Tag Archives: customer service

Customer service is becoming an artifact of a time that has long since passed

Business, Economics, Relationships, Technology, , , , , , , , , , ,

The other night I was watching Game of Thrones on HBO Now through my Apple TV (yes, how many products can I mention in one sentence?). Up until now, Apple TV and HBO Now has been a great service where I’ve really enjoyed the shows and the quality used to bring them to me. However, on this evening (and the following week), I discovered that the sound for Game of Thrones is horrible, to the point where I couldn’t hear the dialogue at all. I ended up turning up the sound on my television to practically maximum and still couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. When the show ended, the sound kicked back in and nearly blew out the speakers in my TV. Both weeks, I’ve been unable to hear the sound on this one show. I can hear it fine on every other show, both on and off the HBO Now service.

So, I sent an email to the customer support people at HBO Now and received one of those “we thank you for contacting us but we’ll have a real person get back to you later” responses. A day later, I received the most generic response ever, indicating that NO ONE read the email, but it was filtered through some program that must have caught the word “sound” or “volume” and then told me to go through the FAQ they have about how to handle problems with adjusting the volume with an Apple TV. Really? In other words, no human is EVER going to deal with the issue. In other words, having a customer support system is a joke and an insult to anyone who may ever feel the need to use it.

If this was just a one-off situation, I’d just chalk it up to that sort of thing. But no, I’m starting to run across this ALL THE TIME. An example: Electronic Arts, the company that is constantly competing with Comcast for the worst customer service on the planet. Some years back, back when the Internet was young, I used to play Star Wars: The Old Republic. And then I quit. A couple of years later, I decided to play it again. Except there was a problem. Let me explain.

When I first played Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR), it was owned by Electronic Arts, but it was billed by its subsidiary company Origin. Sometime during that period when I was no longer playing the game, someone breached Electronic Arts’s servers and stole a bunch of accounts. One of them was mine (inactive at the time because I wasn’t playing any games that Electronic Arts owned). Someone tried to buy FIFA (some soccer game) on my stolen account, but was thwarted by the fact that my credit card had expired a year or so before the transaction was attempted. By the way, EA somehow has translated that to believing its crack crew of cyber security experts had “stopped” the transaction and did a great service to me. Keep in mind, the only “stop” that was conducted was my bank saying, no, that credit card hasn’t been valid for a long time now. Anyway, to make a long story short, EA incorporated Origin into its service as its process of charging everyone for everything, so when I went to reactivate my account for SWTOR, EA refused to let me put any credit card information onto the account because my credit information was now “flagged”, which really translates to “we tried to let a thief fraudulently charge a game to your account and the transaction failed, so we now have to flag your account as one we can never allow you to make charges on again, even though our customer service people have given back access this account to you, no longer the thieves.” All attempts to “fix” this account have failed, as I have escalated the issue to the top echelons of EA, and each time it gets rejected based on…well, no one really knows why. It just keeps getting rejected. And then I get a really friendly email from EA stating: “So, is there anything else we can help with at this time?” I guess just rejecting me isn’t enough. They want to rub salt in the wound, too. For the record, the people at SWTOR have been very kind, but have resigned to the fact that if EA can’t fix it on their end, the issue is out of the hands and incapable of being fixed. Sure, I could start up a new account, but I have a ton of maxed characters on this account and a lot of game money in their banks, or possession. Starting over is not something I desire to do, so I’ve pretty much just stopped playing the game. I could play by buying a monthly game card (for game time), but that means I have to pay the maximum price to play the game each month, which is a direct insult to someone who was a member of the game when it first launched.

Strangely enough, gaming companies do this sort of thing a lot. Sony is a good example of this. I had an Everquest account back in the day, but when I stopped playing, somehow my account then became “flagged”. I can’t get my account back now. It’s like I was doing horrible things in the game and am now banned. But I’m not the sort of player who does any of those kinds of things, but as usual, I can’t even get them to tell me why the account was banned, meaning it was probably compromised during the time I was gone, or it was breached during one of those early periods when entire batches of accounts were breached at once by overseas hackers and rather than deal with each case one by one, they just banned everyone as a consequence.

