Over the past month I’ve had truly poor experiences with two big corporations that you would think are stellar when dealing with customers. And I contend the experiences are indicative of how the quality corporations deliver to customers is suffering on some fronts.
THE ABSOLUTE WORST EXPERIENCE: Dealing with Time Warner. I will say it: I have lived all over the world and even survived dealing with India’s government owned telephone company in New Delhi in the 70s. Time Warner is seemingly the most customer-unfriendly telephone company I have ever encountered. It’s not just a matter of size. It’s a matter how they respond to people who pay for their services which are often the only ones in town since in many cities they have virtual or actual monopolies.
I truly would rather have all my toenails pulled out and six root canals — on my belly button — rather than have to call Time Warner on another problem.
You often get nice people on the phone who are doing their jobs but in the end the corporation doesn’t seem to care. Some of them do not want to go the extra mile — as Cox Cable went the extra mile during my 20 years using them.
I’ve done many Tweets over the past few months how in many instances it has taken forever to get through to a human being .I’ve been in culture shock since moving from North Park San Diego where I could use Cox to Rancho Penasquitos where I must use Time Warner. Finally someone on Twitter sent me an address of an actual website that tells you how to get a HUMAN BEING when you call about your residential phone. YES there is a website page devoted to this. In fairness to Time Warner, it is far easier and quicker to get someone when calling on a business class matter.
But not tonight. Some people house sitting at my San Diego house have a relative who will be incarcerated for about a month. Each time he tries to call my biz line collect he has been told that the collect calls are not allowed from this number. So I tried to set this up so they could talk to this person:
1. I called Time Warner and was on hold for about 20 minutes and talked to three different operators before I was told that calls from inmates are handled by third parties and the company has no contracts to handle them. Fair enough, when I had Cox Cable for some 20 years — a great experience with virtually no problems — I made one phone call to a number and set it up.
2. Time Warner’s person said they would refer me to two numbers of companies that could help me.
3. I called the first company and a recording walked me though setting an account and depositing some money. I then informed my friends and their relative that calls could be made to my biz phone.
4. The person called – and a recording said collect calls were not allowed to my number.
5. I called Time Warner and after a modest hold got someone. They told me to call the company that set it up that it was not their department and they could help me. So I called back that SECOND COMPANY — which would only send me a text and you could not get an operator or even a menu of options by hitting the Zero.
6. I called back that first number and that company said there had been no activity on the account — which leads them to believe they do not service that jail. She told me to talk to Time Warner.
7. I got a very friendly, cheerful person on Time Warner who steadily became less cheerful as I told him a)that Time Warner gave me two useless numbers, b)that this was simple when I had Cox, c)that if they are giving out numbers they should be numbers that help. He then got a bit angry and said it was not their responsibility or ANY phone company on this kind of billing. And I told him that it WAS his company’s responsibility to give out relevant referal numbers since that was what they said they had given me — when they were useless.
8. His voice was rising and I told him that since it was clear he could not help me and would not he had other important calls to get to and good night.
HOW DID IT WIND UP? The outcome shows that Time Warner really didn’t bother to give out good information and this would have been easy — if I had NOT called them.
There is a number on a law enforcement page of a different company. Setting it up took FIVE MINUTES. If I had not called Time Warner I could have fixed this problem in 5 minutes — rather than the total of close to 2 hours that I spent on it talking to the company and their useless referrals.
Time Warner could not take the time to give out a decent number — just two numbers that were not relevant and didn’t work and then the argument I got was they had given me referrals and fulfilled their responsibility. And that they had no responsibility to help me at all. (It’s funny how this responsibility thing goes: I seem to have a responsibility to pay my bills on time but when I call I get loopholes).
So let me get this straight:
If someone from Time Warner gets lost in their car and sees me on the street and asks for directions, if I just tell them to turn any which way and not how to actually get to where they want to, I’m fulfilling my responsibility as a citizen? Hey, I told them something.
