WagJag CEO defends company’s customer service record in the face of complaints

Man, what’s going on over at WagJag? What seems to be a typical, run-of-the-mill daily deal website is getting a some very negative feedback from dissatisfied users over issues like technical problems, poor customer service and, worse yet, no way to get refunds and many instances of customers being charged several times over for their purchases.

Check out the comments on this Techvibes story or the wall on WagJag’s Facebook page. There is customer after customer complaining about these issues. What gives? Isn’t WagJag’s success supposed to be predicated on word-of-mouth and social media buzz coming from satisfied customers? It doesn’t seem like the buzz is all that positive.

According to WagJag founder and CEO Jeremy Zuker [pictured], these unsatisfied customers are a drop in the bucket compared to the number of satisfied customers and successful transactions his website completes. In an interview with Techvibes, Zuker said that all emails are responded to within 24 hours by his support staff and refunds are never an issue.

“Customer service is a huge thing for us,” he said. “We have been growing at a ridiculous pace by any stretch, I would suggest faster than the industry itself. And because of that, we literally have tens of thousands of transactions going on all the time, and in some ways we’ve been dealing with this massive growth in volume of transactions. At the same time we’ve been building our group, hiring people like crazy around that whole customer experience area.”

Zuker has said that his company has experienced “growing pains” because of their phenomenal growth over the past year. He said that 40 customer service staff have been hired since March, and that they are continuously hiring more. Zuker suggested that dealing with growth may have led to some negative experiences for customers.

Zuker mentioned that in some cases customers may have misunderstood when vouchers would be emailed to them and gotten the impression that there was an error. He also said that many complaints are probably the result of user error.

“Often we see people getting emails directly to their junk mail box. Sometimes we’ll reply 10, 15 times and have each one go into junk and people aren’t able to find them,” he said. “Of course it’s possible that something slips through the cracks, and if it does we want to figure out what it is and make it right.”

“We take this very seriously, and it’s disheartening to see some of these [complaints]. At the same time, I know how many transactions we process. And I also know that 99.99 per cent of those are flawless and we get lots of people writing in to us saying how much they love the service and how easy it was.”

Zuker is probably right about the problem customers being a vocal minority and outweighed by the satisfied ones. But when the complaints are about the same issues all the time; namely, poor communication, being charged for more purchases than ordered, and not receiving refunds; shouldn’t WagJag take some responsibility for these problems?

Even if the problems are user error each and every time, it should be up to WagJag to better communicate how to use their service and respond to customers’ problems. And if WagJag was just experienced growing pains, they should be proactively hiring to keep up with demand and keep customers satisfied.

Zuker mentioned in his interview that since the daily deal space is so new, it’s sometimes hard to plan for unexpected growth or predict where every problem will come from. He’s probably right. But I’d like to know if anyone has experience these problems in using other daily deal websites. Sound off in the comments section if you’ve had an experience, positive or negative with WagJag or other daily deal websites.