Recently I had a communication challenge with AT&T. I hope to learn from this experience so that as Worthwhile grows we don’t frustrate our great customers like AT&T frustrated me. I’m fairly confident that no single person that I interfaced with the past 2 months at AT&T intentionally tried to frustrate me. But I think challenges come when “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing” which seems so often the case in giant companies.
Our goal was AT&T’s new UVerse service for our office. Rather than bore you with the day-to-day details of my 2 month journey, I’ve decided to simply outline the highlights.
- AT&T first refused to process our request until we went directly through them because our main AT&T line was through a 3rd party.
- AT&T installed our new line then told us UVerse isn’t available in our area.
- For the next two months I got the run around from at least 20 people.
- Finally, I reached a helpful representative who signed us up for UVerse. She went beyond as well, and asked me to confirm my address (which was completely wrong in the records).
Because of her great service, we now have UVerse service at the office.
Lessons
- Communication is the key to all successful relationships, whether you are the vendor or the customer.
- As a vendor, always look for problems the customer doesn’t perceive. Making information assumptions (like correct phone numbers and addresses) causes problems.
- As a customer, persistence is priceless!
I hope Worthwhile will always be sensitive to our customer relationships and will do all we can to avoid making it difficult for folks to do business with us!
The full entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 — http://woosters.org/dan/?p=545
People don’t have incentives to help you inside big companies. They don’t hold any stake in you as a customer. In a small business every employee is well aware of the value of the customer and recognizes (for the most part) that how they treat that customer very directly impacts their job. In massive corporations the employees are so far removed from being responsible that they really just don’t care.
Growing a small business carefully is a great challenge. Joel Salatin has some great advice on the subject