to call him.

Of course, the phone number on the account is for business purposes, I don't expect and wouldn't want sales calls. In fact, if I wanted to call about a product, I would make that call, but when you register for web widgets be prepared to get tons of calls. There are a couple of other  services I'll be reviewing and so will not discuss them here, but be warned. It's almost the same as registering for spam.

I had registered my site on customer lobby, added the widgets and prepared get a few past customers to post comments, but before I could get there, they called my business number and the person who answered the phone didn't know what it was about and said stop calling. That'd be expected since most sales calls are handled that way. I certainly am not going to pow wow my entire staff on what sales people we should take calls from. I have a department entirely dedicated to setting up my internet presence.

Customer Lobby's response. Deactivate the account. I called. The person answering the call was surprised that my free trial had been suspended. She said she'll have my rep call me back within a few minutes. Expect a call from the 510 area code. I gave her the number to my web guys and they waited. We got the call. My rep said, I'm the one who turned off your account. I wanted to make sure you had the best we could offer you. Of course he would say that, he's a sales person. The best they can offer certainly isn't going to be free. I could easily see the pricing on the web site and I had already picked the package I wanted and I didn't really need a sales guy to sell me their best.

The entire approach soured my research and we removed the widgets and I concurred with my staff and told them to get lost.