When a customer gets bad customer service, who's at fault? The person delivering the bad service, right? In some cases, yes, of course. But in a variety of important cases, the person delivering the bad service is not at fault, but gets blamed (or blasted!) for it anyway, while the guilty party gets promoted.

Sounds strange, right? But it's all too common. I experienced it personally last weekend, and my own experience will illustrate the point quite nicely.

The Cablevision Store

After several years of fine service, my cable modem started showing signs of dementia, wandering off into disfunction with increasing frequency, the only cure for which was a hard re-boot. After several weeks of wishful thinking, I finally accepted reality and took my old cable modem to the cable company's store to trade it in for a newer model last Saturday.

Shortly after starting my transaction, another customer came into the nearly-empty store with a DVR. He went up to the service person next to mine, handed over the DVR, and explained his issue. He said that he had been given the wrong DVR the day before — he needed one with an HDMI connection. Could he please trade for the right box?

I'm sorry, says the pleasant CSR (customer service representative), we're out of those boxes. You'll have to come back next week. That's when the fireworks started.

"I spend $250 a month for your service…how can you be out of DVR's?? … I demand to speak to a manager … I can't come back on Monday, I work in the City and Saturday is my only day for getting stuff like this done …"

It got worse. Various impolite words started flowing freely…

…inspiring the large fellow helping me to try to calm the guy down, telling him there's no need to use language like that, etc. In the end, he stormed out with his non-functional DVR without a resolution.

Meanwhile, I got a new cable modem with no instructions. I was told to just plug it in and it would work.

Who is Responsible for the Customer's Bad Experience?

The CSR's in the little store-front operation? Hardly. They were pleasant enough. But they didn't have what the guy needed — and had every right to expect! This is a guy who's headed right to FIOS, in spite of Verizon's well-deserved reputation for equally horrific customer service.

OK, so who is at fault here? It's hard to know for sure, but it is likely to be some combination of simple incompetence in the people and/or systems that manage inventory at the stores…

…which wouldn't be a bit surprising… or it's some "clever" person in management or finance trying to make the corporation some extra profit (and themselves a promotion) by shaving down the inventory levels even further…

(credit: www.bybee.com)

More Where that Came From

I started thinking about all this as I drove home and started installing my new cable modem. I replaced it exactly, and it didn't work! OMG!! It's a new cable modem! What could be wrong? I checked the cables. I rebooted a few times. I replaced all the cables. Could my wireless router have somehow gone bad at the same time? Out to the store, bring home new wireless router, install, no improvement. Probably the new cable modem is simply dead. It's too late to return to the Cablevision store, so I get on chat. The guy asks me to run a test, and by the time I'm back (all of 3 minutes later), my session has been timed out for inactivity! So I log in again (requiring another download of the chat program), and the fellow can't "see" my modem from the network side. No surprise. He asks me to connect it to the place where the cable service enters my house, and he still can't see it. So he agrees that it's bad, and actually gives me an appointment for a service call on Monday.

All I can say is, thank goodness for neighbors who install WiFi without security.

The service guy shows up on Monday, looks at my new cable modem, and immediately says, "they gave you one of those?" It turns out the service guy knows that these devices are obsolete and notoriously unreliable. As I have confirmed yet again. He hooks up a new cable modem he had brought with him and everything works fine. Problem solved.

Whose fault was the bad customer service I received? The people in the store? The people on chat? The guy who came to my house? Of course, the answer is none of the above.

If you tried to track down the person actually responsible for the bad service I (and many, many like me) received, you'd run into something like this:

(Credit: Animation Guild)

Again, the root cause is likely to be some combination of hard-to-fathom incompetence, simple clueless-ness and actual, anti-customer changes made by someone who thinks they can advance in their career by making things worse for customers. Sadly, this is all too often how organizations, large and small, actually work … unless you take constructive steps like this to make it otherwise.