My Cingular Experience

As someone who has been running his own business and supporting enterprise environments with thousands of users for well over 12 years, I consider myself to be somewhat of an expert on the topic of customer service. As such, historically when I would run into a bad customer service experience, I would walk away from the scenario shaking my head in disgust or go hit the gym or my heavy bag. Fortunately, now we have blogging, so we can collectively share our bad experiences. I have been a Cingular customer for several years now. When supporting Cingular enabled Blackberry devices at a major investment bank, the experience of calling Cingular for support was dreaded. This feeling of dread stemmed from excessive hold times as well as support staff who were often not empowered to solve the problem. Although Cingular does have certain aspects of support down pat, such as empathizing with the user, they are severely lacking in terms of empowerment and anticipating needs. A perfect example is my recent exchange in a Cingular store. The Cingular 8125 is the phone I presently use. It comes with stylus pens. Anyone who has worked with this soft of device knows how easy it is to have these pens disappear. In New York, there are Cingular stores all over the place. I walked into three different stores in search of replacement pens for my 8125, which is Cingular branded. None of the stores carried what I needed. More importantly, rather than offerring to order the pen for me, they told me to check online. My thought has been that the entire purpose of brick and mortar Cingular stores is convenience. They certainly spend enough money on them to promote their products. Perhaps I did not want to wait for the stylus pen. Perhaps it was needed so I could perform an important task on my smart phone. Nevertheless, each problem I have ever had with a Cingular phone has always been directed away from the store. My thought is that the store based Cingular employee should take ownership of the problem coming in their door. Rather than telling the customer to contact someone online, they should own that process, or at least give the customer the option of allowing them to own the process. When I walk into a Cingular store with a problem, I expect them to solve it. I know I can go online, or call their customer service number, however; the time on hold combined with lack of empowerment and passing the buck makes the experience of calling for support painful because it wastes valuable time. For business professionals, time is a precious commodity. Having time wasted by unempowered customer service personnel is part of a bigger problem. A problem that can be properly fixed with the right methodology. The Acres of Diamonds method is waiting for Cingular when they are ready.