The point is: Customer service is almost nonexistent these days. Because of automation and outsourcing, we now have a situation where if you ever need customer service for a game or product, chances are pretty good that you’re going to end up very dissatisfied. There are some good companies still out there, but they are becoming rarities, and one thing I’m starting to recognize is that when someone recommends a company to me for good service, it’s usually because they had good service from that company YEARS ago and probably haven’t had a recent situation they’ve had to deal with concerning that company. I’ve had a few encounters like that recently where I went with a company because of past, good experiences, only to discover that they’re currently a crapfest when it comes to dealing with customers.

Just saying.

Dealing with companies with horrible (or lack of) customer service

Business, Computer Games, Technology, , , , , , ,

star wars satele

Recently, I’ve been dealing with one of those companies known for horrible customer service. You know, one of those corporate entities that everyone loves to hate, yet they keep doing their thing, somehow convinced that people will just forget about horrible customer service in the past, forgive them completely and even though they haven’t done anything to fix anything, their belief is everything will somehow improve.

The company we’re talking about is Electronic Arts, the monopolistic entity of the computer gaming world. Disclosure: Years ago, I worked for them when Maxis was bought by them (and I worked at Maxis Software). That doesn’t mean I have become their biggest fan (or worst enemy either). When I left them, I was lukewarm about the company. My complaint today is coming strictly from a customer, or at least a former customer if you want to be completely honest.

My problem stems from one of those game properties they have that I hate to love, but tend to return to as most gamers seem to have one or two of those kinds of titles in their back list. My title was Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I’ll be honest: It’s one of those games you can enjoy for great segments of time before you grow bored with it and put it on hold for months (or years) before picking it back up again.

Well, I was on my third or so time of going back to picking it up again when all of this happened. I grew bored with World of Warcraft, was looking for something to scratch my gaming itch, and decided to come back to Star Wars: The Old Republic. A few times in returning back, the game is a lot different from when I first played it. You see, back in the older days it was one of those $15/month games, like World of Warcraft. But it kind of failed at that type of game and became one of those free to play (or purchase to play free, or whatever acronym you need to use). The monthly fee was now waived, although if you wanted the full experience of the game (all your characters and not feeling like you’re a toddler in an adult game), you basically had to pay the full price ($15 a month). So, I went to update my billing information and was immediately denied. For some reason, it wouldn’t take my credit card information. So I went to the Paypal option, and it denied that as well.

What I discovered, after some time on the phone with their customer support (this is SWTOR customer support at this time) is that EA has disabled my pay options because during the time I was away from the game someone tried to access my account and buy a copy of FIFA (some soccer game, or something like that). The person was denied (only because my credit card information had lapsed; not through any great action on the part of EA). But because of this, my account has been frozen.

So, I had to then call EA (not SWTOR) customer support where I went through a maze of customer support people who all promised they could take care of it, but each needed the information told to them from the ground up and then hung up and proceeded to do absolutely nothing. A few days after EACH call, I got an email from someone who said he or she was the one who could fix this if I provided more information but that person couldn’t ask me the information by email, so I would have to call back to relay the correct information. Each time I called back, I was given yet another clueless customer service person who couldn’t acknowledge the person who left the message, so they had to start the process from the beginning again. I should add that he email address of the person who wrote me each time basically went back to someone who would state that he couldn’t help me unless I contacted customer service directly.

So, this went on for weeks. All I kept asking for was someone to unblock my account so I can put my paypal information onto my account and be able to play the game again. There has been absolutely no resolution to this issue whatsoever. Fun fun.

So, as it is, I will probably never buy another game from any entity involved with EA, including, of course, EA.

This is customer service at is very worst.

That Moment When You Realize the Customer Service Rep Doesn’t Really Want to Talk to You

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I was in a gas station today, buying some milk. I’ve been in this gas station so many times before that I’d forgotten when I didn’t used to go to this little convenience store. Anyway, the cashiers are generally tolerable, meaning that they say hi and that’s generally about it. But they don’t act rude or anything like that. So it’s just one of those normal places that you shop where you wouldn’t consider it to be the best place in the world to shop.

Anyway, when I went to the cooler to get some milk, I happened to notice that the milk was all “Meijer” brand. I was kind of surprised by that because I tend to buy most of my milk at Meijer and didn’t expect a gas station to stock it as well. Well, much to my surprise, right then and there I discovered that the gas station I’ve been frequenting for years is actually a Meijer gas station, although it isn’t as marked as some of the other ones you see in town. So I was kind of surprised by this and started a conversation of that nature with the clerk.

