Customer Service Revisited

Posted by Bob Greenberger on September 17, 2008

Every now and then I rail about the service economy or lack thereof. I’ve had some mixed experiences of late and it has me uncertain if things are getting better or worse.

It took a few phone calls to cancel Robbie’s credit card and take him off the insurance. The bank explained the required paperwork then worked with us to process his sizeable stack of savings bonds.

When we tried to cancel his plane ticket to a family event via Travelocity, things ground to a halt. The first customer service guy I spoke said the request was in the system and a Travelocity credit was being filed which we could access the next time we used the site, minus any applicable penalties.

Deb tried to use the credit days later and no credit was on file. She handed the phone to me as I railed at the customer service agent who suddenly had a checklist of things required that the first guy never mentioned. One involved sending in a PDF of the death certificate or faxing it. We scanned a copy and sent it with the required account numbers.

I then heard from a rep by e-mail who asked for a copy of the credit card charge. I pointed out that we do everything electronically so there was no copy to forward. That seemed to mollify her but then she needed more information that I had already sent.

The next rep asked for a copy of the death certificate so I sent it a second time.

The next two reps also asked for a copy of the death certificate so I sent it a third and fourth time, noting they were turning a painful process into something unnecessarily excruciating. The last time I sent it as both an attachment and embedded in the e-mail and that seemed to do the trick so now they’re processing the request.

Amazing.

On the other hand, Cablevision, which I generally dislike, has proven to earn their J.D. Power certification for having terrific customer service. Our DVR has been acting up and nearly two dozen premium channels (all the Starz and Encores) were garbled. Over the last few months they came and changed various hardware and fiber optical cable and nothing fixed the problem. They said we needed a new box. Well, as you know, this took a low priority so it was only this week we focused on the matter. Over the last few weeks we’ve been catching up and had just 8 shows left so dumped them onto DVD and I took the box back. I was on line longer than I was at the window. The new box seems to be working so I’m pretty pleased with how that turned out.