I have a story about customer service that happened this week. I’m reading Edmund Morris’s book about Thomas Edison, which he tells from the end and works back to the beginning. I’m not sure why. But I’m going to use the same approach.
To begin at the end, the good news is the story ends happily. I got a customer service rep from QuickBooks on the phone. They were able to help me re-connect our RPV bank account. The trick was, I had to log onto to the web-version, not the app version, and then go through the connection process. That simple solution wasn’t mentioned in any of the FAQs. Seems like they might want to mention that! The customer service rep ended the call by telling me, “Please call us anytime. That’s what we’re here for.”
Before that, when I first called Customer Service, I got a recording that instructed me to hang up and go back to the webpage with the FAQs! No way I was going to do that, but clearly they were doing everything possible to prevent me from calling a live person.
Working backwards, I was on the QuickBooks help page, looking for help. Why wouldn’t it connect with my bank account? There were FAQs, but none addressed my problem. I found a chat function, but got into an eternal loop, they couldn’t answer my question. They provided an option to ask for a human, but every time I clicked on that, it sent me back to the FAQ page! Finally, I went to Google and found a QuickBooks customer service number. It was nowhere on the QB site.
Before that, I followed the steps to connect the bank account with QuickBooks. It gave me an error message, but I received an email saying that it had connected. So, I wasn’t sure if it worked or not. I assumed it did, until the old connection expired and it didn’t work at all.
So, looking at the whole experience, it is amusing that QB did everything possible to prevent me from contacting their customer service rep, but the rep was happy for me to call. Little did she know they were hiding her.
The funny thing is, I am happy with QuickBooks. We’ve used it for 6 years. But clearly they have some room for improvement in the Customer Service department. Not with the personnel, but with the systems that could answer my questions and in letting me find that person!
