Do not do this with your company.

I live in Austin and we have been experiencing harsh weather for the past few weeks. This past Thursday, the city took a beating and large parts of the city lost power. My Time Warner DVR decided to join the party. The box would reboot itself spontaneously without warning (sometimes during the last few minutes of the 4th qtr of a spurs or suns game).
I moved recently and so I am a new subscriber. They have already had to come in and change the box once because of hardware failure. The only options I get are either drive over to the time warner office myself and swap the box or wait for a phone call and leave work in the middle of whatever you are doing to let the time warner rep. in to swap the boxes. This would be the second replacement within 20 days.
Given that my only cable choices are time warner or "no" cable. I get the feeling time warner really does not care if its customer service policy makes the customers life easy or hard. Anyways I was annoyed and ranting about the bad effects of a local monopoly till this morning....

Derrick was the time warner representative who stopped by today. Derrick is good at what he does. Amongst the other problems, the remote had been misconfigured by the previous agent. I did not know this and so when I said the remote was malfunctioning, he (Derrick) diagnosed the problem. Not only did he fix it but when he realised I was curious, he actually walked me through what he did and told me how I can do it myself if I wanted to. It was not rocket science but good customer service, the ability to listen and respond as necessary. I was not so mad at time warner any more.


So I ask Derrick if there is a quick and easy way for me to give positive feedback to his supervisor at time warner. Guess what, call the customer service line and wait for 19minutes before you can talk to someone. Are you kidding me!?! Timewarner is burning good will created by awesome field people like Derrick. What are you doing with your front line people?

To recap

• Do not abuse your monopoly to create unfriedly and obstructive customer service policies.
• Enable your good customer facing employees to make a difference and do not hold them back.
  

So, how is your company being run?