customer disservice

It all started so innocently and then it went so horribly wrong.

Imagine, if you will, my poor old gray-haired mother, doing the things mothers and grandmothers do, not harming anyone, nor ever wanting to harm anyone. At the urging of her children and grandchild, my mother has, for the past two years, journeyed into the computer age. She bought her first computer early in 2003 and we got her set up with the Microsoft Network. Within days, her computer was hit by a worm and became useless. She had to take her CPU back to Best Buy to have it disinfected and they sold her some virus protection software and she has had no infection since.

Mom doesn’t use her computer for much and rarely surfs the net, but she uses it to e-mail her friends, children, grandchild and fellow members of the Red Hat Society (an organization less sinister than the girl scouts), and to visit the blogsite of her eldest child, Jimbo’s World. Then, on Tuesday of last week, the unthinkable happened. After a year and a half of signing onto the internet with MSN, using the saved user name and password she had used for eighteen months, suddenly on Tuesday, the user name and password were no longer any good. ACCESS DENIED.

Several phone calls to MSN’s help line yielded several solutions, but because she had dial-up and no cell phone, she couldn’t call and be on-line at the same time and she couldn’t test the solutions until after the phone calls ended. Nothing worked. MSN customer service suggested mother had done something to her computer, which she hadn’t, but these were computer experts; my mother a helpless computer neophyte. Surely the MSN people knew of which they spoke.

O tempora! O mores!

Enter the savior, my son, a college senior who knows his way around a computer. Mom called him and told him of the problem, so, after we finished playing basketball on Sunday, he went to his grandmothers house, booted up the computer and called MSN help on his cell phone. Obviously grandma, not knowing the ins and outs of the computer was doing something wrong or not understanding what the MSN people told her, but now the young man who knew what he was doing would be able to understand and, with the help of MSN, get the situation back under control.

In defense of the people at MSN help, you know that they must get hundreds of calls a day from people with problems that can be corrected by doing things like turning on the computer or plugging it in, so they have probably seen every incompetency possible foisted upon them by helpless computer users. One would have to assume that so many people call them with problems caused by the users themselves that MSN probably assumes the vast majority of problems are not the fault of MSN. Excellent customer service, however, is based on the assumption that the customer is always right. Even if he is a hapless boob, he does pay the bills.

But on this particular Sunday, my son explained the problem to the MSN help person on the other end of the phone and he was led through a series of solutions, leading to various and sundry new screens and windows and small pop up error messages, now error number 47; now error number 22. He was on the phone with them for more than an hour and the person on the other end of the conversation continued to insist the problem was not on MSN’s end, but in the user computer.

Level of resolution: zero; level of frustration: infinite.

Because my son had an office Christmas party to go to, he had to end the conversation and got a number to which to refer when he called back at a later date.

“Oh, good,” you say. “Someone in Jimbo’s household has a job.”

At the end of the conversation, the help person described the problem my mother was having and said that they were having a number of occurrences of that problem, but that it wasn’t the problem my mother was having.

I asked my son if he had been talking to someone in the United States. He said the person sounded “foreign” but that he couldn’t be sure. Whatever the circumstances, the level of customer service satisfaction was somewhere between bad and lower than a snake’s belly. Can I blame this on Bush? Darn tootin’, but the geometric progression necessary to put it at his feet would be too lengthy, so for the time being, I’ll blame it on the easiest target.

Hang your head in shame, Bill Gates. Hang your head in shame.

Now, in the movies they have “flashbacks,” where everything gets blurry for a minute and when things come back into focus you realize that you are viewing something that occurred before, something in the past. Imagine for a moment that everything just got blurry and now it is coming back into focus. What you see when the picture regains clarity is me, sitting at the desk in my home office, doing the crossword puzzle from the Sunday newspaper, with a telephone resting on my shoulder.

“This is terrifying,” you say to yourself. Then after a brief pause, you recant. “No, this is not terrifying; it is boring. Why the hell are you boring us with the crossword puzzle?”

Let me explain.

Earlier this year I tried to sign on to my own Internet service provider one morning and got an error message. In my location we had only one ISP with a local number until just recently, and only dial-up, no DSL. My ISP is a company called MyVine. I called their help line and after several levels of voice mail, I waited on hold for forty-five minutes before I gave up. That week I was helping a friend remodel the place where she lived. I helped her wallpaper her bathroom; I put in a new floor and a new toilet. Occasionally during the week I tried to log in with no success and tried to call but I spent a lot of time on hold listening to the message that the wait time was in excess of thirty minutes and that I should log on and go to the help screen, which, of course, I couldn’t do. The following week, I finally broke down, got the Sunday crossword puzzle and called and held for three hours, while doing the puzzle to entertain myself.

I listened repeatedly to the message about logging on and going to their help screen, which I couldn’t do, and hearing that my call was important to them. Eureka! Finally human contact—-someone answered on the other end. I explained my problem and they told me that they had changed my user name and that they had sent an e-mail telling me about it. I would later find out that I had the e-mail but it had been sent to me several days after my user name had been changed. I guess their assumption was that I would use one of my other ISPs to log on and be informed, but the fallacy was why would I have multiple ISPs and if I did, why would I need theirs? I changed my user name to what they told me it was and I was able to log on. In a way, it was nice to be out of contact with the world for a week, a little bit like being away on a vacation, but to my horror when I checked my watch list of stocks they were up an average of over ten percent from the week before. This was bad because I didn’t own any of them. I have a group of stocks I know like the back of my hand and I can always play the quarters, halves and points and eke out small profits. When I miss an upward ten percent move it’s like missing a month’s paychecks. And, of course, I compounded the problem by making the decision that the rise in one of my stocks was just the beginning and I established a large position as if it were a momentum play. As the stock dropped for several months, and I held on, it put me in a huge hole that I have only recently dug myself out of.

“Where the hell are you going with this?” you might ask.

Well, I am saying that customer service is not what it used to be. It seems that many commodity-type things we buy are getting so inexpensive that the companies that sell them to us are being marginalized. You could say that we are getting what we pay for, but I would say that we’re getting screwed. The management of some companies are cutting out costs by outsourcing and by reducing the amount they invest in providing good customer service at their own detriment. The law of supply and demand will enforce itself and the companies that provide poor customer service will themselves be marginalized as others will come along to offer better service and take away their customer base. One can ignore the law of supply and demand only as long as one can ignore the law of gravity. Ignore the former and the latter will bring you back down to earth in a heartbeat.

As you are aware, we know and respect the law here in Jimbo’s world.