dispatches from TJICistan

I just had a SmartFlix customer track down my home phone number and give me a 40 minute earful at 9pm on a Sunday night.

Going through the normal channels hadn’t worked for him.

The conversation brought to light not only specific problems that he had had with the service, but general problems that gave rise to his specific problems.

I need to not just fix a few processes (department A does things in manner X, and should instead do them in manner Y; department B does things in manner X’, and should instead do them in manner Y’), but fix the meta process that allowed the problems to develop in the first place: there was insufficient monitoring to make sure that processes were working, and there was no formal way for a customer to escalate a problem: once they got trapped in a dead end, they couldn’t even back up and try another approach.

I consider myself extremely lucky to have had my Sunday night interrupted this way – the customer has given me the opportunity to listen to all the details of his problem (which is to say, MY problem), and respond, and react.

It could have been far worse: instead of telling me, he could have posted a diatribe to some website.

Or – even worse than that – he could have told no one, and let the problems continue.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 10:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.