The Times has a story talking about the phone companies’ new-found interest in selling service to the elderly—and the elderly’s new-found interest in getting the sort of service they want. The AARP has apparently taken notice of the ghastly service provided by current cell-phone companies and begun to lobby aggressively for simpler plans and less-confusing phones. And of course, what the 35-million-strong group asks for they tend to receive.
I’ve long maintained that customer service is harming the American telephone industry, taking advantage of peoples’ ignorance and reticence to become trapped in another multi-hour downward spiral of misdirection and lies from underpaid and undertrained service representives. It’s not just the elderly who need less confusing information about their phone service, it’s everybody, and if the AARP can start a push towards better service then we’ll all be better off for it.
Personal anecdote: about eight or nine years ago I worked for AT&T as a customer service representative in a department that was technically “Inbound Sales” but operated, essentially, as a customer happiness tool. We “sold” things like long-distance plans and free minutes bundles to as many customers—unhappy or satisfied—we could get a hold of. Although it was certainly a real drag of a job sometimes, our team honestly felt like we were helping people out, in general, by helping them understand what exactly their phone bill meant and how they could better spend their money.
But we were fighting a strange battle, because our enemy was essentially AT&T, not any of the other companies. Although part of our job was to retain customers from jumping ship—and this was in the particularly weird time in the ’90s when companies were offering $100 (or more!) checks to people to change long distance companies—much of what we did was to “fix” plans for customers who didn’t know they could have another option.
The point of all this is to relate the experiences that I had where older people would call us up with a question (often just to talk, truth be told, which could be both annoying and endearing at once) and we’d find things like phone rental fees and outdated plans that were costing retirees and others on fixed budgets hundreds of dollars a year in money. It was easily fixed, and sometimes we could even go back and refund some of the money if it were really out of hand, but it was always depressing to talk to a perfectly intelligent old lady who had just been too intimidated by a confusing system to even consider that she might be paying too much.
Anyway, to sum up: if old people can force the phone industry to treating their customers like crap then we’ll all be winners. Also, I miss my grandma.
In Pitch to Older Customers, Static for Cellphone Industry [NYTimes]
