Mr. Glenn Britt
CEO, Time Warner Cable
Dear Mr. Britt;
I am writing to you to express some consumer feedback that you may not be receiving. I have been a loyal paying “bundle” customer for several years. We get our Internet service, Cable television, and landline phone services via Time Warner Cable. We regularly pay a substantial fee for all these services. Yet, sometimes these services don’t work and when one goes down, they all go down.
Recently, I’ve noticed a plethora of Time Warner Cable commercials targeted towards the small business customer. They tout your great service, speed, customer satisfaction guarantees, and all the usual advertising sales talk. And, there are plenty of them.
But, evidently there are not plenty of customer service reps to help out a little customer like me. I was informed of this today after waiting 20-some minutes to seek some help with the second outage of ALL services at our home during the past few days.
Of course, I cannot find or is there a customer service center phone number for my area. Evidently, those are not available to residential customers like me. We have to call the national “helpline” and I use that word facetiously, given the “help” I received. We have to wade through a horrendous voice-menu trying to force us to not bother an actual human being and do it online. That would have been fine, IF I could have gotten online.
Naturally, I was sent from one department to another. Naturally, the first person had NO IDEA that there was an ongoing outage issue in my area because, of course, he WASN’T anywhere near MY AREA! Naturally, I got all the usual “I’m sorry for your inconvenience, sir” bromides. And, naturally he had no authority to actually offer any compensation for the lost services, my lost work, and the extra time I had to spend leaving my home office to find wi-fi at a local coffeehouse.
Naturally.
But, I sure see those commercial a lot. There’s a budget for those, but not for customer service reps so we “little people” don’t have to be on hold for 20+ minutes.
I have a suggestion, Mr. Britt. Maybe, instead of trying to secure more customers with your large television-advertising budget, you might try to offer consistent and decent service to loyal, existing customers. When we “bundle” we are quite dependent on your services and we actually pay a decent monthly fee for said services. Maybe we matter, too?
You might get a slight sense of crankiness from my letter, for which I apologize. I wasted a lot of time and lost a lot of necessary work time thanks to your “services.” I even had to rush to a local wi-fi spot to host my weekly #DadChat, which is a Tweet Chat I founded and host each Thursday evening. It was not easy doing it with my laptop on my lap at that afore-mentioned coffeehouse. I challenge you to read, write, respond, and send 200+ tweets in one hour like I do every Thursday – that way!
So, Mr. Britt I hope you will consider that advertising about great customer service really has no value if we customers are treated like I was. We had NO “service” twice in less than a week and no one seemed to care, except for the apparently scripted, “I’m sorry for your inconvenience, Mr. Sallan” robot-like apologies.
Have a nice day.
Bruce Sallan
