Case Study: How to Build Badwill With Customers

If you want to reduce customer hesitancy (a good thing!) a solid line of reasoning is to reduce the customer’s risk in trying the product or service.  Someone told Verizon Wireless about this, and they prominently feature their Worry Free Guarantee.

All those people and they STILL can't make customer problems right

What they don’t tell you is that their operational team (for the hundreds of them behind the unnamed “Can you hear me now” dude in their commercials) doesn’t know much about making good with customers.  This is a great lesson for smaller businesses in how good intent poorly executed actually backfires.

I purchased a cellular modem and a smartphone for $280 on April 20th.  Getting 2 bars of service in my home was less than expected, so I returned the equipment and have a confirmation letter to that effect.

But upon calling to verify that my account had been zeroed, I began a “hamster wheel” of fun [sarcasm light glowing brightly] with the customer service and finance/credit departments.

Why?  They can’t seem to figure out that refunding my $275 is a different issue than the balance owed.  So I’m now accumulating finance charges and my second month’s charge has it at $320, even though Verizon IVR [interactive voice response, the computer's that ask you to push buttons and talk to them] clearly identifies that I’m not a customer.

In hours of conversations over the past 2+ weeks, I’ve spoken with Germaine, Armando, Fernando, and others before I thought to start logging their names.  Today I got a call from Herman explaining that my account was past due — and a twist, he says they actually are not crediting me fully for the equipment returned (pristine, 29 minutes of usage).

As the customer, I cannot do a darn thing to change the matter.  It appears they’re going to report me to Experian and the other credit bureaus as delinquent, and yet for the number of  supervisors I’ve spoken to, they’re impotent/incompetent to fix this problem.

Did I really need more material for my blog?  No, but when you mistreat customers to the point where they feel powerless in the customer-vendor relationship, you’ve gotta know it will come out as word-of-mouth complaining.

When I ran restaurants “in the last millennium”, I taught my people the line I learned from trainer Frank Cooper:

The customer signs your paycheck.

For all I know, Verizon Wireless may even have signs like this in their corporate buildings.  But like my business card and web site say, “Ideas are cheap — Execution is everything”.  May your ideas for pleasing customers land like you intended

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