Before I finally get to some links I want to post today, I just got off the phone with something I want to share with our readers. Make sure you read to the end, because I got a call while writing this that has knocked my socks off.
Earlier this year a roomie and I got prepaid cell phones from AT&T. The phones were low end, but decent, and with the amount of minutes we put on we basically got the phones for free. But the service isn’t as good as advertised, and their customer service just ticked me so badly off over a charge I got hit with that I’m looking to switch prepaid cellphone providers.
First of all there’s the coverage. We’ve all seen the ads that say “more bars in more areas.” Of course that’s unless you happen to be on the subway in Boston. It’s bad enough that going underground is all but guaranteed to drop your call, just going under a bridge has been known to prompt the ever popular “did I lose you?” (Yes, I did.) To add insult to injury, I often have to spend some time in a building made of cinder block and iron (I know, ugh!) located near a major recreation area and a hospital, and if I get two bars in a back area I’m lucky.
Using a prepaid phone can be an exercise in money management. Not only do you pay for calls to people not on the same network (to be expected), including toll-free numbers, you pay a buck a day just for using your phone to check you balance or talking with someone on the same network. Text messaging? Not recommended, because it’s like $.15 a message. Want to use the mobile web? There’s a charge per megabyte for that (I’ve paid at least half a dollar just to get to my home page), and getting custom ringtones or wallpapers hit you twice, the charge from the service and the cost to download it. Needless to say I quickly called AT&T and disabled all marketing text messages once I got my phone, because they can also cost you.
Except yesterday I created a new custom wallpaper to celebrate the Dodgers winning the NL West, and I waited an extra week to be able to afford all of the cost for it. Today I got a marketing text message from MediaNet, the (evidently) partner company that handles the AT&T MEdia Mall website that sells wallpapers, ringtones, and other goodies for AT&T’s mobile phones. Before I even saw the message I got a charge of $.15, and when I turned around and sent the second STOP IT! message to try to stop marketing text messages I got hit with yet another $.15 charge. Needless to say I wasn’t a happy customer.
I grabbed the phone and called 611, the customer service number, hoping that I’d simply get the $.30 reimbursed. What I didn’t know is that I was destined to talk to a CSR (customer service rep) whose attitude was more along the lines of “sucks to be you.” He looked at my file (after getting my cell phone number from me, which you’d think would have popped up on his screen since I was calling from the cell phone) and informed me that MediaNet is in fact not part of AT&T (huh?) and when I created that new wallpaper yesterday must have reset the flags and put me in line for getting marketing text messages again. It turns out that I could have avoided the charge by deleting the message rather than opening it, according to the person I spoke with, but that’s water under the proverbial bridge at this point.
By the time I got off the phone with him I had blocked all text messages (so much for getting Dodger game updates while I’m in transit and can’t watch the game) as well as messages from their MediaMall, but that also included marketing text messages so I can live with that. Unfortunately this knucklehead (whose name I unfortunately didn’t make a note of) was so rude that just dealing with him to try to resolve the fact that I thought I had already told AT&T that I was opting out of all marketing text messages left me so ticked off that the last thing I told him was that I would let my friends know that if you want a prepaid cellphone only go with AT&T if you absolutely don’t want to deal with text messages. Otherwise go with another provider.
At that point I hung up on the asshole and started writing this post to provide a warning of AT&T’s nickle and dimeing prepaid users to death and their inability to honor a customer’s stated preference not to get marketing text messages. To say I was pissed is an understatement. As I was typing I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize, and having gotten calls before from people looking for the person who had the number before me I simply ignored the call and kept on typing. But the phone rang again and it looked to be from the same number so I picked it up ready to answer with, “Who the hell are you and why the hell are you wasting my fraking prepaid minutes?!?” (I did say I was beyond pissed.) But it was Robert Eldred, a manager with AT&T’s prepaid service who heard my conversation with the asshat. It turns out that it the guy was so rude to me that the manager was pissed off, and Robert was told that I didn’t hang up on the asshat, he hung up on me. (Ok, we hung up on each other. Either way a bad move on the guy’s part.) There’s just one thing. AT&T prepaid CSR’s do not do that under any circumstances. It sound like the guy I talked to got an earful at the very least, and Robert was calling to try to do the one thing I tried to do when I worked Customer Service for Braun: Try to make things up with a very pissed off customer and see if he could get my forgiveness. The fact that he called a second time immediately after I ignored the call was a good thing in my book. You see, when I was working in retail I had a manager who made sure I knew one thing if I knew nothing else: “The customer is always right.” Even when he’s wrong, the customer’s right. Many firms forget about that, but pissed off customers can too often tell others. Some of us have blogs that get some decent traffic, even if blogging about a really crappy customer service experience is off topic. They figure if one customer goes elsewhere so what? They’ve got other customers and their customers don’t care that the product quality has gotten worse or their customer service has started sucking. Besides, they can always get new customers. (A certain coffee shop in the Forrest Hills T station comes to my mind.)
But Robert doesn’t subscribe to the 21st century commercial mindset of “frak people who don’t want to shop with us” and one of the first things out of his mouth was that he wanted to make things right. Beyond calling the asshat on the carpet, he wanted to roll back the charges I got for he text messages, the dollar for using the phone today, and any charges incurred in talking with him. In short, I wasn’t going to have to pay for the idiot that I spoke to. He also offered me something else (which I’d rather not specify) at a cost I might not want to pass up.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t need a bribe. The fact that this manager put so much effort into apologizing for the horrendous customer experience I had meant a lot to me, and if he had only said “I chewed him out and I’m rolling back the charges from your having to deal with this” I would have been okay. When I worked for Braun I had some leeway with bribing customers with problems but I tried to keep the freebies to a minimum, letting my managers sweeten the pot if they felt it necessary. (That way you don’t have to worry about so many callers being pissed just to get a freebie.) What I was offered was extra, and while I didn’t turn it down I wasn’t going to ask for something free as an apology. (Finding out today was the asshat’s day would have been priceless, too.)
I’ll say this about Robert Eldred, Prepaid manager for AT&T, he truly went above and beyond what I would have expected from any company in 2008. He stated that he heard my call, told me how out of line the asshat was, and how I was treated was in complete violation of AT&T’s call center policies. Forgetting for a moment that he offered me a sweetener to make up for what happened with the guy, I could tell he wasn’t just playing the role of the guy one level up on the totem pole who wanted to try to get me to not be a pissed off customer any longer. He was genuinely offended that his employee talked to me like that and if he did nothing else this afternoon he wanted to make sure I understood that AT&T doesn’t endorse how the guy treated me and wanted to make sure I was good with AT&T. Even if I hadn’t been bribed, the fact that I could tell that Bob was ticked at how I was treated and he needed, not just wanted, to apologize went a long way in my book. He also called back to let me know that what he offered me was now in place, fulfilling his end of a very one-sided bargain.
We’re good, Bob Eldred and AT&T. Now if only more companies knew the importance of not just making customers happy, but also the importance of not pissing off customers like this in the first place. Things like what Bob did are what keeps customers happy, and when we’re happy we like spending money with companies like that. Too bad he couldn’t do anything about my losing calls while on the Orange Line, but I know there are limits to what he is able to fix.
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