On the heels of last week’s Comcast customer service (and public relations) debacle, the Sunday NYTimes had another “fun” tale about AOL. A guy called to cancel his service and got a badgering from the CS rep worthy of a cult recruiter. Luckily, the customer made a recording of it and posted it on the Web. The MP3 page got hosed after the Times piece and a Digg item, but it’s been mirrored here.
After the Comcast story, I was talking to a friend on the phone and we were sharing harrowing customer service stories. I was saying that crappy customer service has become so pandemic, we need to figure out a way of using the leverage of the Web to fight back. This is how we can do it — use audio and video recording of our CS experiences and post them to the Net. You know how we always have to listen to that recording on THEIR end telling us that the call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance, I want to make a similar recording on MY end and I want to start recording the calls to Comcast, Verizon, Carefirst and some of the other companies that I’ve had frequent troubles with. If lots of us did this, I bet things would change pretty damn quick, don’t you?
Thanks, Kate!