Giving up on FON

I was eagerly await­ing FON’s entry on the Dan­ish mar­ket. They even decided (clever move, btw.) to give away a bunch of routers for free instead of spend­ing too much money on tra­di­tional marketing.

So I ordered one way before christ­mas and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Ok, maybe some con­tact was needed. So I con­tacted them. Waited. Waited more. Con­tacted again. And again. The third time, a mes­sage in their web­site from hell (seri­ously, this is 2007) said they’d been hav­ing some trou­ble and any­one that haven’t heard from them should try again. So I did. More wait­ing. Still nothing.

I’m not sure if I tried again or if that was the time where I decided to look else­where for help. In their forum, it seemed that a FON employee was pretty present. I signed up, hoped that all the com­plaints about the man­ual acti­va­tion from the FON staff were about every­one else but me and hoped for the best.

I still haven’t heard any­thing. Leav­ing me with no FON router, appa­rantly no way — at all — to get in touch with FON. And a pretty bad expe­ri­ence with what was sup­posed to be their cus­tomer sup­port. One thing is their web­site that is close to use­less as they’ve obvi­ously gone for some stan­dard order­ing setup that makes it wuite hard to input an address that’ll make sense to the poor deliv­ery guy (which is prob­a­bly what hap­pened to my router). But it’s far worse that some­thing as sim­ple as an email doesn’t get answered. Come on peo­ple, play ball.

If I believed that a sec­ond order would be of any help to my sit­u­a­tion, I would gladly pay the few dol­lars a router costs. That’s not the point. The thing is…I don’t. Just as I havent’t been both­ered to help my mom get a replace­ment for the one she actu­ally _did_ receive but appeared to be bro­ken. Too much work…

All this just to say, that even if you do run a suc­cess­ful com­pany that’s prob­a­bly drown­ing in logis­tics and sup­port requests and what have you, ignor­ing your cus­tomers hurt you. Make sure you’re set up prop­erly before open­ing your doors.

Beta on web apps, sure. Beta on cus­tomer sup­port and logis­tics, no way.