Belated

Every Wednesday, for sixty-eight weeks, I’ve unfailingly posted my blog. I’ve been ill, hospitalized, or out-of-town. None of these things have kept me from what I’ve come to believe as a responsibility to those that read it. I’d like to thank you both. What unforeseen calamity of such epic proportions could cause such a travesty? I was stupid enough to trust a representative of a major corporation.

In the past I have touched on the issue of customer service, the term, as well as the concept, that most large companies I’ve had the displeasure of doing business with, are unfamiliar. As the global marketplace has expanded, and with it the vast potential customer pool, the huge conglomerates that tell us what products we absolutely must purchase, and what services we must have, or our lives will be considered empty; don’t give one rats ass whether we buy their shit or not, because there’re millions more where we came from. Yet, these companies continue to spend kabillions of dollars on mindless ads that scream at us to BUY or we’re going to miss out. Miss out on what; I have yet to figure out.

Gone forever are the days of business people bending over backwards to try and satisfy their loyal clientele; not because the “customer’s always right,” but because it was the right thing to do. I have paid my penance as a customer service liaison, and I can assure you the customer is far from being always right. As a matter of fact, the customer is frequently a huge asshole. Nevertheless, as a representative of a business entity, it was my job to defuse the situation, and reach an amicable solution as quickly, and as painlessly (for both parties); my job depended on it. I was very good at what I did. Sadly, working in the automobile industry caused me so much brain damage, that I considered jumping off the roof of the tallest building in South Florida. That rocky marriage thankfully ended in 1997. A lot has changed since then; for the worse I might add.

I have always considered myself a bit of a consumer advocate. I think the real turning point as far as zealousness goes happened when in 1992, I appeared at a Long Valley, New Jersey town meeting to take Storrer Cable to task for their disregard to their own companies policies concerning providing service.
I did research before I went, and when my turn came, I made the Storrers rep back pedal, stammer, and have to defend his company’s unjust position in front of about fifty people. What I had to say sparked heated comments from others in attendance, while I sat back with a kind of smug self-satisfaction. The status quo did not change. Storrer went right on fucking over customers until they were good and ready to move forward with their plans. However, there’s an adage that says “You can’t fight City Hall.” There is also an addendum, “You can shit on their steps though.” I took great pleasure in shitting on Storrers’ steps. Such well earned psychic remuneration is hard to come by today.

My approach has always been pretty simple to grasp. I treat the situation as I would a debate; by using reason, prove to me how you arrived at the conclusions you did. If what is said is unreasonable, I proceed to point out the flaws in the argument presented. It the other party is obtuse, that’s when I spring into action.

I’m not going to go through my entire exhaustive process here. Also, I never ask for something I don’t deserve. No company is too big, no amount of time too consuming. Am I always successful? No. It works out to be about a fifty-fifty split. One of my greatest triumphs was versus the Sony Corporation, electronics division. I have the fifty-inch HD TV in my living room to prove it. Granted, it took twenty-five plus hours out of my life, and eight letters sent, one group to Japan, the other to Sony America’s California headquarters, to get satisfaction. But, I did get a new TV. Wednesday, I wasn’t so lucky.

This was not my first run-in with AT&T. Back when Cingular Wireless was just a subsidiary of the communications giant, I attempted on several occasions to consolidate the family account. When my wife Helen, and I decided it was time my son Cory, got a cellphone, all we wanted to do was add him to our account. That may sound like a simple procedure to dimwits like you and I, but to the big-brains at Cingular customer service, well, you’d have thought we asked them to verify Stephen Hawking’s String Theory of the Universe’s origins. After numerous calls, untold time on hold, and tons of aggravation, we decided to end the pursuit of this fruitless endeavor. We just kept paying for two separate accounts. It is to be noted that both accounts were paid out of the same checking account. That’s the caveat; Cingular had a hard time grasping this complex initiative.

