Tag: Customer Service

Knowing and Seeking

Random Thoughts

I love knowing things. It is one of my favorite things. Knowing stuff is totally awesome, especially when people ask questions and you have the answers. Knowing is, as they say, half the battle. The other half is seeking, or curiosity.

Too many people stop after knowing.

A while ago, I spouted this on Facebook and Twitter:

I love telling other people how to do their job. I hate that I have to tell other people how to do their job.

And it is a truth I have long lived with. Because I love knowing things, quite often when I interact with someone on a professional level I know a lot of things about their job, and since I also love sharing my knowledge, when the knowledge I have can fill in a gap or point out a flaw, I feel awesome. I also don’t mind when people point out something I didn’t know or missed, because I know I would have done it to them given the chance.

When I don’t know a thing, I like to learn that thing – assuming there is some advantage to doing so. I mean, I don’t know how to ballet dance, but I’m also not in a hurry to learn to ballet dance as I don’t see an immediate benefit to it. This attitude tends to lead me to acting like a detective. If something is broken, I immediately start trying to devise a way to figure out how it is broken and how I might discover a solution.

When this is my job, when it is an item under my purview, this is what I do. And when I say that I hate that I have to tell other people how to do their job, what I really mean is I hate when I have to do the detective work for an item that isn’t in my purview.

Example. I have a customer. That customer uses my service in conjunction with the service provided by another company. The customer has a problem and it appears that both services are not working. I examine my side and determine that my service is working, and only appears to be failing because the other service is not working as expected. The person working at the other company says their service is working and my service is failing. I give the customer a list of simple tests to perform to illustrate the problem. These tests are not being done on my service but on the other service, and the results illustrate that the other service is broken, returning improper results that is leading to the failure of my service. These tests are very simple, take less than a minute to perform, and prove conclusively where the problem is and even point to the solution. So why didn’t the guy at the other company suggest it?

Because it’s easier to point the finger at someone else than it is to solve the problem.

Meanwhile, now that I’ve caused the problem to be fixed, the customer likes me, doesn’t like them, and is open to listening when I suggest that they should switch to another provider for that other service.

If you don’t take care of your customers, someone else will.

Hey You!

Random Thoughts

Yeah you!  I know being Customer Service is tough.  I used to do it.  Listening to people bitch about their problems and blaming you for them when there isn’t anything you can do.  But you know what you can do?  Your job!  When someone calls you and gives you details about a problem, how about adding them to the ticket, huh? When the technician reads it and it has no details, I’m pretty sure he won’t be a fucking mind reader and know all the things you didn’t write down!

And hey, while we’re here… you!  Yeah you, Mr. Technician.  When you get a ticket that is light on the details, how about you call the customer and ask, “Dude… WTF?” or, you know, something more business-ish like “Excuse me, sir, but what seems to be the problem?”  You know what you shouldn’t do?  Wander around on your own trying to decipher the cryptic garbage in the ticket and figure out what the problem is all by yourself.  You really don’t want to waste six hours working on the wrong thing when three minutes on the phone would have told you it was a five minute fix.

And the whole lot of you… yeah, ALL of you! Stop lying to people.  Don’t tell the customer they’ll be getting a call in a few minutes unless it’s true.  An hour is not a few minutes, not even close.  Two hours is way off, four hours is even further away, and six hours is a giant waste of everyone’s time.  The real kicker?  You all work at a communications company and the one thing you suck at more than anything else?  Communication!

Admission of Fault

Random Thoughts

Recently, I’ve gone to “war” with Comcast.  This year marked the final turnover to digital and the end of analog broadcast.  For the past 18 months, I had kept in contact with Comcast about the effect this would have on my analog cable.  See, the basic cable – channels 2 thru 78 – are all I really watch, so that’s all we have, and you don’t need set top boxes for that, which allowed me to build Medusa, my 6-tuner PVR running Snapstream’s software.  I admit I watch a lot of TV, but the main problem is that quite often even if I only watch three or four shows on a single night, they’ll always air at the same time.  Years ago I managed this by having four VCRs, but times have changed and I upgraded.  In any event, Comcast assured me that nothing would change, my analog devices would continue to work just fine.  On many occasions over this time period, I inquired about the future of analog service, and every single time I was assured that Comcast had no plans to end analog service for the cable package of channels 2 thru 78.

