The Power of the Pen
Yesterday I wrote about the decline of customer service in America. A couple of interesting things happened afterwards.
Example #1 was about the woman at the disability office not returning a call after I left a message. Five minutes after I hit publish, the adjudicator called me back. She said she was out of the office on Tuesday. With Monday being a holiday, that gave her a four day weekend.
Hey, I have no problem with that at all. All she had to do was change her voice mail greeting. Let people know that she's gone and will return on Wednesday. It's pretty simple to do. I would have heard the message, called on Wednesday, had her answer my questions and she wouldn't have become an example of bad customer service.
Example #2 was the doctor's office that dropped the ball on getting me approval for some important tests.
I went to their office yesterday morning to see where this stood. It was my third trip there plus a couple of phone calls. I swear that as I opened their door, my phone rang. It was their referral specialist. She was calling to let me know that everything was approved and I can move forward with scheduling the tests. Amazing.
Is she off the hook and now an example of good customer service? To quote John McEnroe "You can not be serious."
By the way, neither person apologized for the rudeness and inconvenience that they put me through.
Do I owe them an apology for putting them in a bad light when there were extenuating circumstances? Once again I say "You can not be serious." The answer is an emphatic HELL NO!!
Do it right the first time and you stay out of my stories. They're just lucky that I didn't use their names.
An interesting question is was what occurred today a coincidence or did the bad pub finally get these people off their asses? I did a Google search under "bad customer service" and found my blog on page one. Still unless they were Googling that, I doubt they found my piece. I vote coincidence but can be convinced otherwise.
So what have I learned from this:
a.) There's bad customer service everywhere.
b.) There's still plenty of good customer service stories out there. I found a couple yesterday. That's for tomorrow.
c.) Most importantly...Don't fuck with a guy who has a blog. The power of the pen will bite you in ass every time.