A couple of years later, I received a call from their accounts receivable department wanting to know when I was planning to pay my cellphone bill that I had just paid.
I was on my way to a Saturday college football game on a glorious South Florida fall day. The moonroof was open, the windows were down, and the stereo was blaring. When my cellphone rang, I turned off the stereo, closed the roof and the windows, and this all important call while I was driving at approximately eighty miles per hour. When the “customer service stated the reason for his call, I wanted to throw my phone out the fucking window. I proceeded to tell him that the bill had been paid; in addition to reminding him that talking on the cellphone while driving had now replaced drunk driving as the number one cause of traffic accidents in America. Get this, he then told me that while one account showed a credit of over three-hundred dollars, the other account (the one that shouldn’t exist in the first place) was past due. Someone had applied the monies paid to the wrong account. Needless to say, the following Monday, Helen, Cory and I had a new cellphone service provider; a small victory.

The following week another customer service representative called to try to win our business back. She offered us, as the proverbial “valued customers,” fifty dollars as an enticement to return to Cingular.
Now, understand we were “bundle” customers. Our home phone service, internet service, and cellphone service were all within the BellSouth family, and had been for quite some time. When I calculated what our household had spent with BellSouth over the duration of our business relationship; the total was nearly ten thousand dollars. The fifty dollar offer was an insult. I told her the next time she went to buy a twenty-thousand dollar new car, and the salesman offers to take one-hundred dollars off the sticker price, she, being the shrewd negotiator that she is, should leap at this magnanimous offer, and be grateful for getting it. I really wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, but I was being as professional as humanly possible, lest I be construed as belligerent and crass. Wednesday a new problem with AT&T reared its ugly head.

Feeling the financial crunch of late, I fell behind on my AT&T bill. I wasn’t thirty days behind mind you, just late. I received a notice that stating that if I didn’t pay the one-hundred and thirty-nine dollars and seventy-seven cents I owed by January the thirteenth, our services could be interrupted. Not wanting that inconvenience, I called on the twelfth to make payment arrangements.

The accounts receivable rep was kind, nice, and of good humor. I told her I could pay on January twentieth. She put me on hold, and when she returned, stated that would be fine. However she reminded me that she expected I honor this agreement. I told I would, and thanked her. She insured me that our agreement had been duly noted in her summery of our call.

On January twentieth, I went to log on my computer to pay AT&T; I was unable to do so. My service had been disconnected. My first call resulted badly. I got a customer service representative that was unclear what that job entailed. Her demeanor led me to believe she was a former rent-a-cop, one that exuded the “I’m in charge here” persona. Unabated, I called again. “Marshe” was quite accommodating, but had trouble getting my internet service turned on. She gave me a number where folks resided that- here came the words everyone dreads- could assist me further; they couldn’t. I tried tech support. They turned out to be as much help as jock support. And for an extra added bonus, got disconnected after forty minutes of being on hold.

Oh, periodically “Darlin” would come on the line to tell me he was “still working on it.” He was quite expert at that. I called back. I was told by this unempowered corporate serf that she would try to “expedite” my request since my scheduled restore date wouldn’t be for two days. After submitting said request, which was denied; she informed me that my scheduled service restore had been moved….to February the second. I did not curse, I did not threaten violence, I did not tell her my next step was to firebomb the local AT&T office in retribution. All I asked was to speak to a supervisor who told me…

…does any of this sound familiar to anyone? Okay, five hours later, and countless synapses lost, I remained in internet limbo. You can guess what happened yesterday. I called Comcast Internet. AT&T isn’t coming until February the second. Comcast will be here Wednesday morning; out with the old, in with the new.

Are you aware that it costs approximately four hundred dollars to gain a new customer? Why don’t companies spend a little to retain the ones they have? Why don’t they just try to act as though they want us? My answer is they just don’t give a shit. Keep paying stock holders an expected rate of rate, keep spending money frivolously coming up with new technology they can con us into buying, and keep giving mediocre service; we’re stupid enough to keep paying for it. Why fix it, good service doesn’t fuel the economy. These conglomerates are unaware it's becoming the economy.