Posts Tagged social media
You Gotta Make Noise to Get Satisfaction from T Mobile
Posted by Cordi in Practical Advice on May 25th, 2010
Below is a wonderful blog by my good friend, Craig Miller, of PeakPerformance peakperformanceshow@gmail.com
You should take three things away from this blog –
- The squeaky wheel gets the grease
- But, sometimes even the grease, can’t quiet the squeak
- T Mobile’s business model increases Customer Churn which is always bad for the Bottom Line!!!
The squeaky wheel gets the oil. We all know this to be true but all too often we give up way before we get satisfaction. Those in power, bank on this fact and purposely orchestrate a process that is intended to make you give up before they have to give in. This couldn’t be truer then with the cell phone companies. Do they believe in customer service? Yes, if you make enough noise and make it to the right people in the company. However, most of the time you get entwined in their intentional system of outsourced individuals reading from a, “what to do next”, sheet. It can be like falling into Alice’s hole and trying to get help from the Mad Hatter.
Recently, I fell down this hole while trying to get help from T-Mobile. We moved and the T-mobile coverage in our new house was spotty at best. Most of the time it was non existent. When I first called about this problem they filed service tickets and said they would look into it. They said they would call me back and of course they didn’t. I called them back multiple times and was told that the specific area that I moved into is a known dead area. They then said our area was a priority and that they were working on it. They would not give me a time line for how long this would take. Why pay for a service you can’t use I thought?
Because the T-Mobile service was insufficient where we moved I felt I had no choice but to cancel my 2 accounts. Since coverage is T-Mobil’s fault I was hoping I could cancel without being charged $200 per line for a total of $800. Yet, I was told by the customer service representative that if I canceled I would be charge the entire amount. Then the rep told me he could upgrade our phones for free to phones that could connect to the wireless router in our home. Then, do to the poor coverage, the call was lost and I was never able to get that rep back. I called back 4 times and every time I asked for a supervisor I was put on hold and then the call was cut off. Every time I called back the representative told me there was nothing they could do and then I was cut off. This lasted almost 2 weeks.
When I had experienced enough frustration I decided to take matters into my own hands. I did some internet research and located over 15 e-mails and phone numbers for T-Mobil executives. I wrote an e-mail detailing my experience and sent it off. Within 48 hours I was contacted directly by a T-Mobil executive and was told that they would cancel my contract as long as I sent the phones back. It is amazing how quick you get results when your “squeak” is loud enough and the right people hear it. I could have been stuck in Wonderland hell for a long time but instead I got my desired results and went back to a pleasant reality.
In the 21st Social Media is a Catalyst to the Science and Business of Marketing Research
Posted by Cordi in Practical Advice on April 24th, 2009
I just listened to a Pod-Cast this morning on a product called Clarabridge extolling the virtues of getting to know your customer through elegant data mining algorithms. The mining is done against a variety of online commentary sources where anonymity is considered equivalent to reason or objectivity.
This Pod-Cast was less than an hour after I finished the morning paper – which included a well-written column – “Is Twitter still cool?”. – If everyone is out there doing it, is it still cool? (Chris O’Brien, www.mercurynews.com) –.
I know that I have many more people following me on Twitter than I am following and that makes me feel guilty about not posting some narcissistic nonsense every day –. Not guilty enough, however, to motivate me to post something –
Maybe I am more cynical about all of this – After spending many years engaged in performing market research and applying the results, I believe the fundamentals are still true
There are more sad love songs than happy love songs, because people who are happy DO IT rather than singing about it
A fool with a tool is still a FOOL
Marketers are deluding themselves, if they think that mining the random ravings of random folks on public social media sites is going to give them a more realistic idea of the success of their product versus classic market research validated by sales data (leads, conversions, costs, maturity curves etc).
We know something about customer behavior
80% of consumers buy a product or service because they need or want it. They take it home and use it, like it or don’t and just move along (to which Goodwill, Salvation Army, and local food pantries say “amen” ) –
Self-nominated customer feedback comes from the 20% that really love or hate the product
A profitable and growing business needs to understand the 80%.
Random feedback, even if well analyzed, is a risky basis for making future commitments of time, money, or other resources –. Data mining and analysis of social media comments does offer some insight into avenues that should be pro-actively explored to determine if they are or are not real predictors of future behavior. By offering some specific avenues of exploration, data mining reduces the time and cost of market research while, at the same time, making classic market research techniques more important than ever!!
This is a topic that is going to continue to challenge both the marketer and the market researcher as social media spread across more and more of the developed/developing world.
@Cordi and Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
4/23/2009