WasabiJane | The blog and portfolio of Lisa Eldred » society

On Customer Service

Lisa — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 20:05:08 +0000

I’m sitting at a Panera two blocks from my apartment to write this blog post. Partially, this is because I love their frozen lemonade. Mostly it’s because my Internet is out at home.

I moved into my apartment less than a month ago – May 22, to be specific, though my lease technically started on the 15th. Right now, the only things I actually love about it are the fact that it’s mine, it’s big, and I have rose bushes right next to my front door. The rest of my experience there has been educational, to say the least. In this last month I have dealt with:

a leaky bathroom sink
a highly problematic fridge
a burnt-out pilot light, resulting in no hot water
no water pressure in the kitchen sink
the wrong mailbox key
an…old toilet (that problem is kind of hard to explain)
an Internet outage

The last two actually haven’t been fixed yet. I haven’t reported the former; it’s either not actually a problem or will require possibly two new toilets. As for the Internet, well, that went out on Tuesday. The DSL light started blinking, indicating no connecton.That night’s response was to sigh, unplug the modem, and go read instead of write a blog post. When it wasn’t back by Wednesday, I called my provider, who claimed that there weren’t any outages for my area and since I was using an off-brand modem, they’d have to connect me to the department that would charge me $130 to fix it.

Thanks, ISP! I totally want to pay you $130 to tell me my modem’s broken!

So I unplugged it again, borrowed some other modems from my friends (none of which worked at my place), and took mine over to a friend’s house, where I verified that the modem was indeed working. A second call to my ISP finally got them to check the line and discover that the problem was indeed their fault. If I’m lucky, it’ll be back tomorrow by the time I’m home from work. If not, I get to call and yell at tech support again.

The long and short of this is that I get to learn how to actually have and handle conflict. I’m horrible at that. I avoid it like the plague. Like, I wouldn’t even tell a restaurant that they got my order wrong because I didn’t want to risk the wait staff getting mad at me. And having worked in customer service for a number of years, I’ve never wanted to be the problem customer, making a fuss because something wasn’t absolutely perfect. This, coincidentally, seems to run in the family; when I told my dad about this yesterday, he mentioned that he and mom had told my brother that they should get their toilet fixed in their (rented) duplex when he moved in a year ago; supposedly, he hasn’t done so yet because he “doesn’t want to be a bother.” (A theory: working customer service for any period of time will forever ruin your opinion of your own rights as a customer.)

So, mostly for my own benefit, here’s what I’ve learned.

The Internet (or hot water, or whatever) is not an inherent right. Believe it or not, I do not take it for granted that I live in a country where I can go to the restaurant down the road whenever my home Internet is out. And yes, I can survive a 24-hour period without checking Twitter.
The Internet is a service. It’s becoming a vital one in the U.S. My livelihood literally depends on it right now.
I have the right as a customer to get the service I pay for. This one is surprisingly key for me. See also: I don’t want to be a problem customer. But I pay for my DSL, and part of the rent I pay goes to the salaries of the maintenance workers at my apartment complex. So if my Internet is out and it’s the fault of the company, then I’m not being a problem customer if I call them up politely and work with them to solve my problem. Nor am I a problem resident if I ask maintenance to fix a problem in my apartment.A case in point is the saga of my refrigerator. The short version is that there was a brand new fridge in my apartment when I started the lease. This fridge had electrical problems. It took maintenance a week to finally figure out that the fridge itself was the problem and give me a different one. And I truly felt bad for bothering them every single day for several days in a row to tell them, hey, guess what, the fridge is out again. But the thing is, I know they were just as frustrated with it continually not working as I was. And they didn’t blame me for my problems, just as I didn’t blame them for not getting things fixed the first time. I let them know, hey, nope, sorry, for whatever reason the fridge is out again, and we’d try again. This isn’t like me, say, nagging them because my rose bushes aren’t properly pruned or because there’s a scratch in my paint. If something is actually broken, I have a right to get it fixed.
Good customer support is vital to any company. Seriously. In fact, they and the UX team should probably be the best-paid employees of any company, since a bad experience is likely to turn a customer away.In a perfect world, of course, there would be no need for customer service. Products would always be usable and functional. Our world not being perfect, good usability will solve a number of problems, but will never solve them all. And that’s where your customer support team is crucial.
Case in point 1: I was significantly happier with my ISP after the second phone call to tech support, wherein the nice lady on the other end actually listened to what I had to say, ran a simple test, apologized for putting me on hold during the test, and then nicely explained what exactly was going to happen after she submitted a trouble ticket to the Line department (including, coincidentally, the fact that they’re closed on Sundays and they might not get to my problem that same day, as indeed they did not). If I had been forced into paying the $130 they wanted to charge me to fix something that wound up being their fault after all, I probably would have canceled my service with them. (As an aside, while I actually had surprisingly “good” experiences with their automated support line both times I called, the fact that their core assumption as stated in this system was that the problem was with my technology, not theirs, definitely counts as a negative.)

Case in point 2: We recently made the decision to use Constant Contact for our newsletter at work. On Friday, I discovered a major usability failure in their image editing technology (in short, I couldn’t resize a logo I had uploaded despite them claiming I could). A quick gripe on Twitter got noticed by their customer support team; while this particular problem is, I suspect, only solvable through a major redesign, they get major bonus points for noticing and caring. Even if it turns out that the Twitter response was just an automated reply established through Google Alerts, they still took the initiative to reach out to a customer who was having problems. Wait, let me reiterate that point: I was having a problem with their service and wasn’t going to bother the company, but they still stepped up to help me out.