What I experienced was one of those moments where you realize the person you’re talking to wants to do anything but actually talk to you. A few seconds into the “conversation” I was actually feeling kind of stupid, realizing that I wasted a lot of energy trying to engage this woman in conversation and only got the most brush off of a talk I’ve ever had. It wasn’t like I was asking for a date. Strangely enough, I walked away from that store thinking, wow, I don’t ever want to go back to that convenience store again.

I hadn’t really given a situation like this much thought over the years because most of my interactions with people tend to be quite positive. I’m a sociable kind of guy who likes to talk to people, and as a result, I find a lot of people who are quite conversation in return. But this was the first time in a very long time that I ever came up to someone who I really felt wanted to be in any place but a place where I happened to be standing in front of her.

At least I got my milk. But I’m not sure I’d want to get it from that place again.

The Underlying Problem of Giving Them the Pickle

Business, Education, Healthcare, , , , , , , , ,

Pickle

Just recently, I was working for a health care organization that seemed to be having some difficulty in customer service. As a result, the higher-ups thought it would be really beneficial if the education department (of which I was a part) took up the task of teaching customer service to the front line employees, specifically the people who engage patients when they come to the hospital system. So, after a few meetings that consisted of management explaining how customer service needs to improve (in which I was reminded of the infamous pro dominant adage of “We will beat our slaves until moral improves” but I digress), we were then shown a motivational film that’s been making the circuit called “Give Them the Pickle.” In case you’re not familiar with this film, it features the creator of the ice cream parlor Farrell’s as he explains how a customer got really upset in one of his establishments because he asked for an extra pickle and was then told that pickles are extra, or something like that. This started a whole series of adventures where this owner decided to change the customer service model of his franchise forever. There may have been an “and they lived happily ever after” at the end of it as well. I’ll admit, it was motivational and it was a good presentation. But it seemed to miss a few things, specifically when dealing with the company where I just worked.

First, the problem inherent in our company has a lot more to do with service than just customer service. To begin with, customer service tends to be lacking WITHIN the organization, so that quite often it can be a bit difficult to deal with other parts of the company because of the silos that have been created and maintained. When you have that sort of atmosphere going on, telling those same employees that they now need to focus on customer service when they’re having enough trouble providing company service to each other, well, there’s a dysfunction already harming the larger issue.

One day last year, I was on the bus near the main hospital when I overheard a conversation between a bunch of the passengers. One said something about our hospital, as in he’s never been there and people always told him to avoid it. And then people chimed in about how the people that worked there were rude, the services were all overpriced, and not a single one of them failed to mention our competition as the better facility to go in case you ever need health care needs fulfilled. I brought this conversation back to my organization when I first heard it, and the immediate response I received from management was a reinterpretation of the message, that they were complaining because they couldn’t afford the good health care that was provided by our establishment, not that it was overpriced; when it came to the customer service part, they just continued talking about how because they were already miffed at the prices, they would interpret anything else as negative. Basically, they had solid information from people who were complaining, and the response was that obviously they were confused about what they were complaining about, so nothing needs to be changed.

This is the organization that now needs to “improve” customer service by teaching employees how to give free pickles as ice cream parlors. Keep in mind that we don’t give out free health care, free testing supplies (or tests), cut rates on surgery, an actual better product than any other health care facility (even though the argument keeps being made that they do, based on a sample size of none, as statistics don’t really make a lot of sense when you’re comparing to yourself (one divided by one still does manage to equal one).

So, how do you improve customer service when you actually don’t pay any attention to the public to whom you are now supposed to be providing better customer service? The simple answer is you don’t. The solution isn’t really a riddle, but an acknowledgement that perhaps we need to go out into the population and talk to them, find out what they would like from a large hospital system that claims to know what they need without actually asking them, and perhaps worrying less about pickles and more about why people might be there in the first place. I was in the hospital last year with a kidney problem, and I was scared during the time I was in there. One of the worst doctors I’ve ever experienced was one who was actually from the place where I worked. She didn’t care one iota about how her patients felt, and she was kind of a moron as well (which as a communications person, I attributed to the fact that she had zero listening skills, which made her diagnosis work absurdly bad).

