Archive: Opinions

Customer service shouldn't be hard... but it is.  I am fascinated by it and astounded at the range of the good, the bad, and the ugly interactions I have had with companies I deal with.  Good support requires well designed policies; well trained, responsive, and thoughtful staff; and flexibility.  Even if the customer isn't always right, genuinely helping customers is quite a lot different from slavishly following a company-provided script or strict policies and refusing to deviate from them.  If you make a customer feel respected and valued, it doesn't sting as much when the exact solution the customer hoped for can't happen.  And when it does, well, that is the cherry on top of the frosting on the customer support cake.

I experienced both ends of the spectrum last week when my Internet connection went down during a thunderstorm on the Monday before Independence Day.  And when I say both sides of the spectrum, I literally mean both extremes in dealing with Spectrum, our Internet provider.  If you follow such things cable companies regularly earn the lowest ratings in customer service, and Charter Communications, while not at the bottom -- that honor belongs to Comcast, has received poor customer service ratings over the years.  So I had low hopes as I strategized as to the best approach to getting help.  After my first attempt I was sure that Spectrum would easily live down to my expectations, but then I was very pleasantly surprised.

I have had very good experiences with other companies when using their online support chat windows, with less wait time than calling on the phone, and generally better answers.  That makes sense, because when support technicians are on the phone they are expected to keep the conversation going, but in a live chat they have more time to come up with thoughtful answers and solutions before typing their replies.  In my case I got the opposite -- clearly the woman who was allegedly helping me was following a script and refused to engage her brain in favor of mindlessly following it.  She asked questions I had already answered, and  clearly copy/pasted text that didn't make sense simply because they were the next thing in her script, regardless of information I had provided.

She warned me that when she sent a reset signal to my cable modem we might get disconnected, and told me to reconnect and the next technician would pick up where she left off.  Now I had contacted her because I was getting no signal to my cable modem.  That implied I was using some other means of accessing the Internet (in this case my cell phone via AT&T's cellular Internet connection) because... my cable modem wasn't working.  So how will sending a signal to my cable modem interrupt our chat?  I wracked my brain for a sarcastic pseudo-logical retort, but simply asked her to go ahead and send the signal.

When that didn't work she said there were a few local outages reported and maybe my Internet would come back.  This did not instill confidence, but I had a meeting to get to, and because my cable modem and router are protected with a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) and surge protectors I thought the likelihood of it being a problem with my own equipment was quite low.

All the support chat windows I have used have a feature that will email you a transcript so you can review their suggestions, follow links, or whatever.  This one just disconnected.  No record.  No nothing, including, as it turned out, credible support.  But I did think waiting would be the answer.

Until the next morning when we still had no Internet.  This time I braved the telephone, and this is when Spectrum surprised me.  I spoke to a personable and knowledgeable woman who did what she could do remotely, and then  decided that an on-site service call was needed.  She said she could schedule me for Friday.  But when I mentioned that I work from home and had a Thursday deadline (spoiler alert: last week's Lansing Star was published on time), she signed me up for an expedited service call.  She advised me that if I didn't receive a phone call to set up a time within about an hour and a half I should call back.

I did have to call back, but got another knowledgeable and helpful woman who set up a service call for the next afternoon.  And a third woman who called back to confirm my appointment,  Given what I had read about the quality of Spectrum customer service this was not only remarkable, but exponentially remarkable when you consider that the next day was Independence Day!

A text with a link that supposedly allowed me to track the technician's progress coming to my house came soon after.  It said, "We apologize, we're experiencing technical difficulties with our GPS technician tracking."  This made me laugh to think that Technical Support needed technical support.  But receiving the text made me feel pretty confident that I'd be seeing a technician on the 4th of July.

And sure enough, right on time, a technician was at my door.  He tested the signal, located the problem -- an old signal booster in the basement that had evidently blown out in the storm -- and our Internet was up and running as good as new in short order.  He was professional, personable, and flexible.  He told me the company generally prefers to install signal boosters where the cable comes into the building, but when I asked him to install it upstairs next to the cable modem he did it.  I wanted it there because it could be plugged in to the surge protector and UPS so it would be better protected in the next thunderstorm (which wasn't long in arriving last week!).

It has long been an axiom that no matter how bad the people on the phone are, or how bad company support policies are, the line people who come to your home to fix things are generally great.  That was true in this case, except the people on the phone were also great.

