I’ve had a very frustrating experience with Time Warner Cable. I am their customer for telephone (two lines), high-speed internet (I pay a premium for RoadRunner Turbo and I pay them extra per month to use their wireless modem) and cable television (two cable boxes with premium channels). My bill is set to auto-pay each month. Anyone in sales knows I am what is often referred to as a “high-value customer.” I wonder why they don’t treat me that way?
(A caveat: At WriterGirl, we view all of our customers as high value, because we know how hard we worked to get them. But I digress.)
Since my recent addition of another cable box and an upgrade to RoadRunner Turbo, I’ve had nothing but trouble. I’ll spare you the details, largely because I have no desire to relive an experience that has given me countless headaches over the past week, and which has made me feel as though as I have a part-time job, which is calling Time Warner to ask them why my services still aren’t working. The important thing here is that Time Warner, like so many large, shareholder-driven corporations these days, has clearly outsourced what should be their employees’ jobs to their customers.
Kroger (and myriad other retail establishments) does it via their “convenience” of self-service check out. It’s probably occurred to most of you that you’re doing a cashier’s job when you’re scanning your groceries, but have you ever thought about how much money Kroger is saving by having you do that job? I imagine there are many unemployed cashiers who are aware of this fact.
It’s the same situation with Time Warner and their added “convenience” of offering what I believe they’re calling “self install.” You order a new cable box, and they tell you it’ll be easier for you if you just “self install.” They’ll send you the box (or the modem) via mail, and poof! You just plug it in and it works.
When my cable box was broken, and the modem install was so complicated that it took a trained technician two and half hours… when after a week it appears that the cable modem is broken and Time Warner tells me it’ll be a week before they can get a technician out to take a look… I’m thinking that the simplicity of self installing (or the convenience of self checkout) is really just another way of saying “we want to reduce our payroll by offloading employees’ jobs onto our customers and we’ll sell it as convenience.” I hope you don’t do that to your customers.
At WriterGirl, we don’t expect our clients to catch mistakes. We do that for them, because it’s our job. We don’t ask our clients to edit our writers’ work; our project leads do that before submitting it to our clients, because that is the job of a project lead, not a client. I could go on, but I won’t. And while I recognize that this blog post is a bit of a rant, there is an important message here: Don’t make your customers do your job.
And now I’m off to research other options for internet and cable. Wish me luck.
.jpg)
.jpg)