Which brings me back to the whole communication aspect of this whole situation, which you probably should have guessed it would come in at some point or another. If you want to figure out what’s wrong with your customer service, talk to your customers and try to find out. It’s a good thing to look at comment cards and all that, but quite often a comment card is one of those things logged AFTER a bad experience, which means you don’t really have the opportunity to fix what was wrong, and like the place where I worked, they probably never will.

Some of these things should go without being said, but unfortunately I think that’s the problem. They haven’t been said, and thus, people are now convinced they have the answers after having watched some old entrepreneur talk about giving pickles to customers when they ask for them.

The problem of being asked questions that no one wants an answer to

Business, Education, , ,

Last week, I received an email from two separate sources at the school where I teach. The first one was informing me that I would be charged for parking, and it would be coming out of my bi-weekly pay. It also stated to inform them if I was no longer working on campus, as that didn’t require a charge for parking. The same day, I received an email from another entity asking me pretty much the same thing.

So, I responded to both of them at separate times, indicating that I was teaching ON campus, BUT I didn’t utilize their parking because I worked down the street from school, which meant that I was walking there every day and haven’t used parking since I started working there years ago. In other words, each year they’ve been charging me for parking that I don’t actually use. And never will.

Their response: None. Last week, I was charged for parking.

Does anyone else find this a little annoying?

This falls into what I like to call false communication, meaning that someone addresses you with a conversation but isn’t really interested in the response. What was really going on here was that the administrators of my school were informing me that they were going to be charging me for parking, and it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that they were going to do it regardless of what I said or did.

This is one of the problems a lot of businesses have. A great example of this was the debacle that Netflix went through a few years ago when they tried to raise their prices but did it as if they were offering a “service”. The service they were offering was one that no one wanted, so when people responded that this was a bad idea, they went ahead and did it any way. So, the result was that a lot of people left Netflix and never came back. No amount of cajoling or explaining “this is what we meant to say or do” made a difference. Because they lost their customers by basically telling them one thing, being adamant about it, and then going ahead and doing regardless of the feedback from customers.

And that’s the problem right there. When you ask for feedback from customers, you acctually need to do something about responding to it. If you say, I want to hear from people about our services, don’t be surprised when they respond with negative information. If your goal is to get only good responses, you’re basically wasting the opportunity of asking for information in the first place.

I’ve worked at a few places that have this faulty philosophy where they basically only want to put forth a positive image, so they suppress anything that sounds negative. An example is a human resources department I worked for that used to constantly say “Our company is the number one company in our area and people want to work here.” They say this even though their turn-over is massive, and they basically can’t hire people to remain even in the industry in which they are a pominent player. What has happened is that they kept telling this lie to themselves to the point of where actual employees used to joke with each other by insulting the company and stating “Yeah, this is the place where employees really want to work.” When your boast becomes a sarcastic retort, you’re obviously doing something wrong.

I once worked for a company that kept being hit by national scores on bad customer service. Therefore, management decided that it would educate staff on customer service so they could raise these scores. As I listened to executives explain how they would begin training the staff in customer service, the one thought going through my mind was “you know, if the customer service of the staff teaching customer service is atrocious, how do you expect to raise those scores?” And that was a huge concern. I’d listen to one supervisor talk about how staff was going to work hard to increase those customer service scores, and I’d look around the room at people who weren’t happy to be there in the meeting in the first place. And you’d wonder, do they even realize there’s a problem much bigger than customer service ratings on forms from people outside the organization?

And that’s the other problem. As long as people are short sighted enough to not realize the problems are inherent within the system itself, they’re never going to solve the problem.

I go back to my school and think, if they only knew that their lack of communication is hurting them, they might actually do something about improving it. But even if I said something, they’d most likely see me as an outlier and continue doing what they do, because up until now, nothing has caused them to think they’re doing anything wrong. Until people are affected and their illusions of security are threatened, they have no reason to make changes.

And thus, we get charged for parking even when we don’t need…or want…it.

Just because I paid my bill online doesn’t mean I want to stop receiving paper copies of my bill!

