No, Virginia, there is no customer service

It used to be that the whole idea of technical support was to make sure your customers were happy with your product and service so that they would remain your customer.

These days, technical support is usually 'augmented' (or entirely replaced) with internet FAQs.

In theory, this all makes a lot of sense. In practice, the customer is the loser.

I have come to the conclusion that most companies have a 'bag-lady' mentality. You've seen bag-ladies on the street. They either carry large bags or have a shopping cart full of their possessions so that they can keep an eye on every single thing. They even sleep with the stuff. This is the mentality of most senior management in Corporate America. They will tell you to your face that Quality and Customer Service is important. But only if they don't have to spend any money on it. Most Quality and Lean Programs fail just for that reason. Senior management will not commit to the dollars required.

This also results in the reduction of support personnel, cheap hires and information-free websites, that is, websites free from any kind of information. Forums were originally created so that users could modify their equipment and use it in non-standard ways, or for the makers of free stuff (applications, programs, operating systems, etc) could provide a level of technical support.

Senior management, of course, viewed technical support websites and forums and salivated. Think Cheap, Cheap, Cheap. And, for the most part, that's what they got. They got technical support personnel that know less about their products than the customers, so they provided 'expert' systems. They never realized that expert systems need to be used by people who know how to search. So they put FAQs on a website. Of course the FAQs only covered the barest minimum of problems, usually identical to the half page of troubleshooting at the back of the manual. "Unit does not turn on" Solution: "Plug unit into AC outlet."

In the past, I was able to rely on Cox Communications for excellent customer service. However, somewhere along the line, things deteriorated. Below is the story of how I got a very simple question answered. Management should be ashamed.

How to annoy your customers – HDTV version

Our lone HDTV set is in the basement so that we can watch while on the treadmill. The problem is that sometimes you have to really crank up the volume to hear the audio while running on the treadmill. So I decided to find out how to turn on the Closed Captioning.

This should be simple. So I thought.

Any HDTV system is not simple. In my case, I have to turn on 3 items: The TV, the cable box and the audio system. That plus I have two DVD/VHS players, so there are five remotes sitting around. And, no matter what the cable company tells you, they don’t give you a ‘universal’ remote. They give you a remote that will control some of the options of each device. For example, the universal cable remote will not be able to access the TV’s input switching. You’ll need to use the TV remote for that.

Well, for closed captioning, that’s what I did, reached for the TV remote. It had a nice CCD button. This was real easy. So I thought. The TV gave me a nice ‘denied’ icon and in the menu, Closed Captioning was grayed out.

So I went to the TV manual. There was plenty on how to turn CCD on and change the options, but no word on what is happening when the option doesn’t seem to work.

I got on the internet to find out what was wrong with my brand of TV. I had bought an Insignia. The price was right and I have no complaints on the picture. However, in this case, their ‘FAQs’ were useless. I went to the forum and thank God, I did not have to register or else this episode of ‘Customer Support Follies’ would still be longer. At the forum, I discovered that, if I had a cable box, the CCD was through the cable box, not the TV.

Then this should be easy, thought I as I grabbed the ‘universal’ cable remote. So I thought.

After spending about 10 minutes fooling with the remote, which did not have a CCD button, I was no closer to getting CCD. So now I go off and try to find another manual. The only manual, or rather piece of shiny plasticized paper, that comes with the cable box is how to hook it up. In English and Spanish. The remote has a manual. However there is not one word on CCD.

Back to the internet.

My cable company, Cox, is very fond of telling you over and over again that you can access their website and get answers to your questions. I’ve heard that thousands of times while on hold with their tech support. Still, I try the website first.

I started out by searching under ‘How to’. I got 84 results. The first result which had a 53% relevance (the next were all in the single digits), was the basic instructions on how to connect your box to the TV. It had neither the word ‘closed’ nor the word ‘caption’ in it. So much for relevance.

I switch to searching from the 'How-to's' to ‘All’. I got the same exact results.

If you’ve been keeping track, I have wasted about 20 minutes so far.

With the website obviously useless, I dial technical support. I don’t ever do this lightly because you have to fight your way through the voice response system before you can get to real person you can actually ask questions.

First I had to ignore the prompt for Spanish. Then I had to punch a number to tell them I had an account. Then I had to punch in my 10 digit phone number. Since I have two accounts, I now had to punch in the 16 digit account number. Then I’m asked for the last 4 digits of my social security number or the four digit PIN. Now finally they ask me if I have questions on my bill, want new service, etc, until I get to punch in the number for tech support, which obviously should be the last possible selection. Now I have to punch a number to tell them it’s tech support for TV. Luckily this one is the first selection. This gets me into the next voice response system – tech support! After hearing that channel 9 is having technical difficulties, listening to how resetting my cable cox can solve almost all of my problems, I hit the number so that they won’t reset my cable box.