There are still things about the company that frustrate me, but in general they have better packages than Time Warner Cable did, for less money.  We only have Internet, but are getting more than three times the speed at $5 per month less than we were paying Time Warner, and I only got that price from Time Warner if I called once a year to demand a special deal (not necessary with Spectrum).

So Spectrum has massively failed to live down to my expectations.  And that is a very, very good thing.

As for Comcast... well, arguably they have a monopoly so why should they care what their customers think (my experiences with them did live down to this expectation).  On the other hand, Spectrum has the cable monopoly in our area, and while my chat technician was probably daydreaming about what she would do at the end of her shift, the three people I spoke to on the phone plus the technician who came and fixed my problem genuinely wanted to help.  Four out of five ain't bad.

AT&T also gets low ratings for customer support, but I have always received exemplary support at the local AT&T store, often leaving the store with a better service plan at no extra cost.  Clearly the level of service depends on the individuals providing it, but if you were to ask me strictly on my own experience I would say that AT&T, while a bit pricey, is an excellent company.  And I do recommend it.  But I have spoken to people who live elsewhere who have had terrible experiences with them, much like the experiences we had with Verizon Wireless that prompted my wife to call my cell phone one day and demand we switch to AT&T no matter what the cost, now, today... immediately!!! (I happened to be at the old AT&T kiosk at the mall when she called, so our switch was as immediate as it gets).

I love to tell the story of my call to Radio Shack's credit card support line (remember Radio Shack?) when I spent a whole day coming up with reasons a late fee should be forgiven.  By the time I called I was so worked up I was ready for a rumble.  A personably voiced woman with a southern accent (I love southern accents) asked how she could help me and could she confirm my account information, and while on hold for no more than a minute I marshaled my arguments according to ascending severity, culminating with cancelling my card (the card companies hate when you do that).  When she came back on the line she said "I've gone ahead and forgiven that late fee.  Is there anything else I can do for you?"  It took me a minute to catch my breath before I meekly replied, "No, thank you very much for helping me."

All that energy getting worked up for nothing!

I had an almost identical experience with Capital One a week or two ago, except I didn't bother to get worked up (even I can learn from experience).  I asked them to forgive a late fee that was slightly more than the $15 charge on the bill for last month.  The woman who helped not only got the charge forgiven, but she helped me pay the bill over the phone so my next bill wouldn't be confusing and my account wouldn't be suspended.  I like that company, even though they are a bit overzealous about card security, which can be annoying when you are traveling.  Except the last time they did it someone had actually tried to use my card number at a Walmart a few states away.  So maybe zealous... not over-zealous.  Better safe than sorry.

The worst support I ever received was years ago from a company that contracted with Dell Computers to do support calls in our area.  A big, slovenly employee -- my mother would have called him a schlump -- showed up at my front door who turned out to be one of the creepiest people I have ever met.  Well, actually the creepiest.  This guy was a creep!  He actually asked me if I had a gun to protect my "pretty little daughter" since we live in a rural area, and when he was unable to figure out how to fix my computer he licked the receiver of my phone while calling Dell's tech support to support his support.  He finally left after not fixing my computer, which I finally did myself late the next day after spending hours on the phone with Dell.  Before calling them I used a good portion of a bottle of Lysol to obsessively disinfect my telephone.

I was very creeped out and fearful, because this lunatic knew where I lived and that I had a "pretty little daughter".  So I also spritzed the phone with more Lysol and called my father-in-law, a hunter and gun expert, to ask advice about hand guns.  He talked me down, convincing me that I didn't really want to own a gun.

So, yeah, that was a bad customer support experience.

Apple has the best customer support.  The worst Apple support technician I have dealt with was still better than at least 90% of the support people I have ever dealt with.  They make you feel like you are talking to your best friend, while at the same time walking you through solutions to whatever you called about.  Not that I need Apple support that often, but I have only had patient, knowledgeable, personable representatives help me when I do need it.  And I am not talking about their extended support plan.

While they do have a script with step by step things to tell me to try, starting with a simple reboot and working its way up to reinstalling the operating system and restoring a backup if I have one (I do), they have been consistently patient and willing to stay on the phone, chatting about this and that while waiting for the computer to be ready for the next step.

The key is hiring intelligent, personable people who can follow company policies and use a script while not mindlessly following it.  And people who pay attention to what a customer says.  These support people are the faces of your company, so it is important to actually hire people who represent your company's values.  It stuns me when support is terrible, because it tells me the company's values are that customers don't matter once they have forked over their money.  That is short-sighted at best, but you see it so often.

So customer service shouldn't be hard... but it is.

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