Customer "Service"

This may sound like a "cranky old man" rant, but I come by it honestly.

In one of my real-world incarnations, I'm the volunteer pool manager for our subdivision's homeowners association (or as one kid called me, the "pool janitor".)  In the midst of the past summer, the pool pump began to leak a little.  The pump is at least 25 years old.  The little plate with the serial number fell off long ago.  The company that installed it is out of business.  I found another local outfit.  They sent a service man who took some photos.  I gave him all the specs I had.  He said that without a serial number he'd have to do some "research" and get back to me.  That was early August.  I'm still waiting.

The pool's custom filter grids need to be rebuilt or replaced.  Only one company exists that makes anything somewhat similar to what we have.  They're in Montana.  A couple weeks ago I made email inquiries, sent photos and left phone messages.  I have heard nothing.

The lovely Mrs. Gammons and I wish to install hardwood flooring in our kitchen and dining room.  We called a nearby retailer we've used several times before for carpeting and other flooring.  Someone came to measure.  She said she'd work it up and email us a price in a day or two.  It took her two weeks, and we had to call her with reminders.

For the past two years we've had a TV/internet/phone bundle with AT&T U-verse.  On October 6th, we began to experience intermittent but repeated signal loss -- all three would go dead simultaneously for a few minutes, then come back up.  Then off again and on again.  A service tech came out three times.  Getting him  to respond and show up was a pure bitch.  Naturally, the signal drop never exhibited itself while he was here, but he'd fiddle with something, pronounce the problem "fixed" and leave, always telling me to call him or text him if the problem reappeared.  For three long weeks, sooner or later, it always reappeared.  One day, we had no service at all from 5:00 p.m. until some time in the wee hours.  During our three weeks of frustration, I made 7 phone calls to the service tech and sent him 29 texts.  I also made four phone calls to his manager, and sent him four texts.  The manager never contacted me, and toward the end the service tech stopped returning calls and texts.  Clearly, they had no idea what was wrong, they were just guessing, didn't take me seriously, and were hoping I'd just shut up and go away.

Then one evening our neighbor had a phone problem and an AT&T line tech showed up to fix it.  Since he was just next door, we roped him and explained our ongoing problem (which had nothing to do with him or our neighbor).  Good thing we did.  He gave us a real education.  The diagnostics on his laptop verified everything we'd been experiencing -- three weeks of signal-drop hell.  He said the problem was likely somewhere in the outside lines and junction boxes.  He explained that line techs like him were "outside" guys, union workers with experience back to the days of Ohio Bell.  The U-verse techs were "inside" guys, younger, non-union, and not allowed to work on outside lines.  Their mandate is to avoid involving line techs in service issues if at all possible, because those outside guys are more costly to AT&T.  So the inside techs just string you along, baffle you with bullshit, and don't return your calls.

This wonderful old-school line tech -- who didn't have to do a damn thing for us -- stirred the pot and got some action.  He called the U-verse manager and left him a long message on our behalf.  I made a follow-up call the next morning -- the manager actually answered this time -- and a line tech came out on October 26th to finally track down the real problem and make a real repair.  We've been good ever since.

But what if our neighbor didn't have a phone problem?  What if we'd never run into that line tech?  Our signal loss problem would still be occurring daily, the U-verse "service" team would still be ignoring us, and we'd be  preparing to switch it all to Time Warner.  It may yet come to that.  I'm sure Time Warner sucks too.

Real customer service is dead.

[Thus concludeth the rant.]