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This is one of those things with the “green” movement that has been driving me freaking crazy ever since it started. I’ll give you an example. Consumers Energy handles my electricity needs. I’m okay with that. They send me a paper copy of my bill. I’m okay with that. They let me pay my bill either through the mail or online. Sounds great so far. But whenever I make an online payment of my bill, they automatically switch me from a paper bill receiving customer to an online only bill receiving customer. I never asked for that. I never approved that. They just do it every freaking time I try to make an online payment.

Here. I’ll let you in on a little secret. If I don’t receive a paper copy of a bill, I’m probably not going to pay it. I don’t pay attention to email crap that gets sent to me because my email is filled with so much spam (yes, obviously from all of the porn mail lists I’m on…whatever), but regardless of why I receive so much spam, there’s no rule, written or unwritten that states that I’m somehow supposed to be a diligent payer of attention to crap that gets sent to me that way. But I do look at EVERY piece of physical mail that gets sent to me.

Yet, EVERY month, Consumers Energy attempts to push me off physical mail and make me one of its email bitches. I’m not interested, and I wish companies would stop trying to make that happen.

Recently, I wrote an article about how some company’s “green” policy is not MY green policy, which means that I don’t give a frack that they’re now going green. It’s not part of my business relationship with them, so they need to stop trying to force it on me.

I get so damn upset at Consumers Energy every time they do this to me that if they were any other company where I could turn to some other company to replace them, I’d have done it years ago. That is probably the worst customer service response a company should ever desire, yet I get the impression they don’t give a crap whatsoever. But sure enough, in a few days when I go to make that payment,I’m going to have to go through tons of extra screens of paperwork in order to get myself back on the mailing list again because they’ll automatically try to dislodge me from it yet again, without my permission, desire or intention.

And that’s a horrible business model for any company whenever your customer leaves your interaction fuming at your company after having just paid for your services.

I’m just saying.

Sim City: A Game You’ll Learn to Love and Hate

Business, Computer Games, , , , , ,

londonI recently bought the new release of Sim City (from Electronic Arts, using its subsidiary Maxis Software, which is bought some years back). Maxis used to be one of the greatest companies on the planet, creating Sim City, the Sims and then Spore (which was a little after they were bought by EA). However, Sim City has always been the bread and butter of Maxis, and most likely the reason EA bought the company in the first place (The Sims was released under EA’s ownership, even though it was the last project begun under the Maxis only name).

So what are my thoughts on Sim City? It’s a lot of fun, at least until you get really involved with the game. Let me explain. When you first start playing the game, you get overwhelmed by how much there is to do. You build a road from the highway through your patch of land, you then zone residential, then industrial and commercial. Soon after, someone complains they have no power or water, so you build some kind of power plant and a water pump. This goes on for awhile, until someone else complains that there aren’t enough people to work the zones (so you zone more residential), and then you start to realize your city is lacking in fire support (you build a fire house), police (you build a police station), health care (you enact Obamacare…oh wait, I mean you build a clinic), and you continue until your little patch of land starts to become a thriving city. There’s always something to do, so you’re never going to get bored with it.

And then, eventually, you start to build a major city. And unfortunately, that’s where you start to hate it. The reason you hate it isn’t because there’s not a lot of fun things to do, but because the game was designed badly, almost as if they realized they didn’t have the ability to handle AI as they needed to, so they dumbed down the simulation to be less of a simulation and be a compromise instead. Here’s an explanation of that:

Your Sims (the citizens) are disembodied people who don’t really have a specific place in your city. The people who work at the health care clinic are not doctors. They’re just arbitrary Sims, meaning that when people get up in the morning, they might be a doctor, a fireman, a ditch digger, or a protesting hippie who hates government. The way they find their jobs is through a process I like to call “first come, first serve”. A Sim wakes up in the morning, at the same time as every other Sim, and walks out the door of his apartment to find that there’s a business next door selling donuts (so he decides to work there). The next day, he’s not so quick to the donut shop, so he ends up being a neuro surgeon instead, because the clinic or hospital is located next door to the donut shop. He’ll work his entire day in whatever place he’s in, and then he’ll come home–to any home, because he doesn’t live anywhere; he just occupies the first building that’s built for housing. When visitors come to the city because of your tourism stuff you’ve added (like a building that holds mega super concerts), the Sims will fill up the buildings on their way out, or may or may not leave the city. There’s really no rhyme or reason for what different people end up doing when they’re in your city because they’re all interchangeable. Which brings up the problems that destroy your city.

