Customer service at its best

One hears many complaints about customer service these days, how it takes too long to get hold of a representative, how they read from a script and make you try things you already tried, and so forth. But the bottom line is, do they fix the problem, or can they give you an idea as to when it might be fixed?

Since getting a new computer a few months ago, I have been listening to music through the Yahoo LAUNCHcast Radio program. A couple of days ago, it stopped working. It still manages to play the ad, of course, but then, I get a mysterious error message (Error Code 8, which is its own brand of unhelpful). So I e-mailed Yahoo "Customer Care," and this is what I received back:

Thank you for contacting us about the problem you are experiencing with

Yahoo! Music services.

We regret you are having concerns accessing LAUNCHcast Radio.

The music team and engineers are aware of this problem. Unfortunately, we do not have a set time for a resolution. All issues are prioritized based on a number of factors including issue severity and number of customers affected. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, and do appreciate your patience.

Thank you again for writing to Yahoo! Music. Please don't hesitate to email us back if we can be of further assistance.

Regards,

What isn't wrong with this response? First, it's clearly a form letter, given the odd spacing. Then, they're "aware of this problem," but offer no fix, no promise of a fix, and no notification if there ever is a fix (do they expect me to crank it up once a week or so to see if it works? I'm far more likely to delete it from my machine and never think of it again).

And is there anyone who isn't bothered by the "further assistance" line? Hey, Yahoo, you haven't been of any assistance yet, let alone "further."

This, then, may be the ultimate downfall of the free model espoused by industry experts (I wrote about this last week). It's all a matter of incentives. Yahoo has no incentive to fix my problem; I'm not a subscriber, I have been content with the free version (granted, I'm not listening to the ads any more, but the loss of one user isn't sufficient to make them sweat about that).

Worse yet, they had no big incentive to get it to work right in the first place. As long as only a few people have this problem, Yahoo can maintain their projections for number of users and charge for the ads accordingly. What is the threshold at which a problem becomes worth fixing in the free, push-out-to-everyone market, 1000 problems, 10000 problems, what?

So each of us who are consumers of free or near-free mass services need to understand, there is no "customer care" for us. Have a problem with Twitter, or Facebook, or Yahoo, or Google, or so on, that's your problem in the magical free model - good luck, and "don't hesitate to email us back."