Mediaphyter – A Communications Cocktail

Truth be told, my mom is a little stressed out right now, having just bought a new house and managing the move primarily on her own (insert “daughter doesn’t live local guilt here”). While I’ve made a couple trips home and plan to make another in the near future, I haven’t been there to deal with some of the day-to-day dramas, and her fight with Big Telco is one for which I wish I’d been present.

Last week I got a frantic, tearful voicemail from mom – “Honey, I just wanted to sign up for phone service. (insert sob) I don’t understand what is going on. This has taken ALL DAY LONG!” Being what I like to call “daughter of the year minus that not being close enough to help thing” I immediately called her back and tried to talk her down. Apparently when trying to secure phone service at her new house she learned that moving 1.5 miles away from her current home put her into a different Big Telco monopoly zone. Not a big deal, really, except for the trouble she got when she tried to make the switch.

Apparently the customer service rep was more focused on trying to upsell my mother to services that she does not need rather than helping to answer her questions about basic phone service. Worse than that, he was apparently speaking to her in uber tech geek speak and would not vary from his set script at all to answer her questions. So here’s my late 50-something non-technical only-uses-a-BlackBerry-to-play-BrickBreaker mother in tears on the phone because this guy is speaking to her as if she is a space alien. At first I thought she might be overreacting until I called and found that even my nerdiness had trouble keeping up with customer service’s script.

The point of this blog isn’t only to whine about Big Telco (hence why I omitted the name). I want to make a short but important point. Big Telco and other large branded companies need to take into consideration that the advancements of technology often happen faster than the advancements in some people’s ability to grasp said technology. It’s not even a generational thing — it’s an exposure thing.

Sometimes even I forget that there is still a vast number of Americans who aren’t exceptionally tech savvy. Living in Silicon Valley and working in network security does not necessarily help me stay connected to those folks (thanks Mom, for keeping me grounded). But I have to remember and, more important, large consumer-oriented companies must remember that these people are valued customers who are paying the same as we are, who deserve the same level of customer service that we do, and do not deserve to be made to feel stupid because their areas of expertise may not be related to high tech.

In the end my mom successfully got her phone service and I successfully lambasted a Big Telco customer service manager (after holding for 40 minutes to speak with him, that is). Her installation is coming up this week so I am hoping she doesn’t have anymore problems. More important than that, I am hoping that Big Telco and other corporations bear in mind the reality that their core customer demographic may not be us techy geek heads and that to truly service their customers and create brand loyalty, they need to actually provide customer service.

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Comment by bob Jan 3 09 @ 5:19 am

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