If your traffic was bad before, it becomes a nightmare when everyone is out on the street trying to get to whatever place they need to go. Your firemen, stuck in traffic stops aren’t putting out fires, and your city starts to burn down, even if the buildings are across the street from the firehouse. Your police can’t stop crime, so you have Sims moving out of town because there’s too much crime (caused by cops not being able to maneuver through traffic (or by cops choosing to be donut makers that morning)).. You probably get the picture.

The city’s infrastructure works the same way. If you have water running through your city, it gets bogged down by the fact that the designers of the game didn’t design water (or electricity) any better. Your power gets clogged and randomly just kind of moves around the town so that you can end up with an important set of buildings just not getting power or water because the AI is too stupid to deliver it now that your city has become a lot more complicated. Even if your water pump is across the street from the building that needs water, it waits until the water fills in some cycle that makes no sense to common sense and has as much simulation value as whack a mole does to international diplomacy.

I had a great city that turned into ruins because these problems just blew up at one point where I became too big to fail, but failed miserably. All attempts to fix it were useless because nothing could move through the city. This wasn’t because I was using weak roads; it was because there was so much going on at one time that the Sims pretty much just sat in traffic, water wouldn’t flow, and the city kept complaining that I needed to provide more power, even though I had about 2x the capacity of power that just kept clogging itself up. Even putting a power plant next to the one building lacking power didn’t work because of the previously mentioned random traveling that everything in Sim City does.

This problem is now being noticed by a lot of players, needs to be fixed, or the game is going to be the most successful failure of all time (although it will compete with Diablo 3). EA has the ability to fix this, but I suspect that they’ll do the corporate thing and basically take the money and run, chalking it up to a good experience for the bottom line, even though it may provide the final nail in a coffin that doesn’t need to really happen.

The next move is for EA to do something. The question is: Will they do it or just screw over its player base?

“See Price in Cart” is a crappy business strategy that needs to go away very fast

Business, Technology, Television, , , , , , , ,

I received an advertisement from Sam’s Club today that listed a television on sale, but in order to see the price, you had to click it (as it listed “see price in cart”). One click later, I was now on a screen that told me to “add item to cart” AND NO PRICE. That took me to another screen with the wording along the lines of “complete transaction” and a button, AGAIN WITH NO PRICE. The next screen was a couple of listings of what the price used to be, and yet another button to make the sale (without the price yet). Look, I get the idea that you’re trying to get people to want to buy the product and are doing all sorts of psychological games along the lines of “well, if they click this many times to get to the price of the tv, they’ll eventually just decide they have to have it.” This is fine if we’re all multi-millionaires shopping in some boutique where “price is not a concern” but this is freaking Sam’s Club, not some posh place in Beverly Hills.

If you want me to buy your crap, tell me how much it is. If it’s cheap enough that I find it to be a bargain, I’ll buy it. If it’s not, then no amount of “keep clicking until you’re so worn down that you’ll buy it JUST TO GET OUT OF THIS NIGHTMARE” is going to make me pay more money for an item that I’m just curious about.

Companies really need to stop this crap because it so annoying. Customers aren’t lemmings, nor are they people who want to be herded towards your sales. Customers are people you should be trying to attract with good prices, good service and excellent products. Otherwise, your company and its business practices suck. Simple as that.

The Demise and Failure of Sears Should Be Taught in Every Business Class in the Future

Business, News, , , , , ,

A couple of years ago, I was interested in buying a Lifecycle exercise machine, or at least something similar to it. As I was wont to do, I wandered into a Sears store and took a look around. The salesperson met me at the exercise equipment and shortly after I told him what I was seeking, he somehow talked me into a treadmill machine instead. I think the selling point was that they didn’t have to put the treadmill machine together, but the bicycle machine would have required me to assemble it. Moral of the story is that somewhere down the line I ended up with a treadmill machine that ended up becoming a piece of furniture to put stuff on as I never used it more than the one time after I bought it. I would have used a bicycle machine, but a treadmill was a useless investment for me.

But at the time, Sears actually did a pretty good job of delivering the machine to me, and the purchase wasn’t seen as a bad one by me at the time.

