Customers say Coin is shortchanging them

Vaporware is nothing new. For decades, companies have been promising groundbreaking products that may or may not come to fruition. But building hype is one thing, taking people's money is another. Once someone has paid for the promise, the company has an obligation to deliver. That's where many customers feel that a startup called Coin is heading off the rails.

Almost a year ago, Coin announced what sounded -- and still sounds -- like a cool and exciting product: a device, the exact size of a credit card, that stores all the information from all your other cards. You load your credit card, loyalty and other accounts into the device, and it becomes the only card you have to carry.

When shopping, you select the account you want to use and swipe the card as you normally would. It has security features in place including a Bluetooth "tether" to your mobile device. And it looks slick as heck.

Problem is, a year after paying for this amazing card, few if any people actually have one.

In August, the company sent out emails telling those who pre-ordered that they could now "claim their Coins," but only a limited number of people would get them. On top of that, those lucky few would get only a beta version, with final production units not shipping until spring or summer of 2015 (maybe) -- a year-and-a-half after Coin started taking customers' money.

Adding to the problem is that the longer it takes Coin to pony up, the more challenges it will face in payment technologies and security. From EMV chips to Apple Pay, the payment industry may force Coin to continue kicking the can down the road, or worse.

This is clearly a company with big problems, which alone isn't a sin. But the way Coin is handling it with the thousands of people whose money it's holding is textbook just-plain-bad. Customers appear to be thoroughly confused by the launch/beta/production messages and annoyed by the delays.

And of course, they're making it known. Thousands of angry social media posts paint a picture of a torch mob marching down the virtual street. Customer comments range from patient frustration, to suggestions that they're being scammed, to solicitations to band together in a class action.

You'd think a company with this kind of horror on its hands would drop everything to launch a peacemaking blitz, and do whatever it possibly could to calm the angry hordes. But Coin actually hasn't done much. The majority of complaints on its Facebook page have either gone unanswered or were replied to with this boilerplate message:

"Hey, [customer name], please send us a private message with your support ticket number (or email address) and we'll look into the issue. Thanks for your patience."

(Aside from all the other reasons this is bad, if someone isn't your BFF -- and especially if that person is an angry customer and you're sending a canned response -- don't address him with "hey." I don't care if it's vernacular. In this context it's aloof and arrogant-sounding. Coin no longer has the luxury of acting dot-com cool.)

If Coin has posted a formal announcement, apology or ameliorating explanation on its site or social pages, I can't find it. If the company is making things right with customers, it's not evident in the talk on the street.

Coin is, unfortunately, giving a clinic in what not to do when things go wrong in business. It may be too little, too late, but the company should take immediate and aggressive crisis-management steps, show people that it owns the problem, cares about its customers and intends to make it right.

Then it should explain exactly how it intends to do so and when.

Then it should continue communicating (and not with form letters), every day, or several times a day, until it reaches a conclusion. That conclusion might be working products in the hands of happy customers, or refunds, or even an announcement that the company is giving up.

But the head-in-sand approach is only making things much worse.

Coin offers very limited options for communicating with it, but I tried to reach out to give someone there the opportunity to offer the company's position on the matter. I got no reply (not even with a "Hey, Michael").

And interestingly, Coin's last Facebook post and Tweet (as of this writing) was on Aug. 22, over a month ago. For a hot tech startup, especially one with delivery and customer service nightmares, and other people's money in the bank, that's not very comforting.