Michigan Telephone, VoIP and Broadband blog

You may have noticed (probably not) that I almost never advise people to complain to the Better Business Bureau. The reason is that most people have a misconception of what the BBB is all about. Some think it’s an arm of the government (it isn’t) or that it’s a non-profit organization (it isn’t, at least not everywhere). Generally speaking, they make their money by selling memberships to businesses, and those memberships aren’t exactly what I would call inexpensive. Wikipedia notes:

Companies that are invited to join the BBB as accredited busineses [sic] are required to pay annual dues and to meet and maintain requirements of accreditation. Businesses who agree to the BBB dispute resolution procedures may identify themselves as accredited. If accredited busineses [sic] fail to meet these standards, their accreditation will be revoked.

And further down in the same Wikipedia article:

The BBB has been said to be less effective in complaint resolution than governmental consumer protection agencies. As it is not a government agency, its capabilities are confined to reporting bad, or allegedly bad, business practices to the public and the proper authorities.

Other criticisms against the BBB include the fact that its revenue comes from accredited businesses, raising the question about its partiality on handling disputes and complaints when the BBB may jeopardize its own funding. …..

You might infer from this that if the Better Business Bureau expels a business, that means that business must be really bad, otherwise they wouldn’t want to give up the membership fees paid by that company. Except, you have to remember that all that the BBB has to offer to anyone is its reputation – no one would care what they said about a business, if they hadn’t established a perception of credibility in the mind of the public. For the BBB, credibility is everything.

So that may explain why, if a business racks up a large number of complaints – whether justified or not, whether resolved or not – the BBB would start to distance themselves from that business. The business may be trying as hard as it can to keep customers happy, but if circumstances beyond the control of the business intervene, and a lot of unhappy customers start complaining, and the press on the company starts to turn negative, the BBB may not want to be seen as giving its stamp of approval to that company. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the company owners are bad people, or even that they don’t care what customers think. It’s all about perception. If a significant number of people think that the company is not doing right by its customers, then the BBB may decide they don’t want any of the mud to splash off onto them.

The reason this is relevant to this blog is because today, the news came out that ViaTalk was expelled from the BBB in their area of upstate New York. And as you can probably guess, ViaTalk’s problems started when they had a massive influx of new customers after SunRocket suddenly shut down. Few small businesses can deal with a sudden and temporary massive upswing in customers. If you’ve ever found that you couldn’t get a motel room anywhere within a 100 mile radius of some one-time or once-a-year event during the time that event was taking place, you’ve run into the same situation – the accommodations industry would love to be able to cater to every customer that has need of their services, but sometimes it’s just impossible. ViaTalk (and every other VoIP provider) was blindsided by the totally unexpected demise of SunRocket, but ViaTalk was hit the hardest because their unlimited plan was the closest to what former SunRocket customers were used to – in particular, a discount off the normal monthly rate for signing up for one year of service in advance.

Now, I’m certainly not saying that mistakes weren’t made, or that ViaTalk couldn’t have possibly done any better – I wasn’t there, I don’t know. In any case, this was the first time they’d been thrust into such a situation, so they didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. But one thing I do know is that ViaTalk’s owner, Brendan Brader, has been more willing than just about anyone else in the industry to go into forums (particularly the ViaTalk forum on BroadbandReports.com) and answer questions and respond to criticisms. In response to the loss of BBB membership, Mr. Brader commented:

Hi,

We’ll get this taken care of soon. They’re not being very resonable IMHO as the issues were all responded to on our side within a reasonable timeframe. There was a spike in complaints mostly due to the huge spike in signups and the related overload from the SR debacle, and they’re revoking it based upon the % increase in complaints, ignoring the fact that they have since gone down again and all of them were addressed by our side.

-Brendan

And then, in a follow-up message:

The response I got from our guy here in charge of dealing with the BBB regarding this was:

We’ve been working with the Better Business bureau since the beginning of ViaTalk, but our membership was revoked recently due to the number of complaints placed against us during the fallout after the demise of Sunrocket. All of the complaints were easily resolved, and we kept in close contact with our contact at the BBB to track and respond to the complaints as they came in. Unfortunately, we’re told that the BBB Membership standards include a limitation of the actual volume of complaints over a given time regardless of our proof of resolution. It’s a tough penalty, considering the situation and the efforts we made to keep things on the up and up.

-Brendan

(Those posts are from this thread)

I just hope that the press doesn’t turn this into a week or two of bashing ViaTalk, and by extension, the entire VoIP industry. So far the articles I’ve seen have been reasonably fair, but this is the sort of thing can easily be unfairly slanted by the media. Something like this could happen to any VoIP company, if they happen to have a service plan that closely matches the plan of another VoIP company that exits the industry without advance notice. Here are links to the first articles I’ve seen (these links may not work for very long):

ViaTalk expelled from BBB – The Business Review (Albany)
ViaTalk expelled from Better Business Bureau – The Buzz: Business news

And by the way, I’m not in the least unsympathetic to the customers (or potential customers) that had problems with ViaTalk, but when a multitude of people are trying to get service all at once, and there are not enough trained employees to handle the crush, things are gonna happen. Hopefully, everyone affected has received some form of satisfaction by now.

The thing that may work in ViaTalk’s favor is that the Consumer Electronics Show starts Monday, so all the tech writers will have plenty of other things to write and blog about!

Edit: This story has also made the news page of BroadbandReports.com, and they point out one interesting detail:

The BBB says they received 171 complaints since the company’s file was opened in August 2005, with 142 of those within the last twelve months. According to the agency, 73 of those were fully resolved while 31 saw “delayed resolution.” 65 complaints were never resolved, though the company made every effort to do so. The company did not respond to only three of the complaints.

Only three complaints not responded to, out of how many people attempting to obtain service during that period? I’m fairly sure the number was in the tens of thousands. Seems to me like this BBB was being a bit hard-nosed about the situation!