The douches have a king
There’s a huge difference between a CEO choosing not to be as accessible as Apple’s Steve Jobs and AT&T’s threat to sue a customer who emails their CEO, Randal Stephenson, directly.
While AT&T’s apology to their former customer is not wrong, it still misses the point in a huge way: when customers complain, don’t just talk back at them.
I’ve worked for decades in some form of either customer service or communications or both. Whether it was with a small non-profit, fast food, locally owned dry cleaner, or a Forbes 500 multi-billion dollar corporation, they all had customers who wanted to be heard.
I get a lot of flak for having put in time as a customer service rep and debt collector with SallieMae. If you’ve ever taken out a student loan, you’ve done business with them or you will. For some reason, when people owe you money they come to hate you. Before SallieMae I was a telemarketer and can honestly say folks were way nicer when I interrupted their dinner trying to sell something than when they asked me how much they owed on their education loans.
At SallieMae, we were expected to handle each call in under 5 minutes. SallieMae taught us all their policies and federal laws and lending processes and even gave us the latitude to bark back when things got out of hand. One thing we learned fast is borrowers don’t get off the phone in less than 5 minutes without being heard. We didn’t have the authority to wipe out late fees or absolve balances and we didn’t have to if our callers didn’t feel they were brushed off or read to from a script.
Like a lot of big companies, SallieMae gets most of its customers from buying up smaller companies who’ve already done the work it took to get their customer base. I’m an AT&T customer because they bought out Cingular. We all people who took their accounts to a smaller bank for better service only to have it bought up by one of the big banks they chose to leave.
Instead of a corporation’s success coming from a better product or service, it is now from acquiring profitable assets. These assets are then assimilated into the larger corporation and are no longer the companies with which their customers originally chose to do business. It is like buying at the farmer’s market to find out you’ve got a bag of groceries from a Super WalMart when you get home.
Corporate America needs to look at what happened with AT&T and learn from it. If your customers ask you for something, you don’t have to say “yes,” but you can’t shut them up: not with scripted responses, hollow apologies, and definitely not with threats of litigation.
We saw in the 70′s and 80′s how companies as employers found that laying off workers drove up profits. In the 90′s we saw workers who no longer felt any loyalty to their employers: changing jobs frequently for better pay and benefits, taking their acquired skills and experience with them. We’ve seen customers handled similarly and react similarly: companies dropping or charging for services and customers unashamedly shopping for the lowest possible price above all else.
In the 2000′s it is as if big business has decided to no longer work for customers. Instead, they often buy out smaller competitors to expand their market share. Customers, however, no longer have to wait for responses from big business to get action on their grievances. Tweet “#company_name sucks because whatever” and you’ve just broadcast your problem to the world. Twitter is only one channel of hundreds almost anyone can access freely.
I know people who will complain about a company to their networks before they would attempt to have the issue addressed by the company directly. They don’t want an apology or to be told why this has happened, they want to be heard. If a company won’t listen to its customers, other customers will.
