I’m writing the first draft of this blog while on hold to disconnect my SBC DSL service, which stopped working a week ago. I ordered a cable modem and had it installed in the time I spent waiting for the promised SBC DSL “call-back within 24 hours.”
These days, you expect mediocrity from customer support. People who don’t know the products they’re being paid to help you with, don’t care about the urgency of your situation and don’t have the good sense not to read out loud phrases like, “go on to next page.”
I’ve experienced two incidents in the past four months, which convince me that SBC deserves a special award for extraordinary awful customer support. While most big companies only provide forgettable service, SBC makes theirs truly regrettable. I suspect awful service is among SBC’s strategic imperatives. I can picture training programs designed to make their team consistently rotten.
My two incidents cost me slightly more than six days of productive time. Among specific lowlights were the loss of access to my own email, being banned from entering the back door of my own Web site and learning that making Starbuck’s my office was not my personal cup of cappuccino. ( BTW, I also learned that T-Mobile's 24-hour WiFi service for $9.95 must be continuous, or they charge you $9.95 each time you log on.)
It’s hard to tell these stranger-than-fiction tales in under 50,000 words. Let me share a few excerpts:
• Back in March, I was about to travel to a rural area so I called SBC. After they acquired PacBell, SBC eventually just turned off dialup access to legacy customers who ignored their Yahoo/SBC spam mail campaign. After two-days of increasingly incompetent representatives, a fourth “technician,” determined that the problem lay in the fact that my email was going into Pacbell incoming and outgoing servers and he directed me to change my settings to the new SBC.Yahoo addresses they were using. I was so overjoyed that the solution worked, it was a full day later that I realized my email address had been changed and I was no longer receiving email to my two online addresses. There was no bridge from shel@itseemstome.net and sisrael@conferenza.com anymore. I also had the wrond user ID to get into my web site: www.itseemstome.net. I returned to the pathless jungle that is SBC telephone support. After 72 hours it became clear they did not know how to restore my access. Their encouraging words: “Tell everyone to just use your new SBC/Yahoo dial up connection!” There other cheery upside: I now had dial-up access capability. My resolution was to move it all over to a guy named Mike Kropniak mike@mk.net, who maintains a small ISP server farm and was already hosting my other site. Mike’s customer support policy seems unique these days: If you email him, he gets back to you. If you call him, he picks up the phone. In all cases so far, he has provided two desirable intangibles that seem to me to elude today’s behemoth providers—responsiveness and competency.
• Last week, after six-years of bullet-proof service, my DSL inexplicably stopped. I called their crack support team. After three hours of holding and talking to people who were reading manuals and not listening, I was told to replace the modem. I did. Still no contact. I called back, waiting another 20-25 minute and read my case number from two hours earlier and was told me it had expired. So we started over again. Four hours in, my “tech support” person ran out of manual to read. She gave me another case # and was told someone “more expert” would call me back within 24 hours. That was a week ago. I’ll wager Godot will arrive before their expert calls me. I have a dog (Brewster). He seems to me more “expert.”
Now 36 minutes into this call I have made human contact and have succeeded in disconnecting the DSL service. I had only tried twice earlier. They did better on this than I would have thought.
I was tempted to write this posting in a humorous vein, but it really isn’t funny. We are all feeling the pain and loss of productivity from intentionally awful customer service. This is not an outsourcing issue and I am no xenophobic. When service call centers were still was clustered in places like Stillwater, Okla., they were neither better nor worse. I understand the business perspective: Customer support costs money. But so does alienating and losing customers.
Online support is one of the few times company representatives can actually talk with individual customers anymore. Support can be an interactive learning experience that retains customers and builds loyalty. There was a time when customer relationship management was a philosophy and a strategy, not an inanimate software package hosted in some remote call center.
Marketing really is about conversations and perhaps companies should consider organzing customer support under marketing executive purview who understand that sensitive response and expedient resolution not only retains customers—it makes them user champions.
Meanwhile, if you want a great ISP, contact Mike Kropinak. He’s also a wizard at mail list services.
Desejo ter um e-mail SBC Yahoo
Posted by: Rato | Aug 22, 2005 at 11:48 AM