Feature Article:
Maintaining Superior Service
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Feature Article: Maintaining Superior Service |
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The Danger of Being a Monopoly When we consider monopolies, most of us normally think of the government with its monopoly in mail services, or a local school system that only has public schools. The U.S. military, as well, has a monopoly on the defense of the country. But defacto monopolies also exist. A telephone company can, in effect, by its dominance of a local market have an equivalent monopoly position. When this happens, this dominance in the marketplace can have a chilling effect on how customers are treated. We have just moved to a community that is dominated by one telecommunications giant. In the words of the local population, "They own the town—as far as telephone service is concerned." As a result, we have been very interested to watch their customer service delivery and their willingness to tolerate complaints. On their first trip to our office to work on our phone lines, their representative insisted on installing his company's lock on our phone box. He was angry with us for having put our own lock on the phone box. He took off our lock and installed a combination lock. He informed us that all the other companies that need access to the box would know how to open the lock. When we protested, he became surly. When we told him that the only time their company representatives would show up to our building would be during the day time, and we would always have the key, he balked. "It's my lock or no lock." Monopoly attitude. Two days later, the company that was to install our internet lines attempted to get into the phone box. Sure enough, their representative didn't have the "universal" combination. We attempted to call the phone company, but were only able to leave voice messages. No one returned our calls. We were forced to go to a store, buy a hack saw and cut the lock off the box. A few days later a second representative from the "monopoly" company showed up. We explained what we had been forced to do to access the phone box. We also told him we didn't think this was particularly good customer service. He threw his hands up in the air and defensively said, "Look, it wasn't me." Monopoly attitude. At this point, we haven't bothered to let the company know how their representatives are behaving. We are convinced we'll run into more of the monopoly attitude. At some level in this organization, the conversation that is going on in the community, "They own this town," is probably also occurring within the organization itself, "We own this town." It's a dangerous attitude,
and almost always spawns a negative impact on the behavior of the front-line
staff, the "fingertips of the organization." The conversation needs to be
corrected inside the company or it will be continually repeated and acted out by
the representatives of this organization. "What can they do? We own this town."
Monopoly attitude. Janelle Barlow,
Coauthor
Note: We have been getting e-mail from our readers asking us to list the names of the companies who get complaints. Our policy is to never list names. The reason for this is because every company fails from time to time, and we wouldn't want to tar some company's name just because of one bad example. Furthermore, we are dependant upon the writer's side of the story. We don't know for sure what happened, and in the name of fairness, we will not post names. Furthermore, the purpose of this corner is not to pass complaints along to corporations. This Complaint Is a Gift corner is designed to look at examples of good and bad complaint handling so we can learn from these experiences. Please, if you have a direct complaint you want a company to learn about, contact them directly. In many cases, we have never heard of the company in question and have no idea how to reach them. Janelle Barlow | ||
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