Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Badass of the Week: Jennifer from Charter

Everybody bitches about the phone and cable company (see Cole, John re: Comcast) and nobody like a good rant better than yours truly. With each repetitive information input, or boneheaded service rep i was forced to deal with, I was composing my post to throw my gasoline onto that blogosphere-wide fire...

After over ninety minutes (over two evenings) of absolutely atrocious phone service trying to establish phone and internet service with Charter Communications in the new house, I finally lucked into connecting to the patron saint of customer service, Jennifer.

I told her about my previous phone fiascoes and she assured me she would take care of everything, and even took my number in case we were disconnected for any reason. After a somewhat slow—but extremely thorough—phone call, I was left with exactly what I want, when i want it, and with a pretty good fucking phone number to boot!

So, once the order was complete, Jennifer asked me if I had any questions...

"Yes, I need your name and a way to tell somebody how helpful you were."

She gave me her supervisor's name and email address—this is what I wrote:

Ms. (Manager),

I am writing to let you know that I received excellent and thorough service from Jennifer this evening. I had spent over an hour on the phone with several different Charter representatives who were all uninformed or unable to help me with what, to me, should have been a simple order for new phone and high-speed internet service. In some cases I was told phone service was unavailable to me, once I was told to confirm availability myself by calling a different number (?!?) and twice I was told service was available, but could not be established until a previous homeowner completed his disconnection by being present at the address (that he no longer controls or has access to) NEXT MONTH for a physical disconnect!

Jennifer was quick to confirm that all services were indeed available, despite the conflicting information in your system, and that I could establish my service at the soonest available appointment—which is the day after tomorrow—not August 1, as I had been told previously.

Had Jennifer not been able to properly provide service to me, I was going to look at alternatives for the services I need and you would have lost a customer before you ever had me.

I hope that by providing my confirmation number (###############) you can access the recorded service calls in reference to my account and hear the excellent service provided by Jennifer in contrast to the horrendous, inaccurate, and unhelpful calls I had previously.

Hopefully this will contribute to better service for me and other customers in the future.

Thank you,
Mr. Furious
Asheville, NC


Rock on, Jennifer!

As for the fucktards in sales, scheduling, billing and whoever the fuck else jerked me around...I hope Jennifer gets promoted and comes around personally to fire each of you in my honor.

7 comments:

Rickey said...

Heh, any kind of tech support is the worst--they're all trained to read from the same "if, then" checklist and they're all colossal fuckwits (you definitely got lucky with Jennifer). Moral of the story: pay peanuts and you get clowns.

Just be thankful you weren't calling them to figure out how to configure a wireless network...

Mr Furious said...

As much as everybody complains about Comcast, I always had a pretty good experience with them— though I had the advantage of being in Ann Arbor which was where one of their major hubs was—I had a very fast connection and very little downtime, which was always addressed quickly.

Support was always good when I needed it, despite the fact that I run Macs, and they always were clear they were NOT necessarily trained to troubleshoot for Mac systems...

These Charter clowns were a fucking joke. It was like the first ten people I talked to were all trying to drive me away!

michelline said...

Well, I think it's super you took the time to send a nice email. I know when I was in Customer Service, I was always very happy to get a happy letter from a customer. It really will make her day.

Noah said...

Glad that went well. I recently had a customer service run-in where I was trying to pay them...trying to pay them money...and they couldn't help me with the transaction.

Bob said...

Actually Jennifer probably really wanted to help you, so she had to go off the company script. By thinking out of the box in order to satisfy the customer, she probably violated company policy and now, due to your letter, has been fired.

Nice work.

Alexandra said...

Smart and customer service don't normally go together. You got lucky.

A note on below - you took a 5 day break in writing on the blog - in between starting a new job, buying a new house and moving - I don't think that is unreasonable :)

I love your commentary on the Dems. I can't understand why they can't get some of that audacity and speak out. It's always CYA this and that. If the country is THAT dumb (that they wouldn't understand the Dems positions if they weren't always CYA'ing), then I really don't want to live here.

Nice to meet you. I "lurk" on Mrs F's site. Now I don't lurk here, too.

Missives From Suburbia said...

Isn't it amazing how one remotely competent person looks like a rockstar when surrounded by the dregs of the corporate world? She did her job! How sad is that? Just like Virgil and Brian did their jobs at Comcast last week. But, man, we're ready to lick their feet for it, aren't we?

Hmmm... I'm starting to wonder if companies hire dolts on purpose now...