Hockey Night in Where?

Ok hockey fans, the story around the Hockey Night in Canada theme song has been all over the headlines this past couple of days, and like me, most of you have been stunned, mad and/or confused over the whole thing.

I was a bit upset to find out that CBC will no longer continue to use the Hockey Night in Canada theme song as part of their opening for hockey broadcasts. Like so many others, the song has been a part of my childhood while growing up and without it, hockey on Saturday nights would not be the same. I was even more shocked when I learned that CTV was able to purchase the rights of the song after CBC failed to work out a deal with Copyright Music & Visuals.

Was it a mistake on CBC’s part to pass up on the tune that has been a part of Canadian hockey history? I think so. But they do have a contest open to the public to find a replacement song that will award $100,000 to whoever can come up with a new theme song. This will create some noise but it will be drowned out by the song we so dearly love, playing on TSN.

For those of you who want to listen to an audio clip of the theme song, it’s below. It get’s you pumped just listening to it doesn’t it?!?

The psychology of entrepreneurial misjudgment

Bar none, The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment is one of the best reads I’ve had this year (it’s a blog post).

If you don’t know Marc Andreessen of Ning and Netscape fame, his entrepreneurial insights are head and shoulders above just about anything you can find anywhere – check out his blog.

P.S. Marc…where’s part 2?

P.P.S. I’m aware I’m due for part 2 of this.

Bell Canada lowers my expectations

There are certain things I expect from my telephone company. The first is that they know my phone number.

Apparently, even this is too much to expect from Bell Canada, as I discovered in my still-ongoing quest to get the FreshBooks phones working the way we’d like.

“Hi, this is FreshBooks”

A few months ago we started calling our users on a regular basis, to find out how we could serve them even better. We found an inordinate number of people just plain ignored our calls.

That’s when it dawned on us: if “2NDSITE INC” showed up on your caller ID in the middle of the day, would you know that’s our corporate name, or figure it was a telemarketer?

We also had a long-standing issue where incoming calls to our main number weren’t rolling over to one of our secondary lines. With our call volume increasing daily, it was high time to resolve both issues.

This should be quick, right?

I called 310-BELL. After navigating obnoxious voice menus and enduring a couple transfers, I struggled to explain things to the service representative. Seemed simple enough to me: change our caller ID listing and fix up our rollover service. Unfortunately, communicating this proved tough.

Finally I broke through the language barrier, and she submitted two work orders to two different departments. It would be completed in a few days, I wrote down two confirmation numbers, and I hung up thinking, “all done!”

This would become a familiar routine.

A comedy of errors

At one point our rollover service started working correctly, only to stop a few weeks later. On another occasion they updated our caller ID listing for some of our outgoing lines, but not all. And, of course, there were all those times my calls led to no changes whatsoever. Nothing went right.

But the “winner,” without a doubt, is best explained with an image. What you see on the right was our caller ID for lines one through five a few weeks ago.

Now, in spite of everything that went wrong previously, a typo might still be understandable; people make mistakes. But look carefully at line 5.

Yes, that’s right. Bell Canada got our Bell Canada phone number wrong.

Another fifteen-minute call led to another apology, another due date and another confirmation number. Three days later our name was spelled right; our phone number was still wrong. It still is.

I can’t bring myself to call 310-BELL a seventh time. My will to fix this is fading. Maybe this is as good as it gets?

I’ve seen tales of poor customer service with far worse consequences, but this one might take the cake for sheer ineptitude.

PayPal: Worst. Support. Ever!

If you read our blog often, you might get the impression we’ve got something against PayPal; well, as of today, I for one officially do.

First: a FreshBooks support story

Today one of our clients’ staff members called in with a problem she was experiencing: some reporting features weren’t working the way she expected.

First I took the time to go through exactly what she was doing, step by step. This always works far better than the usual “describe your problem” you’ll often get elsewhere, because instead of trying to interpret their words, you can just hit that stumbling block right there with the user; it’s like the mechanic hopping in your passenger’s seat. Nobody does that anymore, but it’s still the only way to be sure.

While I was looking at their FreshBooks system, though, I noticed last month’s payment hadn’t gone through.

A glitch in the matrix

We use PayPal’s Payflow Pro product for charging our users. Logging into their system, it appeared the regular monthly transaction had simply declined.

This happens all the time, and it’s often a bank issue; heck, the same user successfully made a separate purchase hours later, so obviously this was just a hiccup. Normally our system resolves these “hiccups” a day later. But for some reason that hadn’t happened here, so the account was past-due—but the user hadn’t done anything wrong!

