The Weather Report
August 1, 2004
Column by Brandon Copple

The Weather: Sunny & clear 81°. Humidity 42%. Winds SSW at 10mph. Still pretty damn nice.

What ever happened to summer? I feel like I live in Puget Sound or Nantucket or someplace where it rarely gets hot, where you hardly ever have to water your garden, where every day is a wonder and chilled wine comes out of the kitchen faucet. July was a glorious Millennium Park opening, a pleasant sidewalk birthday dinner and as much time on the patio as I could expect. If it’s gonna get hot, it better hurry.

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Who Killed Customer Service? (or, A Heartbreaking Tale of Staggering Incompetence)

With great power comes great responsibility. I may not be able to shoot spider webs out of my veins, but I do have this column, which at last count was drawing about 236 eyeballs every month (that’s 120 page views at 2 eyeballs each, less 4 to account for my blind and one-eyed readers).

I must not use the attentions of this vast following to selfish ends. So I’m not going to write a rant about SBC Yahoo! DSL, which for the last three weeks has wrecked my schedule, drained my checking account and driven me to the razor’s edge of insanity.

Actually, I already wrote a rant, but I won’t post it because, for one thing, writing it already made me feel better. For another, I just read Chris Orcutt’s rant on Verizon DSL, and while my experience differs factually, the frustration is the same and I can’t articulate it any better than Chris has.

So I’ve calmed down and am ready to think critically about when and how these telco providers turned into such almighty fucking incompetent dickheads. For 10 years I’ve been hearing about deregulation and increased competition, which is supposed to benefit consumers with lower prices, new and better products, improved service.

So far we’ve got one-and-a-half of three. Phone service is Hyundai-cheap – anybody paying more than 5 cents a minute for long distance is an idiot. There are new offerings – wifi, cable modems, voice-over IP – but the old services are no better than before. And customer service is worse than ever.

My internet service got cut off because an SBC customer-service rep told me I could port my number to a voice-over internet provider without losing the DSL line. He was wrong; the mistake cost me 26 days of home service and around $400.

It is no consolation to know that I am not alone. Last year the Illinois Commerce Commission received 2,636 consumer complaints about SBC – almost 1,500 more than any other local phone carrier.

2,636. That’s seven complaints a day. So every day in 2003 SBC made seven people mad enough to file a government report. Christ knows how many it only made mad enough to scream, throw a phone across the room or contemplate cutting a technician’s head off and FedEx-ing it back to headquarters (I know someone who got that mad recently).

But seven a day? Even the big airlines aren’t that inept. Yes, phone companies are running a vast, complex, rapidly changing network. But they’re not flying jets or fending off terrorists.

I keep reading about the cutthroat competition in the broadband business. But SBC, as owner of the local-phone lines, is the only broadband game on our block. Comcast, the cable company, will offer service in my building in lateAugust, but I can’t wait that long.

And even when the competition does come, I doubt service will improve. But I don’t understand why it won’t. Why doesn’t some upstart, some Southwest Airlines, come in and clean up on these assholes with low-ball prices, no-frill products and superior customer service?

I realize that SBC owns the phone lines and the competition has to go through them. And there’s no pricing power so they can’t raise rates to pay for better customer service.

But it’s much worse than that. As you’ve surely noticed, telco companies aren’t the only ones who treat their customers like shit. Don Schultz, a marketing consultant and professor at Northwestern University, says bad customer service is an epidemic sweeping the corporate population. Big companies, and especially big old companies, no longer attempt to connect with actual warm-blooded consumers except through mass-media advertising.

“Most big companies don’t even know who their customers are anymore,” Schultz says.

In the last 25 years, according to Schultz, most big American companies have been taken over by the processes that control their internal functions. The processes are controlled by different groups within the corporation (the customer-service division, let’s say) and those groups are more concerned with protecting their power and position (from budget cuts, layoffs, etc.) than with advancing the business (by helping customers).

‘Processes.’ ‘Functions.’ The words alone make me want to hit somebody.

Anyway, the processes strictly limit how employees do their jobs. A customer service rep has a list of remedies he can offer to solve your problem; if nothing on the list works, well, too bad.

Some companies have figured this out. Schultz cites The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, which gives its customer reps $200 per customer to take care of any complaint. So if the guy can’t get your room cleaned on time, maybe he sends you a good bottle of wine, or a massage coupon, or knocks $200 off your bill.

Companies like SBC turn this concept on its head. They pay more attention to potential customers than paying customers.

During my 26-day service outage, I made 12 calls to SBC, speaking to 12 different customer reps. One guy named Edmund was in mid-sentence when my cell phone dropped the call. I immediately called back, got another rep, Chris, and asked her if I could reconnect to Edmund. “No,” Chris said. “I have no idea where he’s at or who he even is.”

With each of these anonymous androids, I had to explain my problem from the top; each one apologized for the inconvenience, then did nothing to help me. Several made the situation worse.

And then, in a two-hour window yesterday afternoon, I took two calls from SBC peddlers, trying to interest me in local and long-distance phone service. I couldn’t believe how stupid they were. I said as much to both of them, then went on to describe my ordeal in profane detail. Each apologized profusely and asked what they could do to get me back. I suggested some form of gory human sacrifice and hung up.

Schultz says this sort of idiocy is to be expected from companies obsessed with growth. “They treat everything as an acquisition,” he says. “Once they’ve got you, they’re done.”

Someday, I hope we’ll be done with them too.

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The List

Most of these have been pretty upbeat so far. I’m not feeling too cheery this month, so here’s a list of things that irritate me.

• Phones
• Movie critics
• When you wait 20 minutes for a bus, then three come at the same time
• Strangers who strike up conversations
• Loud Harleys
• Shitty weak coffee
• Any mention of pro football in the summer
• Dirty eyeglasses
• The sound of television I’m not watching
• Slow shower drains
• SBC

(Brandon Copple is a volunteer staff writer for 2Walls Webzine.)