Utility monopolies

Due to the nature of my job, I deal with many different utility companies in several different states. Some of them, naturally, are easier to deal with than others. I'll call a specific employee at some of them if I need something, whereas I have to deal with a phone tree at others. In my dealings with these different entities over the years, I have come to really wish utility companies were forced, as retailers are, to treat their customers as customers instead of prisoners. We are prisoners, in most cases, to one company for service. What would happen if gas or electric companies had to duke it out for paying customers like the Big, Bad Cable Company has to? (I realize we're dealing with apples and oranges due to mode of delivery, but follow me for a minute.)

One group that I have to deal with is Cumberland Electric. They have one of the worst websites I've ever seen and they only accept paper checks that are mailed to them. You may not wire, auto-draft, or do a check-by-phone with them. Why? No reason. (No really, there is no reason. I asked.)

ComEd will take certain forms of payment, but only in $500 increments if you call in. They also charge you $3.50 to do that. If you have a $10,000 bill to pay, that's a lot of extra charges. You have to pay them to pay them? Really? Also you can only make a certain number of payments every 30 days. What happens if you have multiple accounts? You're just SOL. ComEd doesn't care.

On the other hand, Entergy is super-easy to work with. Their website is excellent, they'll let you pay however you want to, they'll email you a bill without requiring ridiculous amounts of "verification" information (another peeve for another post), and they send your bill in enough time for even a large company to turn it around.

There are a lot of companies somewhere in the middle. CEMC and ComEd are by far the worst and Entergy is the best but there are varying degrees between them. How I wish that I could take business away from some and give to the others--the ones who deserve it.

I realize it simply isn't logical for water or electric companies to coexist in one market. I just wish it were. My main reason for this post is to highlight the good and the bad in the hopes that if enough people talk, tweet, or blog about it, these companies will have to respond. At the very least I'd settle for some decent customer service.

So there's a name for it

People who take to the web to vent frustrations about negative customer service experiences are "consumer vigilantes." I'm proud to be one. I've had positive and negative experiences with a variety of companies and am pleased to use any mechanism that calls attention to a larger problem in the service sector--one of indifference.

"With blogs and social networks and the way information can be posted so freely, word of mouth is incredibly powerful," says Muller. "It's more and more difficult for companies to survive without learning to embrace this new era. They don't have a choice but to start to provide better customer service, especially in hard economic times."

Muller says 150,000 registered users interact on GetSatisfaction.com with nearly 8,000 companies -- from big guns like AT&T, Ford and Verizon to startups like Foxmarks and Widgetbox. Customers post questions or complaints which company reps (or other customers) try to resolve.

"We've had situations where a customer will come in furious and the company will step in and do a stellar response and then the customer will go away happy," says Muller. "And it all happens in a public way. We believe in the good, the bad and the ugly all being out there."

Back in February I was very, very angry about a situation I had with my work phone; we had an account through Sprint. One Saturday morning I sent an angry tweet and--literally--30 minutes later I received a response with an email address asking me to tell him the whole story to see if he could help. He had an executive care manager on the phone with me within hours. I was very pleased with how quickly the company responded to what (at the time) was just an act of frustration. In the end I was not able to get everything resolved but my last (and therefore probably most memorable in the long term) experiences with the company were positive. On the other hand, I am very happy with the new carrier as well as with my iPhone. For now. :)

"Customer service is going to be the new differentiator," she says. "Price isn't the deciding factor anymore -- it's service."

Retail irritation

Shopping used to be simple. You walk into a store, find what you want, give the cashier your money, and walk out. We had no information collection (name, phone number, email), no requests (and occasional badgering) to sign up for a store credit card; it was a brief and pleasant transaction.

I used to be relatively graceful in the face of these impediments to my purchases but I find it increasingly hard. Due to the fact that I did work in both food service and retail early in life, and in fact have worked in customer-service-oriented industries since then, I really try to be nice to all service providers. Not only does one get better service that way (hopefully), it's just good karma. But now they're really starting to piss me off. I buy more and more online just to avoid having to face anyone in a store, smiling over my gritted teeth.

It all started innocently enough. Boutique stores started offering credit; my mother gave me my first credit card for Lerner (now New York & Company) when I was 13. I'm sure it was a nice convenience for many people, though I don't know exactly why one might need 14 different boutique cards. (I gave that card back to my mom sometime in college as it was unnecessary.) I haven't used credit cards since then. For that reason, I'm probably the wrong person to be talking about whether anyone needs 14 different credit cards, but follow me for a minute. What at one time may have been seen as a convenience and a good avenue of customer service has actually turned into a more insidious mechanism.

Why, in the name of credit collapses, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and bailouts, is it your store's policy to ask every single person who makes a purchase whether they want to open a store card? Furthermore, why are you not educating your employees on how to respond when the purchaser declines? "Why not?" is unacceptable. (For the record, this was exactly the response I got last night at New York & Company.)

Even worse was the response I got from Neiman Marcus a year and a half ago when I wanted to purchase a designer bag in Atlanta. They insisted that I present an American Express card, a Neiman's card, or write a check. I had just taken a new job and knew I would be purchasing a home in the next 60 days so I wasn't about to open a new line of credit. I put my purchase back and walked out. I bought the bag on the designer's website the next day.

