Seth Godin complained about Verizon’s customer service in his blog. The funny thing is that I can relate even though I have never used Verizon in my entire life. Just substitute the name of your local phone company; i.e., SBC, AT&T or whatever it’s called these days. I’m not sure why the telecom industry insists on delivering a subpar customer experience, but it happens regularly. The easy route would be to attribute it to their monopoly status, but not all monopolies act badly.
What irritates me most is when I have to navigate through multiple levels of menus. I just need to type in a couple words and Google can figure out what I’m looking for in less than a second. Why can’t the phone company route calls with similar efficiency?
I’ve been experiencing problems with my phone line and DSL connection for quite a few months now. However, the problem was always intermittent. I would experience static on my phone line and DSL loss of signal errors at random, non-reproducible intervals. I just couldn’t figure out what was going on. So, I finally called AT&T and asked them to check it out.
They sent a service technician and, as I expected, the line was clean while he was here. However, 2-3 hours later, the phone line started acting up again and the 2Wire HomePortal was bathed in red lights again. Oh well, that repair didn’t work.
A few days later, AT&T calls back to ask how they did. I told them that the technician could not fix the problem because the line was clean when he showed up. And, I didn’t give it much thought after that. But, lo and behold, a few days later, someone from AT&T calls me back and asks if they can send another technician out to troubleshoot my connection. Well, this second guy fixed the problem.Almost a week has passed and the DSL connection has been rock solid. No static on the phone line either.
So, the technician tells me that I shouldn’t have the data line routed to all my phone jacks. Said that was fine for older houses with a limited number of jacks. However, for newer houses with 8-10 jacks, wiring the data to all phone jacks will weaken the data signal and cause interference. I don’t know if his explanation was technically right or not, but his fix of converting one phone jack to become a dedicated data line sure worked.
You don’t have to act like one. Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) really threw me for a loop yesterday. I don’t know whether it comes from low expectations after years of conditioning by other companies (say the Internet and telephone line provider), but their excellent service just shocked me. When I called PG&E, I didn’t get banished to voice mail hell where I had to migrate through a confusing menu of options. I didn’t even get placed on hold for a long period of time without knowing how far down the queue I was. What PG&E did was tell me how long my expected wait was and then offered to call me back when a customer service representative was free to take my call.
Yes, that’s the part where my jaw drops. I jumped at that opportunity. I kept the phone by my side and about 5 minutes later, I got a call back. Maybe another 45 seconds on hold and they connected me to a live person.
This was the second time I had to call PG&E during the past year and both times I had excellent service. Maybe this isn’t an accident and someone in that organization is really focused on keeping their customers happy even though they are a monopoly and I cannot obtain gas or electric service from an alternate provider.
So, why aren’t all companies like this?
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