Customer Service a Thing of the Past

We were talking about customer service yesterday at work. Mary had terrible trouble with AT&T with her mother's phone installation. Now she's having an even worse time with Time Warner, getting her own cable/internet/phone set up in her new house. She's had to take off work twice, and it's still not installed. No one has even apologized to her, when I think they should be on their knees, begging her to forgive them for their repeated errors.

For most companies, gone are the days of "the customer is always right."

When I was working as a hostess in the 80s, we bent over backwards to make sure anything we did wrong was fixed to the satisfaction of the customer. It didn't even matter if it was ridiculously obvious that it was the customer who was being a jackwagon. We were to smile and figure out how to make him happy. Moving tables, free meals, whatever.

Later, working in contract research, I primarily dealt with outside clients, whom I catered to every day. Our customer service was excellent.

Two poor service and follow-up customer service nightmares come to mind, that I've had in the last ten years. The first was my credit card company, who came after me to pay for my mother's $1200 credit card balance (through the same company) after she went into long-term care and couldn't work. My mother and I had never had calls from bill collectors, so it was very scary to have a company thug call me at home, pissed off and screaming that I needed to personally pay for my mom's outstanding balance- which of course I was under no obligation to do. I wasn't even on the card. GRR.

I wrote a long letter to the appropriate person there, explaining everything that had happened, and that I was completely appalled that they would resort to harassing family members to get their money. I never heard a word back. Not even a form letter.

I no longer have that credit card.

The other was when I delivered Michael at Seton Hospital. One nurse was amazing that day, but my labor was unnecessarily long, dangerous (OD on morphine much?) and miserable due to the incompetence of two other nurses.

Seton has a fine reputation, and I know that situation, unlike the credit card episode, was just an unlucky chain of events, rather than a reflection of the hospital overall. Still. They owed me at least a response to my very long written reply to the customer satisfaction survey. I heard nothing.

A few bright spots in customer service--
Southwest Airlines, who are the happiest, most fun staff I've ever encountered
Apple, who just handled a gift card problem for me promptly and with apology, even though it wasn't their fault at all
For me... AT&T, who has been outstanding in handling a couple of issues with our cell phones