The AOL Customer Retention Manual is making the rounds today. Wow, I wish I had one of these back in the day! I worked for a now defunct cellular service, and it was part of my job to convince people not to cancel their lousy service and switch to someone else. Of course, back then there were only two services to choose from, so it wasn’t terribly difficult, but still, by the time a customer was speaking to me, he (almost always a he) was close to irate. We’d credit minutes (remember, back then you paid for each and every minute, inbound, outbound, PLUS the local and long distance land charges) & offer free months of service. Then when they still insisted on canceling- we made them send us the request in writing. If they were really freaking we’d say it was ok to fax the request, but they still had to follow it up in the mail. And we weren’t allowed to actually cancel the account until we had at least the faxed request in hand.
Man that part of the job sucked.
I remember one customer who had been through three reps before he got to me. His calls were constantly dropped- service was so intermittent back then, and he was calling to have the dropped calls credited. This was routine. The customer would call every month, request dropped call credit, and a customer service rep would manually review the account for calls to the same number within a minute or two- indicating that the customer had to redial a call that was dropped. We’d refund a minute of air and land changes for each one. Tedious, annoying, but in the interest of customer retention, a must. Anyway, the computers were down this day. The customer service rep told him so, and asked him to call back later. He asked for a supervisor, she told him the same, he asked for a manager. The call got bumped to my department (marketing) and one of my co-workers told him the same- sorry, the computers are down, please call back later. Now he was yelling, and she shrugged and handed me the phone (yeah, exactly… ). I apologized profusely, and again told him the computers were down, and that’s when he said, “what does that mean??” OK, remember, this was 1988. This was obviously an older executive who probably had never used a computer for any reason (only clerical workers used them- we didn’t even have PCs, just CRTs.) The poor man had never heard the phrase “the computers are down” and he just couldn’t understand what we were telling him. I explained it simply meant that the computer system wasn’t working, similar to a power outage, and it meant we were unable to access his account information. I promised to call him back when the system was working again (I avoided the term “back online”…) and offered to credit him a month’s service fee. Problem solved, he was a happy camper once again.
But, it was a cool time to be in the industry. When I started working there we were one office of about 65 people. That was the entire company. We provided cellular service for the NY met area. There was us and AT&T- every market had one “baby bell” and one private service (that was us). Our ownership changed a lot while I was there- shortly after I left the entire industry changed to a completely different, more competitive format. It had to, no way could it expand the way it needed to the way it was set up.
Shortly before I left we had 100 employees. Boy we had fun with that. Five of us were pregnant- hey, thats 5% of the company! Three were gay (at least out, anyway), 3%! Single moms? 10%! Hey, we were easily amused, what can I tell ya?