We have just finished a disastrous six month flirtation with Vonage, the voice over IP (VOIP) telephony provider. VOIP providers offer a great solution for a fast-growing business. You can run your own exchange software - Asterisk - create conference call dial-ins, allow staff in different countries to share your switchboard - all very useful. Sadly Vonage has all the characteristics of old style telephony businesses: poor quality of service, an inflexible billing structure, hidden charges (they even charge you for the privilege of closing your account) and the appearance but not the reality of good customer service. Their customer service folk are (wearily) polite but all work to a script and know too little about their business to be helpful. They mimic, but don’t replicate the experience of dealing with human beings. Welcome to the revolution, intones the announcement as you reach the automated switchboard. The announcement - a taped British voice - sounds flat, perfunctory. You are talking to a machine with a human voice. And that’s what you get.

Unlike (e.g.) the excellent and reliable Zen Internet, Vonage have no “cancel account” functionality on the web interface. (Why not?) You have to call the company. As the billing lady tried to talk me through a script designed to find out why I was leaving I felt sorry for her. Customer service, I kept saying. Price, I kept saying. She started talking about new packages that were on offer. After five minutes of this I had to cut her off. Cheez! Trying to keep a customer from quitting by making it difficult to quit! I thought this sort of thing was on the way out …

Unless they change their ways the real revolution will do damage to Vonage. This ain’t the way to grow a business.

The Overture search inventory tool is one of the great little secrets of the internet. For those who have not discovered it, you can find out who is searching for what around your topic and use the information to drive your paid search choices.

We have been reviewing a particularly sulphurous quantity of consumer-generated feedback on behalf of a company which has incurred the wrath of consumers, and trying (on their behalf) to figure out what advice we should give them about managing the situation. The volume of complaints made us think it was worth looking at traffic on Overture, which captures Yahoo! searches. Fortunately it hasn’t quite got to that pitch yet.

But, intriguingly, several other companies figure in the context of the term “complaint”. Here they are in order of the most complaints. We have linked to the page you reach if you follow the link.

There are some observations one should make about this list. Big companies are more likely to figure on it than small ones. Yahoo! is going to be there, because it is Yahoo!’s website. Tech companies are more likely to figure than non tech companies. The two tech companies eBay and Yahoo! have even thought about this search and ensured that they have pages with information for customers there. eLoan complaint appears to be such a popular term that it is spammed, judging from the search results page. Pay Pal, despite being part of eBay, seem less well prepared and their number one result is Pay Pal warning which is a forum for people with cautionary tales of dealing with the company.

Vonage, Wal-mart, Cingular, Herbalife, Bank of America and McDonald’s would be well-advised to think about this search in the context of their web presence and provide customised landing pages answering the issues that consumers and journalists may wish to raise.

The Overture results on the word “complaint” point again to the undoubted lesson that if you are in customer service the search engines (Yahoo! in this case) are doing the job for you.