customer service

Sean's T-Mobile Hell

leelefever — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:00:00 -0400

Sean O'Driscoll unravels a long chain mishandled and unfortunate situations within the bowels of T-Mobile customer service. Sean's experience is sadly not unique, but his perspective is. He manages the community support services team at Microsoft and is tightly focused on the future of customer support. It appears that T-Mobile has provided him a great worst case scenario - he left the service because of it.

â€œsean, can I just have the agent call you back so we can handle this? Me: â€œNO! I wonâ€™t do that. This is not my problem, this is your problem. Now you want to take time from my family on another call. NO.â€ Supervisor: â€œI understand, what do you want me to do? You donâ€™t really have any other option here.â€ Me: â€œDonâ€™t have an option? Hah. I can drop you as a service provider.â€ Supervisor: â€œYes, you could do that.â€ This was maybe the most depressing part of the call. She really didnâ€™t care. And it was clearly not because sheâ€™s a bad person but because she has given up on her own employer. I actually felt sorry for her. I couldnâ€™t yell at her. I said goodbye.

Popcorn With Your Sewer Scope?

leelefever — Mon, 07 May 2007 14:30:55 -0400

This morning Sachi had a fun job - participating in a "sewer scoping" with someone from a company called Hydro Physics. It's like a colonoscopy for a sewer line. They feed a camera down into a house's sewer pipes to look for problems.

The whole process is video taped and before Sachi left she received a video tape (yes, VHS) of the inside of the sewer line. But the tape was not the only take home - she also received two packs of microwave popcorn for our viewing pleasure. The sewer scope guy is giving out popcorn with his sewer movies. So you know what we're doing tonight!

Really though, I think this is a great example of a positive customer service experience. That popcorn costs them pennies, but makes a great impression.

Eating Their Dog Food

leelefever — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 22:21:54 -0400

That phrase always makes me laugh, but I think it's accurate. If you're not familiar, it means that a company that produces a product should use the product themselves.

In the online community world, I've been suspicious of companies that purport to understand all things "community" but don't have a community that supports their customers using their platform. It's one of the things I do like about Web Crossing, they have WebXHarbor.

I haven't seen a more productive example of eating their dogfood than how the Robot Co-op is using with their new site at ideas.43things.com.

The site is using the 43 Things format to collect ideas from users about what they should develop next. From talking to the guys, it's working -- the users have come up with ideas that had never occurred to them.

Finally a Positive Experience with an ISP

leelefever — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 13:59:00 -0400

I awoke this morning to find my Internet service was down. Historically this has been a complete pain, as it was never easy enough to find out if it was a system wide problem or something local about my service or set-up.

Eventually I called Comcast, entered my phone number within 2-3 button pushes. The next message was- "We are experiencing service outages in your area, if you would like to receive a phone call when service is restored, please press 1".

So, I accepted the offer for the call-back, my service came back a few minutes later and I received a call from Comcast saying my service had been restored.

I did not talk to a human the whole time, yet I had a great experience. I wasn't put on hold and I wasn't upset about the service being down- I know sh*t happens. What has historically upset me so much was how hard it was to get answers. I ranted about my previous experiences with Earthlink on my personal weblog here, here, and here.

In this instance Comcast gave exactly what I wanted- an explanation as to why I can't connect and some type of notification when it's fixed. I wish it hadn't happened at all, but I was pleased to get an answer so easily.