Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Is service failure the 21st century invariant?

Steve recommended Toumani Diabaté's latest album Mondé Variations. Being a Diabaté fan away from a good independent CD store, I rushed to find it on Amazon MP3. It was there, and I downloaded the small album download seed .amz file. I double-clicked on it, the Amazon downloader started, but then I had to pause the downloader because the net were I was (the Monashee backcountry) was just too slow for the download. I had got no tracks at that point. I resumed the download when I returned to faster net. But the downloader claimed that the tracks could not be downloaded. After several go-rounds with Amazon customer service in which they were unable to fix the problem, I asked for my money back.

The question is, does anybody in consumer services care any longer about reliability? I would be willing to pay CD prices (higher than what Amazon MP3 charges) for a solid, high-quality download service. No such luck.

2 comments:

steve said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
steve said...

The past two experiences I've had with Amazon music have been bad. A billing error and a downloading problem that led to a billing error. Repeated emails were frustrating.

They haven't figured it out yet.