Stumble It!

The biggest problem with companies doing business on line is that they forget customer service. To see what I mean write an email to Mcafee or Norton and see if you even get a response. Invariably when I get a response to a question from someone I find they have not even read my email. For example:

Comcast Are You Even Listening?

My Internet service quit working when Comcast took over from Insight so I used the web interface to tell them of this. The representative I was chatting with in their customer service chat room asked me to read the fine print on the bottom of my cable modem for serial numbers etc. (remember my complaint is that I have no internet connection). I told her that turning the cable modem over was causing it to reboot. She then said how are you chatting? I replied that I was using my Verizon Wireless card, to which she replied, “Good, it’s working” and disconnected. Clearly she was not listening or reading my replies.

Hewlett Packard Can You Understand English?

We had a new computer fail. Using another computer we contacted Hewlett Packard to tell them of this computer which was still under warranty. We were literally kept on-line all weekend long being passed around to different customer service representatives, and each one would start over from scratch asking the same questions over again. Also during this entire period it was increasing apparent the representatives could not understand English since they never responded to any questions we asked. If we would say we have answered a particular question many times they would ask it again. I was first alerted to this by the fact that none of the symptoms I gave them were related to the questions they were not asking, nor would they comment on these symptoms. I told them none of the computer input devices worked (i.e., mouse and keyboard) and they asked us to run tests. Obviously this could not be done without the keyboard, we just never got them to understand this.

We did eventfully get the computer shipped to the factory for repairs but we should not have had to spend all weekend long answering questions over and over just to get this accomplished.

The most important lessons from these should be listening and responding to your customers. This sounds easy yet why is it so rare?