I’ve now been on the phone ten minutes and am still fighting my way through the menu system. But I’m stubborn. Of course I’ve convinced that the first live person I’m connected to, will know nothing, but I glory in the struggle!

Now the voice response system asks me to ‘say’ what my problem is. I tell it ‘I want to turn on closed captioning.’ There is a long pause. Similar to the long pause you get from customer support people when they realize that you actually want them to help you. Isn’t it amazing how close to reality the voice response system is getting?

The system, now confused that I don’t want a canned response, responds with a list of problems it understands. The last option (of course it’s the last one) is ‘I have another problem’. This finally prompts the system to say it will transfer me to an ‘agent’.

I’m now up to almost 15 minutes and not quite there yet.

I have to listen again as to how my problem could have easily been solved by going to the website then finally I get an agent. His speech is slow and his tone is lazy. I have a bad feeling about this.

But wait, we’re not home free yet! For security purposes I have to:

1 – Give him my ten digit telephone number.

2 – Since I have two accounts, I have to give him the 16 digit account number.

3 – Now I have to verify my first and last name.

4 – I have to verify my address.

5 – I have to give him the last four digits of my social security number or the four digit pin.

Sorry about the delay, he says.

Now we are at the 20 minute mark and I finally get to ask my question. But, as anyone knows, I’m just beginning the struggle.

“How do I turn on closed captioning?” I ask. Just what I expect now happens. He tells me he’s happy to tell me that if I hold on for a moment. In other words, He has no clue and needs to ask somebody.

After a short time, he comes back and tells me all I have to do is hit the ‘settings’ button on the remote. Been there done that. When I tell him all I get is instructions on how to use the Info button, he argues with me. He keeps asking me if I have the Cox remote. Is it the silver Cox remote?

“Yeah it’s the Cox remote, it has ‘COX’ at the bottom in blue letters!” I respond.

“I’m watching television right now and I get closed captioning by pressing the settings button,” he says.

Sorry buddy, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I read him off exactly what is on the screen and tell him it’s an HD box, it must be different.

So I’m on hold again. While on hold, I play with the control again and find out I can access the Closed Caption Option by hitting the Menu button twice. I don’t ask me why I tried that, except that talking to tech support makes you really desperate.

He comes back on the line to tell me what I just found out but I blurt it out first. I do that because although I can access the Closed Captioning, I can’t turn it on and make it stick, it keeps switching back to off.

He makes a series of nonsensical noises that was supposed to pass for help. One thing is obvious, he has no idea what I’m seeing or doing. I narrate what I’m doing as he again departs to ask for help. Do you see the pattern here?

When he gets back, I’ve figured it out. Apparently you can’t just turn on the Closed Captioning and exit the menu. You have to go back two levels, then exit. This is the true definition of user-unfriendly. Now, of course, I have another problem. The captions are now in the center of the screen. I ask about this and again, I’m on hold and he’s off asking for help.

I change a few channels and find out that the position of the captions varies from channel to channel and sometimes scene to scene.

The ‘tech support’ person comes back on and tells me the first relevant piece of information I’ve heard from him. Apparently the close captioning is done by a third party and Cox has no control over the position. He tells me to change channels and see what happens. Been there, done that. I had really seriously considered hanging up on him before he came back. I was nice, however, and thanked him for his help and got off the line.

Total time: Over an hour. Just to find out how to turn on CCD. And I virtually did it all myself. I had had the wild thought that calling tech support would be a shortcut.

The Illusion of Hard Work

Maybe I've mentioned it before, but for some reason, bosses do not consider starting earlier than normal as putting in 'extra time'. Have you run into that? So far, in many decades at several companies, I've not found one manager that actually realizes that if you start a 1/2 hour earlier and leave on time, that you've put in overtime.

When I was working at a major medical manufacturer, all of upper management (department managers, directors and executives) had a curious work pattern. Not all of them, but the majority performed this ritualistic work 'dance' on a daily basis. I call it the Illusion of Hard Work. No matter what the normal starting time for employees, management would drag in somewhere between 9 and 10. The first order of business would be to grab their coffee and head into a meeting to chit-chat with their fellow managers. As lunchtime approached, the more 'diligent' would suddenly find that their employees needed to do some 'important' job before they took lunch. Managerial lunches were of the hour to hour and a half variety so that they would get back just in time to demand a lot of information from their employees before they could leave for the day. In a typical company, if you do personal stuff during work, it's considered stealing from the company. However, if the company requires unpaid overtime, that's good business, despite the fact that they are stealing from you.

Now the manager stays after quitting hours. Note that he's done very little so far. He stays to 7, 8 o'clock. Note that one of the reasons this happens is that the manager can A) demand stuff be done before you leave and B)Make you feel guilty if you leave on time.

