Here comes the rain again…

Falling on my head like a tragedy…

I heard the song on my Treo while showering this morning and it fits my day well. Not only has the ACTUAL rain returned, and it’s nice and wet outside, but I’m seeing clouds forming and sprinkling on me in my work as well.

Remember last time, when we sent letters to people in preparation for a shift in our services, and I was deluged with all kinds of mail in response? Well, tonight, or tomorrow, is the actual shift that the message was to prepare them for. I saw that coming. What I didn’t see coming was the price change in our other service, the one NOT being changed or shifted. For weeks and months I was told that we weren’t changing the prices of that part of the service, and that people would even be able to change their subscriptions to the yearly from the monthly without any problems. When asked, I would pass that information on to the customer as I was told to. Just yesterday I am told that they WILL be changing the price, and that if someone decides to alter their account for any reason, they’ll be subject to the new pricing plan. All this without any notice to me, let alone the customers. Yes, in the fine print on our site we say that we reserve the right to change things without notice. We just exercised that right.

Well, it looks like one of our VPs let the cat out of the bag to several groups of customers, and so last night I was deluged with desperate requests to switch their accounts from monthly to yearly for fear of having to pay a higher price later on. That’s fine, except that with our poor back-office support, this process is not a quick and easy one, and even requires the customer to repurchase their subscription of the desired type. There will undoubtedly be some people who assumed I could flip a switch and that they would be home free, and not get the e-mail explaining to them what to do next until it’s too late. Then I’ll get a nastygram about it and have to figure out some solution that doesn’t currently exist.

Yay for me.

So, either tonight or tomorrow, we’re also performing this paradigm shift in the way our web site services work, and I’ll have another deluge of e-mails and phone calls dealing with people who need help using the considerably more intuitive system, or people who felt they didn’t get what they felt they deserved, as well as more people who just didn’t want anything, and didn’t read the bit at the end of the email about how to block all messages from us in the future.

Bleh. Already having a crappy day, and it’s only going to get crappier.