Customer Service and Expectations

I viewed a great video the other day by Justin Lukasavige where he discussed how the USPS wanted him to help them out with saving money.  But they wanted him to mail them a letter as opposed to sending an email or submitting a request online.  Justin does a great job of covering how business owners need to communicate with their clients using a medium that is familiar to their clients.  You can’t expect everyone to communicate the way you want them to.  It’s just not realistic.

That same day I received a letter from Time Warner Cable that the credit card used for my monthly broadband auto-billing expired last month.  They asked that I call their customer service department to give them the new expiration date.  Now, I’m pretty sure they know I have Internet access, since that’s what I’m paying them for and they haven’t deactivated it yet.  So why not allow me to go online and update the expiration date at the same site I used to setup the auto-bill?  Like the USPS, they also gave me the option of mailing a form back to them with the credit card details. It’s nice to have options.

Situations like this make it really difficult for me to have any empathy for companies when they say they can’t turn a profit.  Sure, not everyone has Internet access, but it’s pretty close to being ubiquitous.  At least enough that the default option could be to transact online  with a secondary option of calling customer service.

So I’m off to call Time Warner Cable, navigate the phone tree, eventually make it to a live person and update my credit card info.  And at the end of the conversation they’ll ask if there is anything else they can do for me today.  I’ll bite my tongue and and say “Not today” as opposed to “May I have the last 15 minutes of my life back?”.