If you can get a customer support team together that is friendly, knowledgeable, and proactive, you’ve got yourself a strong backbone to your company. And if my ISP can continue to listen to my problems and explain reasonably why it may take a few more days, well, I’ll be okay with using Panera’s wifi in the meantime.

The Necessity of the Law

Lisa — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:31:40 +0000

I’m editing a coworker’s paper, and came across this quote:

“While politics is about power, an ethical framework can be seen as a ‘counterbalance’ to power, or at leat as a way to mitigate some of the potentially negative impacts of power.”

(Source: Cathy Gibson, 2009).

Mostly, I’m throwing this up here for the sake of storing it somewhere, but it really synthesizes some of the vaguely politicky thoughts that have been stewing in the back of my head. Namely, this is why the Right cares about issues like Gay marriage and abortion and the sexual exploits of politicians and whatnot–it represents a decay, perceived or real, in the mitigating force keeping those in power in check. And it’s why presidents like Bush, love him or hate him, could get re-elected: again, real or perceived, as a proclaimed Christian, many who voted for him perceived him as being guided by an internal counterbalance to the power–the human conscience.

It’s the entire purpose of the law: it’s not solely about keeping society in order, but it provides a structure by which leaders can help society maintain this order without losing control or, more frequently, gaining absolute control. Without moral absolutes, what is there to stop those in power from seizing it? Indeed, without moral absolutes, what does it even matter?

Dear Churches of America

Lisa — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:47:11 +0000

Dear Churches of America,

Dear Body of the Living Christ,

My brothers and sisters,

Change has come to America, and we the church had very little to do with it.

I’m not talking about the political landscape, per se, because we had as much to do with that as the rest of the citizens. Some of us voted for Obama. Some voted for McCain. Some even voted for third-party candidates. Those of us who voted made our voices heard. And whomever you voted for, Obama is now our president–has been for almost 48 hours, and will be, by the grace of God, for the next 4-8 years. And he has a lot of worthy things to say–like stepping up and helping each other. Like doing good deeds in service to one another.

President Obama’s not the problem. He merely highlights it.

See, here’s the thing. Half of America thinks that Obama is going to be the greatest president since Lincoln, minimally. They expect him to restore the economy. To rule with justice. To set the (political) prisoners free. To bring peace to the planet.

In short, they expect him to be the Messiah.

Can you see where I’m going with this? They expect him to be the savior because we’ve failed to show the world the real one! We’ve failed to preach the gospel, and when we have, we’ve failed to back it up with compassion. And even when we do show a strong outpouring of love, it’s often not of our own initiative. A bunch of churches in Lansing, for example, teamed up to provide financial support for a food bank, and I believe we supplied three times the amount of money requested–but we came together at the request of the MAYOR–the government’s initiative, not our own.

I’m not saying that we don’t do good works or that we don’t preach the gospel. We’re just not doing it enough. I’m certainly not. And because of our failures, our fellow citizens are looking to the government to save them, to provide the answers to their questions.

Wake up, churches of America! Don’t be like Laodicea, neither not nor cold! Be Smyrna, be Philadelphia! Love your family, your friends, your enemies. Let the unbelievers see our good works, that they might be receptive to the Gospel and glorify the Father in Heaven! There’s only one Savior. We need to make sure the world sees him.

In Christ, who has made us new creations,

Lisa

It’s not plagiarism, but…

Lisa — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:52:03 +0000

I just saw a Facebook ad for “custom term papers” (not linked, but you can find 212,000 results by googling that term). Basically, you hand them your research and they churn out an actual report. And they’ll even write your Master’s thesis for you!

My goodness, people. This is why writing centers and editors exist. Let me give anyone who wants to use a site like that a hint: academic writing is about clarity and organization. If you can explain your research to these people, you can save yourself $20/page and write minimally your own first draft. I won’t deny the need for corporate professional writers… but it strikes me as unethical to pay someone for a paper that you’ll then get graded on. It’s called “credit where credit is due.” Seriously. Learn it before you enter the corporate world.

The Outward Appearance

Lisa — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:25:21 +0000

In high school, I had an obese teacher who claimed to have once been the cheerleading coach for Madonna, who had graduated from my high school some 20 years previously. For years I wrote her off as a compulsive liar–it wasn’t the only hardly-believable claim she made. In retrospect, it would have been very easy to either verify or repudiate her claim, as the school no doubt would have had records, but at the time it never crossed my mind to do so, and now it would require more effort than I really feel like putting into it (that is to say, it requires any effort at all, which is by default too much).

I bring this up because Yi noted that Michael Phelps consumes between 10,000-12,000 calories each day, but burns so many off that he has trouble gaining weight. Like Yi, my first reaction was that it would be nice to have that problem. I definitely eat more than I burn each day. But it got me thinking: Phelps’ stomach is undoubtedly enlarged. When one day he stops working out nearly as much, will he also think to stop eating so much? Will he be able to retrain his body to desire less food? Or will he one day become one of the millions of Americans who suffers from weight issues because he failed to adapt? I’d love to see a study of former athletes to know if there’s some sort of major weight gain trend among them.

It also makes me wonder about my old teacher. If athletes require that many calories a day, it’s entirely possible that she legitimately was a cheerleading coach once, but didn’t decrease her caloric intake as she stopped exercising heavily. If that was the case–what a horrible fate! It’s bad enough being overweight in a Photoshop world. It would be even worse for one who used to be thin–who had a legitimate claim to fame–but gets discredited just for being the product of a consumer environment.