Service: Improving, No Fooling?
When tech fails, you want help fast. And you just might get it.Contributing Editor Stephen Manes has been writing about technology for more than two decades.
Illustration by John Cuneo
And I lend a sympathetic ear to people like my dad. He once spent much of a day on the phone with morons at his Internet service provider who couldn't diagnose an e-mail problem I nailed in 5 minutes.
But if my recent experiences are any evidence, customer service seems to be moving in the right direction. I shudder to say this for fear my luck will turn, but I see lots of hints that companies are beginning to get the idea that good service is good business. I'm hearing encouraging tales from various friends and colleagues, too. I couldn't tell you whether this has some relation to global warming or whether it's just random--but whatever it is, I'll take it.
Back in the bad old days last summer, when a little piece of plastic broke off my Handspring-labeled Treo 600 and I phoned the support number listed on the Web, things got stupid fast. After long holds, three successive people in India kept giving me different numbers to call. Luckily, a fourth support rep finally set things right.
Things were different when the replacement unit broke in exactly the same way. This time, one quick call did the trick. I again had to offer a credit card number, as security against the possibility I might not send back the old one, but the new unit turned up fast. My latest Treo has the PalmOne logo, apparently came out of a more robust mold, and is doing fine.
When I put the first Treo on T-Mobile's network, I ran into glitches with the data service: Sometimes the phone could connect with the system but not with the Internet. T-Mobile's support people were almost too polite as they got the data flowing again. Friends tell similarly positive stories about Verizon's service-desk staffers.
I'm always running into weirdness with hotel Internet services. This hit a new low last year when I had trouble at one hotel and called for help--and two guys in overalls came up to my room with pipe wrenches to see if maybe the cable had fallen out of the wall jack. It hadn't, and neither they nor a toll-free service hotline had any idea how to solve the problem. But recently when a connection at a different hotel failed the second time I tried it, the hotline answered quickly, diagnosed what was wrong, and fixed it in minutes.
Back when AT&T owned my local cable system and the Internet connection went down, you wanted to wring necks, particularly when you had to suffer through messages inviting you to consult the Web site for help. But since Comcast took over, support personnel seem to have a better idea of what they're talking about. And during increasingly rare outages, the support system knows where you're phoning from and alerts you if there's an area-wide problem it already knows about.
There's still plenty of fifth-rate support. Many firms continue to treat you as an irritation, not a potential repeat customer. In a perfect world, though, support calls would never happen in the first place--so it's nice to see that some companies are working to make them useful and pleasant instead of fruitless and obnoxious.