Anyone who has followed my Twitter page know of the constant problems I have had with this company. I’m on a trip where I’ll be gone all but 7 weeks between now and the end of May. I have to decide whether to switch to AT&T or some other company. And NOT because of digital phone service: but because Time Warner does NOT help me in a crunch, or it is difficult to get through and when you lodge complaints you never hear back from a supervisor or anyone. If I had any problem with service at Cox, I’d get a call back. At Time Warner there is silence.
If Cox Cable is “your friend in the digital age,” Time Warner sometimes comes across as “your mime in the customer service department.”
If you saw skeletons on your street this Halloween, some of theme may have been people who had been glued to their phones waiting to be connected with Time Warner customer service or to have a problem resolved completely.
I rank my deals with it as the most difficult company to deal with — and that includes companies I dealt with in Asia, Europe and Mexico in my years as a journalist.
DMV is more pleasureable.
But think about it: this took five minutes to set up. Instead, I was referred to two useless numbers for the San Diego area and not even then one on the law enforcement website.
CUSTOMER SERVICE DETERIORATION: VERIZON Wireless.
Verizon is one of my favorite companies and I have loyally stuck with it since 1997. But it is slipping:
–They sold me a new LG phone that won’t shut up. I get AUDIO COMMERCIALS that sometimes wake me up for Verizon Mobile Internet or the Navigator. Even though the phone is closed a voice comes on and wakes me up trying to sell me the service. I called Verizon and asked how they could sell a phone that has screaming commercials go off in the morning or if I’m meeting someone and they said these are preinstalled applications. I need to go to a store. Which means allocate a few hours that day.
I asked them why my other phones didn’t have commercials that scream out to me when the phone is closed and wake me up. They told me it’s the phone manufacturers. So why, then, should I buy my next phone from Verizon if it’s putting on commercials that wake me up?
–Not testing devices sold to customers. On Oct 12 someone broke into my van in Hamden CT while I was having dinner with my 90 year old mother and during my 85 minute dinner stole my NEW laptop (not even a month yet), GPS, phone charger and Bluetooth device. I have had to replace all of them. I stopped in at a Verizon store on the road and they said I had two Bluetooth options. They recommended the newer more expensive one and I said OK — but asked them to set it up. They assured me it operated just like the other one and that there would be no problems.
Nope. It isn’t receiving calls. And it isn’t letting me use it remotely to place calls, but I can have it in my ear and dial my phone.
Since I’m in a different city each day, this means I will have to go to a Verizon store to get the screaming commercials off my phone and see if they can make the Bluetooth work.
All of this is a shift: in all my time with Verizon I’ve had few problems. All phones I bought from them were phones — not audio advertising machines. And all products I bought worked.
And the point?
No this isn’t a blog post to let off steam. It’s to detail how corporations are falling down on the little things.
But sometimes these little things are big enough so that the big corporations lose customers to competitors who may not be as big — but who make it clear that they really do care, in big and small ways…
UPDATE: This seems timely:
Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) — Time Warner Cable Inc., the second- largest U.S. cable-television operator, fell the most in almost 18 months after reporting third-quarter profit that missed analysts’ estimates because of video-customer losses.
Earnings per share were $1.08, the New York-based company said today, missing the average analyst projection of $1.14. The shares fell 7.7 percent to $65.17 at 4:02 p.m. New York time, the biggest one-day decline since May 2010.
Time Warner Cable lost 126,000 video subscribers as customers defected to Verizon Communications Inc.’s FiOS, AT&T Inc.’s U-verse and DirecTV, according to Vijay Jayant, an analyst at ISI Group in New York. Analysts estimated a loss of 113,000, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Overall customers — video, phone and broadband for corporations and households — fell by 16,000 in the quarter.
I could easily see moving to other options in coming years so I can deal with other companies. It’s also a matter of principle: I have all these services bundled up and then when I need to contact the company I am on hold forever, or can’t get a human being, or they basically blow me off. Why should I stick with a company like that the way I stuck with Cox Cable until I couldn’t get it in my new home area and the way I continue to use Verizon Wireless?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.