I'm increasingly tempted to start laying my would-be purchase on the counter and walking out of the store anytime I'm asked to open a store card. Frankly that shirt is just not worth it.

And what's with all this collection of personal info? Why do you need my phone number or email? Hey, guess what, I'm already ON your stupid mailing list because, as I mentioned, I shop online a lot. Even if I weren't, you didn't even ask if I wanted to be on it. Why does your software require that info? But see, I worked retail. I was in management and I know there's a way to override that requirement. (My store--now defunct--would require an address and phone number on returns to minimize shrink. But every once in a while you'd get a person who got really, really pissy about the whole thing and you needed to do the right thing: mollify him or her.) Some stores want to know your ZIP code (yeah, yeah, I know--demographic reasons). I can almost understand that, but it's still annoying.

What happens if I refuse to divulge any information at point of purchase? I really don't want to give out my phone number anymore. Period. The email I always give is specifically my store-spam account and not the one I use for real correspondance but maybe I don't want that out there any more than it is either. Maybe I want to retain some shred of privacy. You're giving me buyer's remorse and I'm not even out the damn door!

Listen up, retailers. Either quit your bitching about how your numbers are down for the last five quarters or start making shopping fun and painless again.

Frank Deford argues in favor of putting the surprise back into sports

On this week's edition of Sweetness and Light, Frank draws the line between Susan Boyle, Mark Fidrych, and Mine that Bird. An excerpt:

Hey, let the sunshine back into sports. The humorless defenders of the college cartel have increasingly cut back on inviting smaller conference schools into March Madness. No, instead, let's have a lifeless seventh-place finisher from some big-foot conference. If Susan Boyle were a college basketball team, she'd be a midmajor and would have never gotten a chance.

Read (or listen) for context.

Funniest Favre-related line yet (this round)

. . . comes courtesy of SI's Dan Banks.

I can see it coming: Favre fatigue replaces swine flu as the next pandemic scare. And there are no know vaccines, short of dropping EPSN from your cable package.

Today is apparently list day

. . . because I just ran across How Not to be Hated on Facebook (which is also a list of 10 things) and several of them hit really close to home. :)

1. Stop taking quizzes. Nobody cares what literary time period you are.

Actually you can take quizzes, I think. You just shouldn't hit "publish." Again, no one cares.

7. I'm sorry your grandfather died of emphysema, but I will not join your "cause."

We've all got our causes. I don't proselytize to you, so return the favor, please.

10. Cryptic status updates about your mental state — "Rachel is trying so hard," "Rachel wishes things were different," "Rachel is starting her life over" — don't make you sound intriguing, just lonely and pathetic.

'Nuff said.

A list I wish I'd read two years ago

Ten questions to ask your mother.

I really wasn't prepared for #10, though.

10. When did you realize you were no longer a child? I know what the answer will be for me, and I was startled to hear my mother give the same response: "I knew it when my own mother died," she told me. "That's the last time there would be anyone in the world who always put me before herself."

It's a valid point.

ADT false alarms

For the second time in two weeks, I was awakened last night by my security alarm blaring. Unlike last time, I knew there was no break-in and I knew there would be no need to await a call from ADT, as no call would be forthcoming. Nor would police show up. ADT never received a signal from my panel, you see!

Last time I was told that the wireless tower losing signal would cause the alarm to trip, that this was common when storms were in the area. (Yes, it was sprinkling that evening. Amazingly there was no alarm days earlier when tornadoes made their way across town!) They told me that I should call back and test my system when the weather cleared up. OK, did that. It still woke me up again last night and the CSR was still less than helpful. "Storms in the area" she mentioned--as I gazed out the back window at the stars.

I am tired today. And my patience with the company is wearing thin. I think they have no idea what's going on with my system and I'm starting to have no idea why I'm paying them for monitoring if they'll call me and then my father over a trouble signal on the panel or a zone not resetting correctly but they will NOT call to see if my house is being broken into at 1:00 AM.

Jury's still out on this one but I'm realizing that there are a LOT of unhappy people where ADT is concerned.

Since I can't buy wine in the grocery store and won't be able to this year. . .

. . . let's talk about my obsession with Petite Petit. You know how you usually tire of the same thing after drinking it regularly for, oh, eight months? I haven't. I still buy a minimum of two bottles at a time of this Lodi offering and it's ALWAYS good.

Grace's blogged about it too.

It was a terrible, horrible, no good. . .

. . . well, you know the rest. Today has been a pretty bad day for me, for reasons you can read below. But toward the end of the workday, four things happened that put a spring in my step:

1. I found out Flight of the Conchords' new album will be out pretty much any day now.

2. I quickly learned to love Pidgin for offering me all the things Facebook chat could not--very specific privacy settings right on my desktop.

3. I had the distinct pleasure of canceling an entire property's Sprint account (I warned them that I'd do it if they didn't offer better customer service!)

4. I saw this YouTube of Coach Pearl rapping shirtless at Monday night's Volcars.

And so the day ended happily.