If the company is lucky, the manager actually does accomplish some work in the afternoon/evening hours. However, as you can guess, the total amount of actual work can be counted in minutes. The manager then goes home to complain how hard he works. The next day the dance begins again.

Bag Lady Mentality

Have you ever noticed the homeless and watch what they do? Consider the Bag Lady. Here is someone who walks down the street with all of her possessions in a bag or shopping card. As she passes by anything that looks interesting or looks valuable, she grabs it out of the gutter and puts it in her cart or bag. Think about it, this is the way that most executives run their company. In those time when there isn't any easy growth to be found for their company, executives search everywhere to pick a few scraps out of the gutters of their business. As a comparison, the Bag Lady never gets out of the gutter from what she finds, so the business never gets out of the doldrums with penny-pinching attitudes. In short, you can't remain a World-Class company with a bag lady mentality. When you constantly trim the edges off of something, it gets smaller and smaller. Even businesses. When executive bonuses are threatened by a flat or declining economy, businesses shed people, services and pretty much all dignity. It's the bag lady mentality that accounts for the decline of customer service and product quality. When a company is World-Class, it does not have to make rules for employees to be nice and helpful to customers. Proper treatment of the customer is, by the time a company is truly world-class, ingrained and part of the company 'fabric'. When the company begins to trim the fabric, those tasks that used to be done by the so-called 'unnecessary' people begin to be delayed and even dropped. Employees, who want to see the company succeed begin to take on more and more tasks. This is called an increase in productivity. It's temporary, however, because without proper 'feeding' of the company, the employees begin to feel like their efforts are useless and update their resumes. At this point, the good workers find work elsewhere and the dregs are left. Even if some good employees are loyal enough to stay, the attitude sours.

It bears repeating: Businesses are like crops. You have to properly invest in a company, even in flat and declining economies, for there to be any growth. If you consider the farmer, what does he do the year after a bad crop? He plants MORE. By comparison, most US businesses eat their seed corn. Think about it!

Courage

There was a time, and you have to be old to remember it, when a company was a team working toward a goal. There was a time when all shared the effort and all shared the results. Wow, have times changed. As management bemoans the fact that employees are no longer dedicated to the company, all they have to do is look in the mirror to see the reason.

We've covered a lot of ground in examining the aberrant behavior of people warped by the experience of management and one overwhelmingly dominant characteristic is that of projection. Projection is a term used in psychological research to describe the situation where a person, consciously or unconsciously 'projects' what they believe onto another person or persons. Racial or other prejudice is one such example. You see a lot of it when liberals brand those who don't think like them (and that's a whole subject of deviant psychology) as uncaring, hate-mongers, etc. The clearest example is someone who hates another person 'because he/she hates me.' In other words, a person justifies bad behavior by turning around and blaming it on someone else.

You can see now where management, especially upper management gets a lot of it's ideas. And a lot of projection gets mixed in with lack of trust. Most management realizes it can't trust itself (think Sarbanes/Oxley), projects it onto the workforce. That is why feces occurs.

One of the clearest examples of how wrong management thinking can go wrong is, surprisingly enough, snow. Or rather, plant closings due to snow.

I went to a college that subscribed to the co-op plan, where you went to school half the year and the other half you worked in your chosen field. This particular winter quarter I was working at the company that I would eventually join when I graduated.

We arrived that day at work to a snow storm and the snow continued to fall. Management made the right decision and sent everyone home at 11 am. By that time the parking lot was so bad, that we were pushing cars out of snowbanks to get them moving. Leaving that day was a physically arduous task. HOWEVER, by 1 pm, the snow stopped, the sun came out and began melting the snow. By the next day, the snow was gone.

Need I ask you to guess what happened next? Yep, management never, ever again sent people home 'officially' due to bad weather. And I mean NEVER. You would think that they'd have some compassion on their employees and open later. But...no. They'd been burned once. They had lost a half-day of productivity and they weren't going to lose that again! Yes, it is as ridiculous as it sounds. These days management has come up with an explanation for their policy that abdicates all responsibility from them and adds a tool to their arsenal of punishment against their employees: They tell their employees to use their judgment on whether to come in or not.

Think about it! Now management doesn't have to make any decision on bad weather, and if some employees take personal time to take a half-day or day off due to fears about the weather, they can use that against them at their reviews! It's a management Win-Win! First, they don't have to do their job by making a decision, then they can use the results to reduce costs. That is good business!

All hyperbole aside, this is management at it's shoddiest. They hold the threat of low/no raise over a person's head so that they have to drive through some of the worst conditions, risking injury, damage or life just so that they don't have to possibly be wrong. In plain words, it's cowardice.

The current place that I work has a 'snow phone' that we can call to see if the plant is open or closed due to weather. Since I've worked there, over 8 years, the message has never, NEVER, changed. We are always open for business as usual. This past week we had a 29 inch blizzard. The message did not change.

Stupid cowards.