So, one day there was a problem with my cable.  It seemed I was only getting channels 2 thru 29 or 30, everything above that was gone.  I called in to Comcast customer service and asked what was going on.  They explained it was an outage, and regular service would return soon.  Seeing as I already had them on the phone, I again inquired about the future of analog services.  I asked if this division of 2 thru 30 and 31 thru 78 was a precursor to them moving 31 thru 78 to digital only.  I was assured that there were no changes planned.  None.  Channels 2 thru 78 would continue to be available for all analog users.

In the meantime, over the past couple of years, I have watched with anticipation the development of digital tuner cards for PCs.  At first the support was iffy, but now pretty much all software supports them, and given a good enough PC they’ll even watch and record HD channels broadcast “in the clear”, like your local network affiliates.  I’ve been budgeting my money in plans to upgrade my PVR so that I could take advantage of digital, but its not exactly cheap to do, and besides, I still had time.

Imagine my surprise when, the day after the outage above and being assured that analog was not going to change, I received a letter in the mail explaining that channels 31 thru 78 were being moved to digital only on August 11th of this year.  That couldn’t be right since just the day before I was told it wouldn’t change, and mailings like this take weeks to plan out.  So I called customer service again, and with letter in hand was told again that there was no planned change for analog service, channels 2 thru 78 would continue to be available.  But a quick search of the Internet found several locations, including Comcast’s own website, telling people about the future and channels being moved off analog.

Now, here we come to the “war”.  See, I’m not actually upset by the digital switch.  I expected it would come eventually, hence why I’ve been planning to upgrade my PC… next year, when my budget can afford it.  And I completely understand and even agree with the need for change: when you move analog to digital it takes far less bandwidth and allows you to have more channels and services.  My problem is that I was lied to.  As far as I can see, one of two things had happened.

  1. Failure of Management: The customer service group was not properly trained or informed about the August 11th channel moves to digital, and therefore the reps I spoke to were telling me what they believed to be true.
  2. Failure of Employee: The customer service reps, not wanting to deal with a possibly irate customer, chose to not inform me of the digital change, on which they had been fully informed and trained.

There is no other possibility.  Either the reps lied to me, or the reps were not properly trained.

I decided, for the first time in my life, to actually write a complaint to the Better Business Bureau.  I wrote in detail about my 18 months of contact and the day of the outage and the mailer I received.  I even wrote that I understood why the change was being made and that Comcast had every right to do so, but that I was lied to through one of the reasons above and I would like something done about it.

Since writing this complaint, the case has gone back and forth between Comcast and myself.  I have been called on several occasions and emailed a number of times.  Every time they contact me, I get a spiel about how there were two digital changes (the government mandated change and the Comcast channel moves) and this lead to confusion (despite my most recent calls being AFTER the government mandated change), and that I can continue getting all my channels by simply getting a set top box, which they will provide, or replace my analog tuners with digital tuners, which I will have to do myself.  Every time, I report the resolution as unsatisfactory because there is only one thing I want: Admission of fault.

I want someone from Comcast to call me and tell me the staff was improperly trained, or tell me that reps have been found lying to customers to avoid confrontation.  I want Comcast to admit that the failure existed on their end, in their processes or with their people, and to apologize for it having happened.  I want someone to say they are sorry and that the customer service department should have informed me of the impending channel moves on all calls made after some date.  This is the one thing I have not heard from Comcast.  And I probably never will.

It is not just them, of course, its systemic.  Companies do everything in their power to never admit fault.  Well, I’m tired of it, and this time, in my only piddling and puny way, I’m fighting back.  this case through the BBB will never be resolved until someone from Comcast admits fault.

As for my personal resolution for Comcast’s change of service, since my budget will not allow for rebuilding my PC (not only do I need new tuners, since the best ones are PCI Express and my PC is old enough to only have PCI, I have to get a new motherboard, processor, memory, video card, etc… the hard drive is IDE, not SATA… in fact the only thing I can keep is the case), and with budget being the main concern in this economy, I’ll be canceling my cable TV service.  Thanks to Hulu and individual network web pages, everything I want to watch is online anyway.  In the end, Comcast’s refusal to admit fault is probably going to wind up saving me over $50 a month.