I am old enough to remember the days that when you wanted to
speak with someone at the telephone company, you went down to the
local office and had a face-to-face meeting. It was the same with
the electric and natural gas utilities, and cable television hadn’t
been invented yet.
I am old enough to remember the days that when you wanted to speak with someone at the telephone company, you went down to the local office and had a face-to-face meeting. It was the same with the electric and natural gas utilities, and cable television hadn’t been invented yet.
Today, we have call centers and automated attendants and the availability of the Internet. Call me a dinosaur, but customer service was better in the old days.
You don’t have to look far to find examples of bad customer service. Ask the PG&E customers whose power went out during the recent rains. Ask them how long they were in the dark. Ask them how much human contact they had with the utility. PG&E does have a local office where you can ask your question in person, but only if you want to drive or take the bus to downtown San Jose.
Verizon and SBC prefer to transact business over the phone. Verizon used to have a customer service center, what they called a phone store in Gilroy, but it was closed more than a year ago.
The cellular telephone companies are worse. Once they have you signed up, some charge an extra fee if you want to pay your bill in person. Then there is the cable company. Their local office is in Gilroy tucked in behind the outlet stores. They also have a local phone number, but it isn’t listed in the phone book. When you call the number listed for Charter you reach their call center in Vancouver, Wash., just over the river from Portland, Oregon. You press “1” or “2” a handful of times and then you get to listen to some advertising until the “customer service representative” comes on the line.
The trouble with centralized customer service is that the problem you are having with your cable, telephone or electric service isn’t their problem. After they review your account information to ensure that your payments are up to date, these folks don’t have much information to offer you. They can tell you that they’ll report the problem or that they’re working on it. They can’t tell you why you’re having a problem or when service will be restored.
The truth is they really don’t care. But, if these folks were your neighbors, the problem you’re having would be their problem, too, and they might take a more direct approach to solving it or finding out when things would be back to normal.
This “hands-off” approach to customer service is reflected in troubles in our economy. We’re waiting for something to happen, for someone to do something first. We’d rather complain about the lousy economy than figure out ways to get it moving again. We’ve become too accepting of bad service and no accountability.
We have only ourselves to blame because we take this diminished service because we feel there’s no choice. We have choices in phone service and in home entertainment. As we learned from the Croy Fire, some people live without PG&E.
We also can seek the missing accountability by getting names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Call these utility call centers and ask for the names of local supervisors and ask how to reach them. You may have to spend some time on hold and it may take more than one call, but you can get the information.
Of course, companies like Verizon, PG&E and Charter could take a few steps backwards. I doubt that this column will lead to the companies abandoning their call centers, but it would be a great start if those charged with customer service were more focused on providing knowledgeable answers instead of trying to set productivity records of how many calls they can handle each hour.
