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Google Fiber Goes Down During World Series, Credits KC 2 Days of Service (pcmech.com)
kstatefan40 writes: Google Fiber went down in Kansas City during one of the most important times in the local market: Game 1 of the World Series between the New York Mets and the Kansas City Royals at Kauffman Stadium. Yesterday, I got an apology from them via email, and even though I wasn't home during the outage, they're making up for it by proactively giving the entire market 2 days of service off of their next bill. The rest of the industry could really learn from their customer service.
When was the last time a telecom provider gave you a discount on your bill without you asking for it? The only times I've gotten much apology from my own ISP is when I threaten (with reason) to jump ship.
When was the last time a telecom provider gave you a discount on your bill without you asking for it? The only times I've gotten much apology from my own ISP is when I threaten (with reason) to jump ship.
They take it as a writeoff, and now:
People know there's such a thing as Google Fiber.
Big companies use it for real things.
Google is cool about customer service.
I wouldn't be surprised if they torched it on purpose just to make the point.
We lose broadband in my town (Time Warner) for 4-6 hour periods, roughly once in a calendar year depending on the weather. And no, they've never credited me a dime for it, nor will they since they already have the market cornered.
And thus bad CSR's are the prime cause of customer loss, and not the other way around. That's excluding when they make promises to retain you that they know are rubbish, or it ends up costing the customer more and then they just cancel out of distrust of anything further.
Personally, I get through to supervisors. It's not hard. I'm not even very polite, I've just had a lot of experience (you'll see why below). But mainly because I know what I'm entitled to and what I'm not. If you give me problems, that's what recording the phone call is for. Ooops. A CSR out of a job for talking bullshit is much easier than losing a long-term customer precisely because the next CSR is paid the same and just another guy reading the same script.
It's not a question that large callcentres are always staffed by assholes, who all claim the supervisor "isn't available" (or not even there, that always gets a laugh from me too!) because that's exactly what they are told to do.
But that's not the end of the customer's power. In the UK, you can record the phone call. It's only "advised" to tell them you are recording and if THEY have a "calls may be recorded" warning - well... I don't need to tell them if I'm recording at all (I don't need to anyway, it's just polite).
And then the ball-game gets turned around. You're refusing to give me your name? You're refusing to accept notification of my cancellation? You failed to follow procedures? You put me on hold but never resolved the query that you went on hold to do? Oh, that little tape winging its way to head office is going to hurt and given that it's your JOB to help (no matter what your mythical never-present supervisor might train you to do), it's going to cost you.
Last time I phoned up with a complaint, I *did* get the mythical supervisor on the line (I always do, when I deem them necessary, but that's another matter) and I had the British Gas callcentre (if you live in Britain, you know they are one of the WORST for callcentres) that he was in charge of phoning local newsagents near me to discover one that they had a PayPoint in, that they could *pay* to stay open late, especially so that *I* alone (as in I had to present ID to the newsagent, who'd already shut up shop but had been paid to stay open only for me) could go over to them and top-up a pre-payment card to solve my problem. The problem was quite minor, their way of dealing with it wasn't, but I got my way and cost them a lot more money than basic compliance would ever have cost - by getting through to that supervisor and explaining what was happening.
I don't expect the minions on the front-line of the callcentre to understand that, they never do. But getting a supervisor isn't a fob-off that works when people are serious, and the supervisors know exactly when they have to act to not get caught.
And turning the tables of "No, that's fine, I'm recording that response, and your name was?" on them soon wakes them up because they know those kinds of games are stupid, immoral, not helpful, losing them customers, and sometimes illegal when they have a duty to act on the information given to them (i.e. cancellations).
I don't threaten callcentres and companies with court. They threaten me quite often. I've invited to initiate the court proceedings on behalf of at least two companies to save them time. Strangely it's NEVER got that far when they find out I have recordings and every letter and email ever sent or received. But I have screwed over any number of callcentre operatives who failed to do their job by playing such games and thinking it's cute to try to run rings around my efforts to do something quite reasonable. To my knowledge, I've cost at least two their jobs. One of them phoned me back up to threaten me because of that.
Being a dick on the phone to customers is all fun and games until it costs you your job. Because you ARE supposed to be there to help and you're really not important enough to lose even a medium sized customer over.
That's th