Customer service? What's that?

Ah, the sweet neglect of a newborn blog. If it were a child, protective services would come take it away from me. In the interest of furthering my employment, though, I had to take Friday and Tuesday off of blogging to focus on tackling the task(s) at hand, and the end of the day just crept up on me Wednesday. Incidentally, if anyone knows how to get .NET to pass an SQL query that includes parameters that are NOT compared to fields (or columns, if you will) to MSSQL, let me know. I ended up kind of cheating. It took more code and three data adapters instead of one, but I made it work, and no one is the wiser (especially me, since there HAS to be a way to make it work the way I wanted, but hells if I can figure it out).

In other news, I have decided to forego overall triathlon training for the next few months to focus on improving my run times. While this method won't increase my swim or bike times as much as regular training would, if I increase my run pace by a minute per mile or more, I think my overall performance will improve more than regular training, since the run is where I lose most of my time to people I should be beating. I had a high school track/cc coach give me a 20-week plan that basically involves running EVERY day, although it does stress biking as well to help balance out leg muscles to help prevent injury and assist in endurance training. What it'll amount to is AT LEAST five days a week running, and either fitting in biking (and later, swimming) on off days or as two-fors (cross-training days).

In an effort to separate myself from other blogs/bloggers, I have decided to NOT blog about either the new season of 24 or the Golden Globe awards (or, likely, the new season of American Idol). My decision works out well for me, since I have no interest in any of the above programs, and, even if I did, would find it hard to watch them, since I ditched my cable television last May. The cable company really pissed me off, and DSL had become available in my area, and I don't really watch anything on television anyway, so I dropped everything. Digital cable, DVR, cable internet, et al. The last straw was the company telling me a supervisor would call me back within an hour. I waited an hour, missing out on a run in that hour, and there was no call.

First rule of call centers is that there should ALWAYS be a supervisor available to speak to. As a company, the LAST thing you want to do, if you want to keep customers, is to make them call in, wait on hold for an extended period, then have them talk to operators who have no authority to help them, and then be told that they can't talk with a supervisor. "They'll call you back" is actually much, much worse than "they won't call you back". Holding out hope only adds anxiety, which can cause a range of stressful emotions. Being bluntly told you are being sent into a black hole will only cause anger. Anger breeds revenge. Companies with terrible customer service deserve to have revenge brought on them. Luckily, the BBB will do this free-of-charge, and with no curse words. Dangling the prospect of actually talking to a supervisor in front of callers' faces with nothing ever coming of it is an absolute slap in the face to consumers. I'm convinced they don't exist.

Anyway, the cable company had pulled the supervisor trick on me more than once. Other companies have pulled the supervisor trick on me (one of them ended up with a BBB complaint against them that they promptly bent over backwards to take care of, btw -- which leads me to another point: customer service/relations always claim to not have authority to do stuff, needing supervisor input, UNTIL the BBB becomes involved. Then, suddenly, things happen all quick-like.). But since there was no real "money" vs "product" in the case of the cable company, the simplest way to deal with it was just to stop feeding them $120 a month for things I could easily replace or live without.

Anyway, if a company jerks you around, don't waste your valuable time and effort. Get the BBB involved. And one person asked me if the big companies even care. Actually, I think the biggest companies are the ones that care the most. Usually, for mere pocket change to them, they can prevent a bad BBB reputation. On the flip side, with a bad BBB reputation, it could prevent the sale of MANY units, costing them far more in profit than the replacement/repair/refund of whatever merchandise the complaint is about.

So, anyway, in my current case, the BBB has already been notified. I'm currently waiting to talk to a "supervisor". Yeah, right. I know better than that. The latest is that they told me I needed to fax a document to them before the supervisor would look at the case. Well, the fax number doesn't work. Har har har. Giving me an impossible task to enable communications with a supervisor. They may as well have farted and told me to catch it and paint it green. Ya know, if I don't get this resolved with just the company, and the BBB has to pressure them, I'll reveal the company here. It's quite a riveting tale. I spent two hours on hold this morning before hanging up, never having spoken to a real person. This. Company. Sucks. Rocks.

Hasta.