This is from the cable company to the for-profit colleges ..... They have the staff to call you again and again trying to get you to sign up. After you paid your fees, you get layers and layers of automated voice message when you call for service, you be lucky if you get to a human. Is the the new way of American businesses ????
Yeah and if you want to upgrade your service on say Saturday morning, you can get through to a live person right away...but if you call to cancel, you go straight to the automated message "Sorry, please call back during normal business hours Monday to Friday"
Imo, this way of doing business has contributed to stress and anger to society as a whole. On the flip side, when I was in business, someone always answered the co phone, I didn't give a rats ass if it was the janitor, everyone was trained in answering the phone. I had customers tell me repeatedly this is one of the reasons I got their business. One more thing. If voice mail, etc increases your companies productivity, what's up with the customers productivity if your customer wastes 20 minutes on the phone with zero results? Everyone's time is valuable. No respect.
The part that I like is where they send a sales representative to walk door to door in your gated community. When you point out that there is no soliciting, they fall back to their utility easement. Seem to remember their argument even held up in court last year. So much of our money spent marketing for a no-competition utility.
I cancelled my cable a week ago. I was tired of paying $70 per month, when there is nothing but dumb reality shows on TV anyway. I just use Netflix for $15 per month.
I think this is definitely a positive change that's going on. Everyone is loyal to a phone/cable/internet company because they are more or less stuck with them as there are usually only a couple of options in most areas. Even in bigger cities there may be up to 5 companies or so to choose from, which really isn't a whole lot in the scheme of things. Happy consumers that can put there resources where they want to could stimulate an economy more than anything. We of course in the transition process where we are still stuck in this boat, but Netflix is definitely and slowly killing huge companies like DirecTV and Dish, as well as others. Perhaps they will begin to adapt and perhaps charge per channel. Because if you're like most consumers you don't watch all 150 DirectTV channels in the standard package as more than half of them are Home Shopping Network type channels and a handful of music channels. However, as far as customer service, it has definitely shifted a lot in the past 15 years. It didn't used to be so automated. In fact, when I try to get ahold of my health insurance company, I typically wait 10-15 minutes on hold after I put in my information until I get ahold of someone...then I get transferred. The sad part is the firms don't really consider that a part of their marketing which they DEFINITELY should. The problem I think stemmed from so many companies that did do this to save costs that it allows all of them to do this. I think many firms are afraid to go back to this because that would mean they would incur more costs. But of course we know that we would be much more likely to be loyal to a company that practices such a strategy (always getting ahold of someone) and would lead to longterm profits. But of course, therein lies the even larger problem. Many businesses today have a very short-term focus. Which, in my opinion, may be the reason we are in a recession today. Make a quick buck now rather than a lifetime of cashflow.
The one channel I really wanted to watch was Bloomberg TV. The local Cable company packaged it in such a way that it is available only with the more expensive packages. I canceled my cable TV and watch Bloomberg TV free on my extra computer.