Customers Expect More

Saturday night my internet access went down at my house.  This is an issue because it is a weekend and I am working from home.  It is also an issue because my phones are tied in and therefore I don’t have any phone or fax at home. 

We called our ISP Comcast—famous for the Comcastic commercials in our market showing very happy customers running businesses on their high-speed internet.   In talking with them they told me that they had determined it was equipment failure on their part somewhere between my house and the street and they would send someone out on Monday. 

I explained my situation to the guy on the phone and asked if their service people worked on Sunday.  He said they do work on Sunday but they are just too busy to get to me until Monday. I reminded him that it was his equipment failure and again how much I rely on the service.  He then told me that 2 days turnaround is not outside of normal standards and if I wanted the 24 hour turnaround I should have purchased a business account versus residential.  I told him that I did not know about the business account and if I would have known I would have purchased. 

After talking with his supervisor, the supervisor told me that if I call the retention line and tell them I am going to turn off my service they can pull some strings and get someone out sooner.  Unfortunately, the retention line is closed until Monday.  In telling him that 2 days for broken equipment is not acceptable service to me he assured me that there is no other service out there with faster turnaround. 

This made me feel very frustrated because I would expect more from a company that shows these happy people on TV flashing their profitable businesses with the Comcastic jingle playing in the background. 

There are a few major points here to consider:

1.       Customers no longer expect businesses to be closed on weekends in the case of service issues. If my service would have gone down on a weekday it might have turned out more positive.

2.       No amount of happy commercials from Comcast will wipe my memory of this service failure followed up by a customer service failure.

3.       We need to make sure that our solutions match our customers growing needs.  I was not made aware of the business service or I would have purchased it.  This forces me to think---how many services does my company offer that my customers are not aware of?

4.       Never tell customers you don’t have the time for them.

5.       Coaching customers to threaten to quit in order to get what they need is truly sad.

This experience has inspired me to look at my current service set up and review if theire is anything I can tighten up to make it even better. 

Comments

[Greg Lins]

Hi Amy,

Great post. I have a horror story with Comcast that took weeks to resolve... I won't even go into it because it still hurts - almost 3 years later.

The problem with experiences like yours and mine is that these collosal service failures violate what is effectively a Brand Promise from Comcast.

Nevertheless, it's fashionable these days to market Promises, actual or implied, without regard to Ability to Deliver. It isn't just a problem for Customers, it's effectively erodes the Brand for the company that chooses to Make Promises that can't be Kept.

We work with Organizations to develop Promise-Driven Organizations to ensure that Promises Made = Promises Kept. In order to do that, CEO's need to reign in the Marketing machine, look at what Customers want, and selectively choose which Promises they can reasonably (and profitably) deliver.

Why oh why is this so hard to do?

See ya Wednesday, Amy.