Adventures in Customer Service, Part 1 of 3

I've written before about customer service as a marketing tactic.  See here and here. I'm pretty passionate about the idea of excellent customer service being a key marketing tactic in your business.

I recently experienced customer service from a major corporation that could only be described as epic fail.  I think the reasons why this corporation failed might not be so obvious to the casual observer.  I have so much to say about this experience, I had to break it up into three blog posts!

Here’s the situation:

I was without internet service from about 6:30 pm on Tuesday 7/30 through around 11:00 am Saturday 8/3.  My service provider is AT&T Uverse.

Hi There!  How can I be of no help
to you whatsoever today?

Over the course of about three and a half days, my critical work and personal financials piled up (I couldn't do secured transactions via public WiFi after all) and our family life was disrupted.

Now, this was very frustrating, as I depend on the internet for just about everything (including TV).  It was like being punted back to 1986 and the digital Stone Age.  Yes, yes, I know, first world problems and all, but still, it was a major disruption to my business and my life.

The outage itself, however, was not what outraged me the most.  What was particularly galling is that my interactions with AT&T customer service representatives proved to me that for all of the money, training, and process that AT&T is obviously putting into its customer service apparatus, it’s missing a few key important points that are critical to providing excellent customer service..

I believe that the four different CSRs I talked to sincerely empathized with my problem and genuinely wished they could do more (being CSRs, of course they have zero power, but still – nice people overall).

So where’s the epic fail?  Here’s a list:

REQUIRING THE CUSTOMER TO FOLLOW UP

Once I reported a problem to my service on Tuesday night, why did I have to call AT&T back repeatedly over the next few days to make sure that AT&T was doing what they should be doing to fix my problem?

After the first call, I was told service would be restored by 8:00 pm on Wednesday.  I get home at 9 pm on Wednesday and nope, no internet!  I call the help line – and they don’t answer it after “business hours”, so I’m down for the night.  As you can imagine, that was awesome.

So I had to call them on Thursday morning, find out I need to get a tech scheduled (none available until Friday), wait another day for a tech to show up on Friday (and nobody showed), follow up on Friday with another call, to be told that the techs were backed up and I would not get my problem resolved on that day, and I had to cancel another day’s worth of activities on Saturday when the tech finally showed up and fixed the problem.

Here’s the thing: if AT&T actually gave a flip about me or my time or my value as a customer, they would have in place a process that, once I reported a problem, THEY would follow up WITH ME – again, via phone or email or text message, even – to make sure everything was okay. 

On each of four phone calls I made to AT&T, I had to go through the same rigmarole with my account number, phone number, PIN and explanation of my problem.  If they were calling me, I wouldn't have to go through the same song and dance repeatedly, theoretically.

So, here’s the point: if a customer is having an issue with your product or service, it’s on YOU to follow up with them to make sure that the issue gets resolved.  That action shows that you actually do care about their satisfaction with your product or service, and that their needs are more important than yours.

I've got two more main points, but I’m out of space today – see you in part 2.