Skype. Rhymes with “swipe”

(WARNING: RANT AHEAD)

Remember this old jape?
We’re the phone company. We don’t care. We don’t have to.

Well, say hello to the new phone company, Skype.

I’m helping with a promotion that involves giving 100 people a free 1-year Skype Unlimited subscription. While discussing the design of a mini-site for customer conversions, I innocently asked, “So how will you get the subscriptions to the winners?”

Next thing I know, I’m saddled with figuring out how to buy a $30 Skype gift certificate. Two weeks later, I still don’t have one and have come to the conclusion that it would be easier to turn penicillin back into bread mold.

Skype, for those of you that don’t know, is a VoIP (PC to PC) calling service that lets you make free calls to any Skype user, or paid calls outside that network, just by plugging a headset into your computer and downloading some free software. It’s based in Luxembourg, has a bouncy, friendly-looking site, tens of millions of users…and absolutely no customer service.

I won’t bore you with the details, but this is what I’ve found:

Skype, a phone company, doesn’t have a phone number. You CANNOT call them, not even using Skype. At best, you e-mail them and hope for a response within 72 hours. I e-mailed them three times over the last two weeks and have yet to receive a response.

The company I’m working with is a SKYPE PARTNER, integrating their service into the software they sell. They can’t call them, either.

You are not allowed to buy Skype gift certificates unless you are already spending money with Skype and have had at least two successful financial transactions with them. When I try to buy gift certificates even after fulfilling those requirements, I’m told I don’t qualify.

Even when you ARE allowed to buy Skype gift certificates, you are limited to $100 per month (or you can do some financial trickery to up the ante to $700). We need $3,000 worth and apparently the only way to do that online is to spend the next 6.5 months buying them in increments.

Gift certificates and Skype credit expire after a period of non-use or in six months, whichever comes first. Fail to use it and –poof– it’s gone.

You CAN buy Skype cards, worth either $8.85 or $20, at 1800 different Walmarts, according to the Skype site. We called every Walmart in Oregon and most of Washington state–only one carries these cards, they only had 24 of them and when I drove 30 miles to buy one…they had vanished.

I finally managed to lay my hands on a $20 Skype card, used it to buy “Skype Credit” for my account, and spent another $10 on my Visa to have enough to buy a 1-year Skype Unlimited subscription ($29.95). In the interval between those purchases, Skype debited my account by 55 cents (to $29.45), so I was now 50 cents short.

Gritting my teeth, I got out my Visa again, planning to add another $10 to my account to actually complete the transaction. Surprise! I can’t. Skype won’t let me buy more Skype Credit until my balance dips below $10. This is apparently to avoid the possibility of fraud.

The Skype help system kinda reminds me of a user manual with half the pages missing (i.e., it’s not particularly helpful). And while they do frequently show up on Skype’s user forum, Skype support reps spend most of their time explaining why the customer is a fault and should stop bothering them.

So I’ve spent $30 and a lot of gas and phone time to almost buy a $29.95 item. My only option is to spend $20 on some Skype thing to drop my balance so I can bring it back up to $30, or buy the $30 service without using any of my Skype credit (you can’t combine payment methods)….or just wait and Skype will automagically make my money vanish without giving me a nickel’s worth of anything.

Hmmm….I do believe Skype has perfected information highway robbery.

Afternote (9/29/07): Yesterday (Friday), got a call from a Walmart manager who had managed to find the missing 24 Skype giftcards and was combing the west coast for more to fill our order. (I must say that–despite my great antipathy to Walmart in general–the Walmart managers have really gone out of their way to help.)

Turns out that each Skype giftcard must be individually activated at a Walmart cash register to work properly, and the one I purchased had taken three tries before activation worked…which was the final straw. The program manager wanted 700 of these cards. Plus, the math didn’t work–giftcard denominations ($20 and $8.85) don’t support a $29.95 Skype unlimited subscription in any configuration.

Given Skype’s poor customer support and confusing website, we could just see our own support center call volume skyrocketing when (not if) something went wrong.

So…we opted for plan B: Heartfelt thanks but no thanks to Walmart, but we’ll send the customer a $30 credit on his order and let HIM figure out how to work with Skype. (And remind the product managers that it’s smart to dry-run a promotion BEFORE you announce it.)

–sigh–

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