Since their next regular monthly payment is due tomorrow, I wasn’t just going to retry the payment—the problem wasn’t their fault, so it wouldn’t be very polite to charge them twice within a few hours. So I called the client, explained, and apologized for what happened. Thankfully he was very gracious about the situation, and said it would be fine to charge his card twice.

So after thanking him and hanging up, I clicked the button to retry the payment. That was when I got a very odd error message (which seems to be PayPal’s specialty):

Error: Error in forcing the recurring profile payment: Cannot force a future payment

Admittedly, I did not invent the Gregorian calendar. But to my knowledge, September 13, 2007 is not in the future.

Next: a PayPal support nightmare

I phoned PayPal. After a few minutes navigating their automated system, I waited ten minutes before I had a service representative on the other end. It quickly became clear neither her, nor her technician’s manual, had ever used Payflow Pro before.

I explained my situation, and she seemed very confused. Since there was no number accompanying the error message, she said she couldn’t look it up. So she decided the error message didn’t matter; instead she just spent the next five minutes repeating, “you can’t re-process if the card failed with response code 12.”

For those of you who don’t speak technical gobbledygook, she was saying it isn’t possible to retry a declined payment. (Yeah, it must have been one of those single-use credit cards.)

Trying not to get frustrated, I asked why there was a retry button, why I was receiving an error I’d never received before, why the error message was complaining about the transaction being in the future, why she was calling something impossible that I do multiple times every single day.

So she put me on hold while she went to talk to her supervisor… for ten minutes.

From bad to worse

When she finally returned, her first words were, “are you still there?”

(Folks: if you put somebody on hold long enough that you have to ask if they bothered to stay on the line, that’s a bad thing.)

I replied with a “yes,” only to have her repeat what I’m guessing is PayPal’s new mantra: “you can’t re-process if the card failed with response code 12.”

Apparently those ten minutes were spent fixing a sandwich.

There were no higher-level support folks I could talk to, she said; she’d already talked to her supervisor, and that was all she could do. The error was because I was trying to do the impossible. If there was anything wrong with the gateway, it already would have been fixed. Up is down, the sun revolves around the earth, there are five lights. Thank you and goodbye.

Dejected, angry, yet not the least bit surprised, I hung up, having re-affirmed everything I ever believed about PayPal.

In conclusion

For what it’s worth, before VeriSign sold Payflow Pro to PayPal, the interface and support for this service were amazing. So VeriSign, if you’re listening… could you buy Payflow back?

And to the rest of you, could you share some of your horror stories? I could use a little consolation here.

PayPal Payflow Pro down “agin”

Ever since around 5:00 pm last night, the PayPal PayFlow Pro reports have been down, making it almost unusable for us (and probably thousands of others).

Here is the message that comes up when we try to view the payment history of a recurring profile:

PayPal has been making a lot of changes to all their services for the last six months. Many of the changes have been great. I love their new logo, and I love some of the improvements they have made to the usability of PayPal Standard. But when they told us last month they were discontinuing the old VeriSign Manager and forcing us to use the new PayPal Manager to manage our Payflow Pro accounts, we were none too pleased.

On the surface, the new PayPal Manager “looks” very pretty… but when you try to use it to manage recurring profiles, it is a royal pain in the ass. To search for a recurring profile you have to:

1. Find the link to recurring billing that is on the very bottom corner of an extremely busy home page with way too much information on it:

2. Find the Manage Profiles link on another very busy page;

3. Click the “search by” drop-down menu and select Profile ID, then finally paste in your recurring profile ID and click Search.

Three steps doesn’t seem like much, but when you are managing countless recurring profiles, it is a big step backwards from the VeriSign Manager page that let us search recurring profiles in two very clear clicks. I think the most annoying part is having to drop down to search by Profile ID. I wish I had a screenshot from the old VeriSign Manager search page, but they had four or five input boxes for information to search on so you didn’t have to use a drop-down. Seems like only a slight difference, but it really annoys everyone here who has had to use it so far.

Playing around a little more with PayPal PayFlow Pro Manager, I have realized there is a more direct way to get to recurring profiles (Service Settings -> Manage Profiles). Nonetheless, I didn’t figure that out until just now. I’m willing to bet they didn’t invest much time in watching people use their product (something FreshBooks is going to be investing a lot more time in ourselves).

Anyway, since the reports are still down, I figured what better time to vent than now? Let’s just hope they aren’t down for long.

How’s a billion? That enough?

Could you ever imagine making a billion dollars in a year? Not your company — you.

Rest assured it’s not me or anyone else here at FreshBooks who made a billion dollars last year, but Paul Kedrosky just posted a list of hedge fund managers who did:

Wow… I saw this yesterday and I still don’t know what to say.