Fast-forward a few years, and Sears has become a shadow of its once great self. Years back, every holiday season was seen as special because it usually culminated with the arrival of the infamous Sears catalogue. This was a sought after book that practically everyone in a household wanted to flip through, even if to imagine all of the great things that were offered, even if, like me as a child, you knew you could never afford them. Some years ago, Sears stopped sending out the catalogue for free (and may not even send it out at all, for all I know), which probably should have been the first of many signs that Sears was turning into a company that was nothing like it used to be.

Today, even though a lot of Sears stores exist in most major malls, it ends up being that one big store that people recognize as being there but people generally pass around on their way to the better stores. At some point, Kmart bought Sears (or they bought Kmart, or whatever), but the quality of Sears has been going downhill ever since. In today’s business news, it was reported that Sears has changed its online policy of upselling its warranty service when not requested by customers. This comes from a company that made it a policy to tack on a warranty service to high ticket items bought on its web site, causing customers to buy something they generally never asked for. When a customer reported them to ConsumerWorld.org, their response was that few customers had complained in the past. However, due to the outrageously negative response they have received (the different message boards covering this case have been nothing but a nightmare for Sears and its non-existent customer service), the procedures have completely changed for the future.

This is not the way a company should be perceived when trying to make its way into the 21st century. The response from former customers (and I emphasize “former”) has been overwhelmingly hostile and negative. Reading the 296 comments on msnbc.com’s response to their article about this story shows a massive onslaught of negativity towards Sears for the way it has changed over the years from a company once touted as the nation’s retailer to one that people are embarrassed to mention in the same sentence as our nation.

What needs to be said is that if there’s another company out there that is attempting to see profit as numbers rather than customer service, their future is exactly what can be expected for a company that is more interested in padding CEO pockets than serving customers. I’m looking at you, Best Buy, which seems to be on the cusp of almost the same type of transformation as it becomes one of the only major electronics retailers left, yet treats customers like Mac users are treated by its genius bar (where Mac products tend to be user friendly until they actually have something go wrong, and not a single tech person at a Mac store has a clue what’s wrong with your computer or tech device because they’re not trained in technical stuff, just responding by scripted dictates). I went to the Geek Squad the other day to ask about having a programmable thermostat installed, and the “geek genius” (or whatever they call themselves) couldn’t figure out how to answer the question because it wasn’t something simple like “do I need virus protection for my computer?”.

Part of the problem of our future in technology is that more people major in business these days than they do in anything dealing with technology, which means that way too many people are interested in separating us from our money without actually being able to do anything to earn that money. Too often, the focus of companies these days is on how to maximize profits, often at the cost of doing business to get profits. Sears recently announced it is fixing its current money woes by shredding staff. Never a good sign. You’ll notice that the Post Office is doing the exact same thing. They’ve announced that they’re going to improve their bottom line by offering less service, slower service and possibly fewer days of being open. It’s almost like the one person they never hired (even though their problem has always been they hire too many people and keep incompetent ones) was someone who sat down and thought, “wait, is that really a way to build business?”

But who am I to say anything? I’m just a customer, and as I’ve already pointed out, companies don’t need me. They just need my money.

Monopolies, Greed and Treating Your Customers Like Crap

Business, Economics, News, Social Networking, Television, , , , , , , , , , ,

This morning, I was about to leave my apartment building to head to work when I noticed an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper taped to the exit door for everyone to read. It was a message from the apartment complex managers, indicating that anyone who was currently using the video services of U-Verse by AT&T must discontinue using it immediately because they are in violation of the apartment’s “contract” with some cable service called Suite Solutions. Not being a user of U-verse, I didn’t give it much concern, but then it had me thinking. What if I was a user of U-Verse and decided to get my television programming that way? What if I decided I didn’t like Suite Solutions (which I don’t) and chose to get my television programming through my phone line? What right does some housing complex or some cable operator have to choose how you get your television programming?

For the longest time, I’ve been receiving flyers in the mail from AT&T, promoting U-Verse as the answer to bad cable companies, and I just ignored the stuff because, to be honest, I don’t think television is all that worth subscribing to in the first place. While some people remained glued to their television screens every night they get home, I don’t think I’ve turned mine on to television programming in over 8 or 9 months, so to be honest, I’m not even sure I even have a television signal these days. And honestly, I don’t really care.

