Customers mattered, once

Quaint idea, no?

I was stumped.

I figure out all my bills around the first of every month. On Saturday, I spread out the invoices and immediately could see I had a problem.

I bought a used car two weeks ago, and through the dealer, obtained a loan from a national credit union I had never heard of. The company had sent me a congratulatory letter, but nothing else. How do I pay this bill? I wondered.

Sighing, I called the number on the letter, fully expecting a robot, a recording telling me to call back later or to go to hell. Or perhaps an endless loop leading to a communication cul-de-sac, as is the case with just about every company I deal with lately.

Instead, after answering a question or two from an automatic system, I got a HUMAN BEING. On a Saturday. During a holiday weekend for Labor Day. I almost dropped the phone. Honestly, I nearly had a heart attack.

She was pleasant and efficient, and when I mentioned the company had not yet sent me a loan number, she gave that to me, along with the bill due date and instructions on where to send the check.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

I hung up, stunned. When is the last time anyone got service over the telephone? From a real person? The experience left me almost confused.

I know a couple who are having an epic struggle with Xfinity to get problems with their bills for home internet resolved, spending pointless hours on the phone. The only people they have encountered have offered one excuse after another and little else.

For my part, I’ve been trying to find just one warm body at ExxonMobil’s credit card company to help me change the telephone number on my record. The number has been disconnected for more than 20 years. But without a telephone number that can accept texts, I can’t get anywhere with the automatic system. And God forbid the corporation would provide any people to help.

Fuggedaboutit, as they say in Jersey.

Despite this, I can offer an occasional glimmer of hope, like the nice lady I talked to Saturday about my loan.

About six years ago, I switched cell telephone providers because Sprint coverage in my area became, in a word, appalling. (Sprint soon merged with another company, T-Mobile) But I kept getting bills from Sprint. I haggled. I begged. All to no avail. Finally, I got angry. I wrote a letter to the president of the company laying out the problem, saying that I hadn’t left Sprint, the company had left ME. A few days later I got a call from company headquarters. It was the president’s administrative assistant, who told me she would handle the problem and I would stop getting bills. She was as good as her word.

My favorite story about a rare success in the perennial case of Corporate America v. All Customers Anywhere is from wonderful Alice Fitzpatrick, one of my wisdom figures in southeastern Connecticut where I live. More than 30 years ago she paid cash for a brand new car, a Chrysler, and before she had gone 100 miles the car interior filled with smoke when she so much as drove around the block. She went back to the dealer to request a new car only to get the patronizing, “now, now, little lady” treatment. The dealer told her that her husband (who had recently absconded) could surely fix the car. He would most certainly not undo the sale.

He had no idea.

Alice fumed, paced, railed against a man’s world and the unfairness of it all. Then she began to work the phone. Alice talked her way up the chain of the Chrysler Corporation until she connected with the president of the company, the iconic Lee Iaccoca himself. She told him the problem. He listened. He said he had no control over individual dealerships, but he would see what he could do.

Indeed.

Within the hour, the dealership called Alice and gave her a new car she was proud to drive. “It became a symbol of my own empowerment, all because I, as a customer, encountered empathic, humane service providers along the way,” Alice wrote me in an email. Lucky for her that AI had not yet been invented

Yet telephone trees, automatic messaging or any new-fangled system we have now is not the problem. The issue is that far too many companies simply don’t care about ordinary customers. That’s the problem.