When Customer Service Doesn’t Matter

Ah, but you say customer service always matters. Not always. The outward-facing image of a company is only one of its many characteristics that must be prioritized relative to the external environment. I once worked with a crusty old marketing VP to ensure that a start-up company’s recruiting campaigns were consistent with product marketing. In a universe where everyone is concerned with projecting a positive brand image in the marketplace, collaboration such as this is of benefit to all. He had one message that I heard over and over. “You can’t gift wrap a turd!” In other words, it doesn’t matter if you have the best sales team, marketing campaign, and customer service on the face of the planet if you can’t deliver a quality product.

I thought about this again last week when once again, my business web site hosted by Earthlink was invisible to over 18.5 million Comcast HS internet customers. This debacle was an instant replay of the same problem that happened only one month earlier (see last month’s occurrence Tech Wars: Difficulties Beyond Our Control). I dreaded the hours and hours and hours… you get the picture… on the phone dealing with 1^st and 2^nd level support turd wrappers. They have all been drilled on walking me through fixing my account, but are either ignorant of the well documented recurring problems with Comcast or have orders to stonewall it. The party line is “never reveal any culpability in causing an outage.” Experience reminded me that they would escalate the issue only after beating me into submission by performing time-consuming, mindless, and robotic routines from their list of user-related solutions to non-related issues. I already knew that this was not MY problem but a much larger issue that should be a concern to any reputable service-oriented organization. Pretending to care doesn’t cut it when the product fails.

I made a decision: I would not sacrifice time from my family over the holidays to argue with them, but would publicly make it known through their social media contacts that it is happening again. Away from the office and using only an iPhone to access their problem solvers, this was the only way to communicate without totally disrupting my family’s travel plans. To their credit, they replied to me. They did not fix the problem.

Should I have expected the Earthlink and Comcast engineering teams to jump in and fix this on Sunday morning, December 23^rd when I first noticed it was starting again? Could I expect a response during the downtime before Christmas Day? I’m only one small business customer, but I think yes. Companies with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue did not get there by accident, and it is unthinkable that they would not have contingency plans to handle emergency operations at any time. More important than being able to handle technical downtime is the looming fact that it should never have happened in the first place. Assuming that these two mega-giants in electronic communications had to work together to fix the November problem, it would also be logical to think that they would take some measures to prevent recurrence in December. Instead, it seems that they polished the turd and passed it on for lower-level employees to gift wrap for them. On Day 4 of this latest outage, I got this tweet:

EarthLink Business @EarthLinkBiz @TomBolt I apologize that you are experiencing issues. I have the customer care escalation team on this one. You should be contacted today.

Later in the day, they resolved the problem. Suggestions to my clients regarding your brand: no charge for this:

1. Putting the word “care” or “guarantee” in your promotional materials will never be believed if it is not backed up by quality products and services.
2. Trying to cover up problems by applying spin or misleading information will ultimately backfire. Customers are insulted when expected to believe fairy tale propaganda.
3. Size doesn’t matter! If you are a small business, never remain silent when the big guys try to bully you around. If you are big business, avoid becoming the next evil empire by forgetting that customers do matter.
4. Hire employees who have intelligence, an excellent work ethic, and a passion for doing the job. Then pay them appropriately and give them continuous training.
5. Maintain a culture of employee ownership. Keep them informed and give them the tools to act independently and intelligently to solve problems.

Hopefully, this is the last chapter in this saga, but I have little hope that in one month, there will not be a “strike three” event to report. I’ll be working hard in the meantime to be able to respond by firing one or both of my flailing external technology partners.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times… ain’t gonna happen!

Image credit: CustomerService lightwise / 123RF Stock Photo