But what started to bother me was this anti-business message that was being pushed on potential customers by the people who manage the place where I live. It’s one thing if Suite Solutions was a good company, but let me tell you about my experience with that company. When I first moved into my apartment over two years ago, I chose that company to get my television and Internet service. At one point, I remember counting on a calendar to see whether or not it my service was down more often than it was actually up. I paid for the highest speed service, and when it worked, my download speeds were atrociously slow. I remember beating a download with my cell phone once (which ironically never actually succeeded with Suite Solutions because the Internet crashed during the download and didn’t come back up for another three days).

This was the company that my housing complex thinks that I should be emboldened to because they signed a contract with them somewhere in the past. Now, I don’t mind this being an option, but if they eliminate all of my other options, so that Suite Solutions is my ONLY choice, I think we have a horrible problem that really needs to be solved by the SEC, the FCC or maybe Elmo and the other characters of Sesame Street (they are notorious for advocating for consumer rights in the fantasies I have about Elmo and the gang).

Of course, no story about monopolies should be complete without a little bit of irony. I mean, we are talking about some unknown cable company using its monopoly to cut out the little guy, specifically a little guy named AT&T, who happens to be going through a little bit of monopoly trouble of its own these days. Now that the government has stepped in and told AT&T that it is creating an unfair monopoly by trying to buy T-Mobile, does anyone see the ridiculousness of some small cable provider shutting out AT&T through its contracted monopolies? I’m sure there are some people who are thinking this is a good thing because they just hate AT&T, but when AT&T becomes your alternative source to a crappy choice, something’s seriously wrong with this picture. I mean, I’m not exactly the poster child, greatest fan of all things AT&T. Just last week, AT&T refused to transfer my Internet service (not U-Verse) to my new apartment because of some flag that showed up with an old bill for $189 that HAD BEEN paid over two years ago; unfortunately, because it was so long ago, they couldn’t find a record of the situation, nor could they offer any way of alleviating the problem because the situation occurred too far back in the past to be solved by any simple transaction (like me just giving them $189 to make the problem go away). That’s the kind of problem you get from a monopolistic company that is so big that it can’t handle its own financial problems that emerge from its own lack of correct record keeping (you can always spot this problem when some customer service person tells you: “There’s nothing I can do about it. The problem seems to be coming from another area of the company that doesn’t exist anymore.”).

So, I ask, are monopolies good or bad for consumers? So far, my experience with them has been nothing but negative. You constantly hear economic pundits talking about how monopolies are good and how they drive innovation (or some other big proclaimed statement that has no basis in reality), but how do they really help us? Okay, there is one area, and that’s price, in that a company with a monopoly has the ability to lower the prices by handling all of the means of production and distribution, but how many times has that monopoly also gone the other direction, to where the only source of a product decides to raise its price because it realizes that no one else can fulfill the need? We’re kind of seeing that right now with Netflix, that erroneously thought that it was a solitary producer of content services so that it could pretty much do whatever it wanted to do by raising prices and splitting its company into two so it could eventually raise prices at its own leisure (possibly by raising it twice as much, as both companies can now raise prices as the same time, and thus, increase profits twice as fast). But what really happened was that Netflix realized too late that its customers WERE its product, not just the users of their product, and without customers, they have no income. I expect to see Netflix become the next Myspace in an era of Facebook.

For me, I have no real solution other than to boycott all of the products of companies that are hostile towards customers, which is why I gave up on Suite Solutions shortly after feeling like I was being cheated month after month. Fortunately, I am not a consumer of U-Verse, so I don’t have to worry about this proclamation from the emperor, but at the same time it also keeps me from ever wanting to do business with Suite Solutions again because instead of trying to compete with AT&T by providing a great customer experience and a good product, they decided to go the punitive route instead.

That companies never realize this strategy is a blueprint for failure is a footprint that forever haunts me. There’s a reason that message was tacked on our door like Luther’s 95 Theses. The company is failing to attract and keep customers, so it needed to crack down on anyone who decided to use alternative choices. Unfortunately, that strategy rarely brings in new customers or business. Instead, it leads you closer and closer to becoming obsolete. That this is 2011 and a company still doesn’t understand that is ridiculous. But why innovate when you can demand business? Need I say more?