Endicia Internet Postage: Not VERY Recommended!

UPDATE: Monday, February 28, the CEO of Endicia contacted me to apologize and give me free service – for life. I don’t know if that’s something I should be telling the world, but Mr. Whitehouse once before responded to a problem I had in a very courteous way. And while one might make the argument that we shouldn’t have to contact a CEO to get our problems solved, I’ll say in the case of Endicia, I have felt like problems have been addressed quite cordially (quite being quite an understatement in this case) and left me with the impression that Endicia is a company that learns from its mistakes and moves on.  How a company handles its customers’ problems is really the most important thing when all is said and done.  I’m also not indifferent to a business model that is not high margin by any stretch of the imagination. – Rob

This is a letter I sent to Endicia’s CEO.  You know when you do business with a company resentfully?  When you wish you felt like you had other reasonable choices so you could take your business elsewhere?  Endicia is one of those companies.  Stamps.com is a lot better, and why they have not come out with a Mac version of their software I have no idea.

Dear Mr. Whitehouse,

I’m not exactly sure of this date but I believe in April of 2010 my debit card was reissued and as a result, when Endicia went to charge the old card on file, it got a declined message that caused it to shut down my account. When I called and updated the debit card on file, the account was restored. There was no mention of a credit for lack of service usage. Now while the employee politely explained that your system shuts accounts down for certain decline messages, it was clearly an error in how your accounting system works and needed to be changed. When an account is shut down, the service log and history are inaccessible, service is suspended, and I am unable to retrieve the data on my hard drive containing hundreds of shipments.

Well this apparently happened again last week, for which I figured it out last Friday night.

There are a number of problems with how all of this works:

  1. You did not contact me in either of these instances to alert me to a billing problem with my card.
  2. I can’t log in to update my billing information. To add insult to injury there were 13 people on hold when I just called. No way.
  3. When you suspend service, you owe the customer a credit for service reflecting the time period for which service was suspended. As in, you’re not entitled to charge for service you didn’t provide!
  4. There is no notification of the suspension of service sent to the customer.

There are some long standing problems that make it appear that Endicia is not moving forward as a modern business in implementing some commonplace and customer-friendly accounting practices in general:

  1. You send me an email after you have charged my debit card and sorry man, but that’s not how it works. You send me a statement and tell me what my charges are this month and then you tell me that the charges will be billed and when they will be billed to the credit card I have on file. That’s how a “billing method on file” system works.
  2. The receipt send is not clear enough. You should be confirming the $15.95 standard monthly charge in addition to the insurance charges (or possible other charges?) in the email.
  3. Customers should be presented with a way to click to a report of the aforementioned charges so they can review the items. I think this is commonly referred to as “detailed billing”.
  4. And no, checking the chronological activity log does not suffice.

People often do business with companies because they have to, and that’s sort of the case with Endicia. You’re a hassle – only occasionally but always unnecessarily so, and I keep desperately trying to find other ways to get my postage done from another company to automate my business, but so far, nobody is doing anything with Mac. I am a “resentful customer” – I use the service, recommend it to no one, am generating interest for other companies to come in and do a million times better, and when I can finally switch, I’ll never stop clamoring about how great thew guy is and how awful Endicia was for the most trivial things that ground my business to a halt from time to time. I hope you see why these problems that make me the resentful customer are toxic to your bottom line. I use social media and this letter is going on my blog.

Please tell someone to unlock the account so I can log in and update the billing method.

Robert Reale