Though I don’t *always* agree with you, I’m *completely with you* on EarthLink’s customer service. In my opinion, EarthLink’s customer (dis)service is horrendous. They simply aren’t being properly trained or don’t have access to the information or tools they need to perform some necessary operations for their customers. In addition, I believe they’ve outsourced much of their CS department to another country; a few of my friends, some employed by and another formerly employed by Earthlink, have alerted me to this. (At least one EarthLink CS rep has also told me this I was speaking with them.)

I’ve tried cancelling my EarthLink service since the first half of 2005, and I’m still not certain my service has been cancelled. (It’s currently December of 2006.) I signed up for a “deal” in which you would receive a significant discount on the purchase of a Microtel PC if you signed up for 1 year of EarthLink dialup. The day after I signed up for the deal, I had Buyer’s Remorse and so decided to cancel my order for the PC. Microtel had no issue with cancelling my order, but EarthLink would not. They told me there would be a $150 charge if I failed to fulfill my 1 year committment at $21.95/month. I refused to accept a $150 charge to my bank card, so EarthLink refused to cancel my service.

I’ve contacted EarthLink on a number of occasions since then, attempting to cancel my service. On each occasion, representatives have ultimately told me it would not be possible to cancel my service without being charged $150. This has resulted in a monthly EarthLink charge being applied to my bank card each month, often producing an overdraft fee by my bank. Did I mention that I’ve *never used the service*? I’ve never used the dialup access, nor the “free” email address, nor any of the services I’ve paid for each month. You’ll recall that I first contacted EarthLink the day after my initial signup; on that occasion I’d told them I’d never be using the service. (And I have not.)

Here’s the kicker: Earlier this year I spoke with an EarthLink CS rep who told me he could cancel my service without my being charged $150. Later, I received an email stating that my service had been cancelled, and that I had been charged the $150, along with my next month of service. That’s right — another $21.95 charge. Since then, I’ve been charged $21.95 each month. To sum it up: EarthLink charged me the $150 for not maintaining a 1-year committment to paying for their dialup services, and then the proceeded to continue charging me for their dialup services.

About a week ago, a CS rep finally told me my account has been cancelled; I’ll believe it when I no longer receive charges to my bank account. I’m currently looking into my legal options…

I have everything documented, both written and voice recordings of conversations with CS reps. For example, when I called EarthLink last week, I immediately stated that I was recording the phonecall — I stated this immediately after hearing a similiar (pre-recorded) statement while on hold — and during the conversation I repeatedly mentioned that I was recording the conversation. So I’m prepared to take significant action against EarthLink. (My closest friend at EarthLink has long since moved on to a more honest career at another company, so I’ve no problem suing them, if it comes to that.) Generally, I’m not a litigious person, but EarthLink has really made my life difficult, (over)charging me for services, their CS reps giving me countless “run-arounds”. Consumers don’t deserve this type of (dishonest) treatment.

To Dave Coustan: Frankly, I’d be surprised if I did in fact intro Mike to Weblife, but in the off-chance that I either did, or that my earlier post bumped it up in his queue of sites-to-post-about, I’m sorry for pushing it into gear earlier than your team had anticipated. As you might notice from this post and my earlier one, I _love_ Weblife (hence my being horrified that I might have instigated this earlier-than-planned sort-of negative review). You guys are doing a great job, and you’ve got your product polished, so based on Mike’s post, I’d think you have maybe one minor issue to round off. Good luck!

To both of you and some commenters here: You can’t blame ANY company (no matter how large or small) for trying to tackle the monster Windows market before fully approaching the Mac market – *especially* when there is an offline, software component that needs to be designed and integrated and *especially* when it is still in alpha/beta/preview mode. Even as a non-Mac user, I would find it hard for a Mac user to logically begrudge Earthlink in this situation for pushing out an excellent product to the overwhelmingly large majority of internet users first (i.e., Windows users).

Weekends are usually a little quieter at EarthLink. I can send you replacement “e” and “l” keys if you need them after all of this.

Thanks for taking a look at WebLife — glad that you liked what you saw overall, and I’m sorry to hear about the compatibility confusion. Although the web-based parts of WebLife do work on Macs (just not the client apps), it sounds like the rep. gave you bad information and we will work on nailing all of that language and communication better. And I hear you loud and clear about the need to offer similar services for Mac users as well. Especially because I am one myself.

I’m not sure who the apparent tipster was (the anonymous commenter “other” on the Friday TechCrunch entry), but WebLife is still in sneak preview mode and we would have gladly given you complimentary access so that you could evaluate it as a non-access customer, without a credit card transaction.

What I mean by sneak preview mode is that we’re not yet marketing it outside our base. We’re mainly asking our access customers to try it out and help us refine the experience for our first service pack release and full launch. In fact, we’re asking our customers to help us out by filling out a survey that’s also available from the product page. We’ll add your thoughts to our research too, and we invite you to fill out the survey if you’d like to add your numbers to our stats. Meanwhile, we’re working on things like finalizing our marketing strategies, and completing and expanding our customer service training and testing. Your CS experience shows our work is not yet done in the latter area.

As far as the pricing questions, we recognize that there’s been a boom in online storage services for a while now and prices continue to fall. We see great potential for providing lower cost (maybe even free someday) storage in the not-too-distant future, and we’ll continue to evaluate our pricing structure as we roll out WebLife to a broader audience.

Thanks again. I’m off to herd our other cats back into the bag.

It increases the stickiness of your ISP meaning that even if the core service declines it will be tricky to switch, which is bad for users obviously.

As for your final why not question, doing things requires effort. You always need to have a positive reason to do it rather than not having a negative (”why not?”). In this case the positive is financial gain and perhaps customer gain (=financial gain).

It is ALWAYS a good idea for businesses to provide extra services for their customers. You are probably right that not many people would switch for the sole purpose of WebLife, but there are many ways in which this will benefit them. A few might be:

1. Increased existing customer loyalty. Their current users will be more reluctant to switch services when all their data is tied to Eathlink, plus they won’t want to loose these features by loosing Earthlink.

2. For people who are looking to get Internet access, or have moved and need a new prodiver, these few additional services may tip the scale. Admittedly this market is small, but why not grab them anyway.

3. This is very similar to when ISPs started offering “unrelated” services like email, personal homepages, and web browsing software in the late 80’s. Earthlink is wisely evolving these services as the Net evolves.

4. They’ve got to compete with AOL/Netscape who are moving into this territory.

Besides, they have a ton of programmers, why NOT have a few of them build great web apps?

What is the point of venturing into the Web 2.0 space? Do they think that people are going to think ooo I will change my ISP/get my first ISP as EarthLink since they have all these cool products out?

If that is the idea then EarthLink need to wake up to the reality that more people do not have a choice of ISP. And I would bet a fair sum that of the people that do have the choice between EarthLink and a competitor most of them would not be willing to go through the hassle of changing at all, especially not for such “gimmicks”.

Even if these people did have multiple options, I would be tempted that some would prefer to go with a company that is focusing its efforts on being an ISP rather than trying to compete with Google/Yahoo/Others.