In the last few years, people have taken their frustrations dealing with customer service reps to social media. Companies, in turn, are reacting quite quickly to complaints and reaching out to customers. While I’m not sure I’m a fan of jumping on social media before giving companies a chance to fix the problem, it seems to be an amazingly effective tool.
Last month I returned my cable modem to avoid the $3.95 monthly lease fee that is now being charged and replaced the cable modem with the same model that I bought off eBay for $23. I had to goto a Time Warner Cable store to do this and got a receipt for the return. Like all the paper I collect, I scanned in the receipt and stored it in Paperless. When I received my next bill, I saw that I was still being charged for the lease (it is billed one month in advance), so I contacted customer service via the web chat and tweeted about it. I got a direct message asking if they could help, but I had already gotten it “resolved” via the standard channel. I thought my tweet complaining was legitimate as I shouldn’t have had to contact customer service after waiting at the store and returning the modem. Problem solved, or so I thought.
I just got my latest bill; it had a $3.95 credit on it, but the cable modem lease fee was still being charged. OK, so now I’ve gone through the official channel twice to fix this issue. I tweeted again and this time corresponded with their social media folks who said they escalated the issue. Awesome service on a Saturday by the social media folks, but this kind of issue shouldn’t have required me to do this.
So the moral seems to be, if a company wrongs you, they are much better at fixing the problem if you complain in public. I’m not saying that this is the way to go, but if the front line folks aren’t capable of doing their jobs correctly, then I’m not going to waste my time and will just use Twitter as my complaint board. While I’d like to say that companies will do a better job at fixing things the first time, social media probably isn’t going to change that.
I have my fingers crossed that I’ll not only get credited the $3.95 for the charge for the cable modem this month, but the recurring charge will be taken off my bill. However, given the track record, I suspect that I’ll either get the recurring charge taken off or the credit, but not both. If that is the case, I’ll be taking to Twitter again next month and possibly doing a chargeback on my credit card; I have very little patience for things not done right the first or second time. Yes, it is only $3.95, but it is the principal that matters to me.