Customer Service

An observation:

For many years, various pundits have complained about the decine of "customer service" in general. Ill-informed, innatentive and rude sales people, unresponsive corporations, and so forth.

This eventually led to a sort of backlash, and many thousands of employees, managers, and even executives were exposed to the ideas of improving service. Even we police officers attended classes like "Service for Success", where we were encouraged to think of all of the people we dealth with (even criminals!) as "customers".

I can't say to what extent overall customer service has improved or not, but a couple of stories may illustrate what's good, and what still needs to be done:

First the good. All cyclists need a tire pump, usually more than one. I bought a Blackburn floor pump years ago, and after daily use for 5-6 years, the seal on the pressure guage failed. I e-mailed Blackburn to see if any parts were available, and found that this particular pump had been discontinued. Not to worry, however. They asked that I send them the pump to examine, and if it was a design failure, they'd send me a new one. It was, and they did. The new pump (a much nicer one) has been in use ever since.
I use it so much, in fact, that the little rubber inserts that grab the valve stem had become worn out. Another e-mail, and another case of "we don't make that model any more." Again, not to worry; they looked through their old parts and sent me the full rebuild kit, free of charge.
Blackburn is a subsidiary of Bell industries (Helmets and such), and all my contacts with the firm have been excellent.

Now the bad: We have our cable TV service through Charter Communications. We've used this for a long time; it's predecessor, Cencom, was the first cable service in the St. Louis area.
For the most part, service has been OK, though with constant rate increases.
However, recently I began having trouble with our second TV, the one in the computer room. Those annoying "this channel will be available shortly" screens began to show up, on increasingly more channels. This despite the fact that the same channel would be playing in the next room.
I suspected the digital reciever box.
From long experience with cable, I tried the "re-set" routine, that involves unplugging and letting the little chip reset itself. That didn't work.
So I called the service number. Used to be this was a local number with actual technicians you could talk to. Not anymore, it's a toll-free thing that connects you to the "automated" service. For those that have not experienced these abominations, they have have a human-sounding voice track and some sort of voice-recognition software. You are supposed to talk to the machine as if it were an actual person. I do not know anyone who finds these things to be anything but extremely annoying.
Nonetheless, I let the thing go on, and it tried to walk me through the same re-set routine I had just done. I answered all the questions "no", and eventually it decided I needed to talk to a technician. It tried to transfer the call, and I was disconnected.

My next avenue was to e-mail the service department. There's a link on the Charter website. So, I wrote up the problem, and fired it off. No reply. No automatic "we got your message" note.
I let it ride over the weekend, then sent another one. Same result, no reply or recognition. By this time, I am getting more than a bit cheesed off.
I tried the "online chat" feature, and was connected to a young lady who tried to walk me through the re-set procedure yet again. I explained that I had already done this several times.
"Are the connections tight?" she asked. I explained that they were untouched since the original installation. I checked 'em all anyway, finding everything tight. "Well, we need to send someone out then." No kidding...
So I make an apointment for the next Wednesday. I explianed to the girl that I was off on Mondy, Tuesday, and Wednesday. About an hour later, I got an automated phone call confirming my appointment for Thursday. The robot told me I'd be charged if no one was home.

I called back, bypassing the robot service to "wait in line" for a tech. I waited for 30 minutes. Finally got a young fellow who apologized for the mix-up, then explained the next apointment they'd have was two weeks later, and the technician might show up anytime between 8AM and 5PM. We'd be required to stay at home all day, waiting for his arrival.

After grudgingly accepting this, I sat down and wrote an actual snail-mail letter to the CEO of Charter, explaining much of the above, and pointing out in no uncertain terms that it was no wonder people were switching to sattelite and DSL.
That was last week, naturally I have recieved no reply.....