eHarmony Blog.com

In our last poll, many people suggested that eHarmony indicates who is paid and makes it free to respond to paid members. eHarmony, in all probability, will throw this suggestion out the window and say that this will decrease revenues. What do you think?

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(By the way, in my case, during my first subscription (14 weeks in the service), 53% never replied or closed the match.)

It’s a matter of ethics

An ethical company is one that thinks more of providing its customers a better product than thinking of its bottom-line. eHarmony’s business is straightforward — matchmaking services have been around for over half a century:

• Step 1: A person pays the matchmaking service.
• Step 2: The company sends him or her matches.
• Step 3: The customer assesses each match if he or she hits it off. He or she meets them in person.
• Step 4: The person leaves the service satisfied.

I think anything deviating from these four steps is being unethical. (I’ll talk further about this in a later post.) Paying customers deserve more respect and real matches. Yes, eHarmony, you cannot control who subscribes to your service, but there is one thing you can do to make all your current customers happy:

Make it free to respond to paying members — We want it, we deserve it, you owe it to us.

It’s ethical thing to do.

Your screens invite us to click the red button to “start communication to get to know your match better.” Your welcome letter encouraged us to “to reach out with an open heart to every single match we bring you.”

The heck we do. We then wait for their response, of course.

We don’t need to know whether they’re paying members. That’s not our problem. Read the four steps, buddy — I paid you, send me matches, I want to talk to them, let them talk to me. For crying out loud, if they cannot reply, yet you matched them to me,

• You made me look like an idiot.
• You strung me along into false hopes.
• You’ve USED me to create you more customers.

(eHarmony, don’t run and hide. Don’t say, “Our privacy policies prevent us from disclosing the status of a specific account.” Say that he’s a nonpaying member, say that the woman joined five years ago, and say that he has not logged in since 9/11. Or that the baby in the photo with her is now attending college.)

Dupe us more

It gets worse, by the way. eH offers some nonpaying members the option to “send the initial set of questions for free”:

Do you see the ramifications? We, paying members — the only source of eHarmony’s livelihood — feel pleased that another member cared enough to get to know us better, so, sincerely and faithfully, we answer the members’ questions. Then we send our questions. We never hear from them again. Blast it.

(Incidentally, nonpaying members cannot see responses until they chuck in the cash. Oooh eH holds our responses for ransom! Sweet!)

The easiest feature request

Guess what, there is hardly any computer programming involved to implement this.

The computer power used for handling communications between members is very miniscule. Disk space is cheap. In the past few months, eHarmony offered two “Free Communication Weekends,” where everyone and anyone communicated freely; the eH servers didn’t collapse or slowed down. I doubt they added new machines to handle the extra processing just for those weekends.

Thus, on the infrastructure side, I doubt that this feature will require more computer hardware.

“Everything in our power”?

What’s your mission, Dr. Warren? More money, or more marriages?

eHarmony sends its newly paid members this welcome email, signed by Dr. Warren himself:

I�m watching all of the eHarmony couples getting married (90+ members get married every day), and you can�t get around how excited and satisfied they are. I want this same experience to be yours. I promise you that our staff and I will do everything in our power to make your eHarmony experience effective. We want you to experience your fondest dreams. (emphasis mine)

I swear that nothing shall boost the number of couples getting married daily than making it free to respond to paying members. eHarmony, I paid you to send me eligible singles, that I may evaluate them and meet them. Right now, all you do is use me to convert people to customers. We deserve more than this.