After reading this post at the The Big Act blog run by SproutIt, I thought about the power of positive customer experiences in changing mindsets. A good customer experience can greatly influence future purchase decisions and affection for the brand.
We've all seen the situation before. A program, website, or service isn't working as expected. Most people ignore them and keep going, either due to perception concerning information technology (unable to see when something has failed) or knowledge of said failure. But there are instances of a user wanting to provide feedback, and confirm with an authority that something isn't working right. So they send email, like we did to the Comcast Help Department.
Now, if I were a major national corporation like Comcast, I would attempt to respond to such inquiries with the necessary due diligence. And being a business owner myself, I understand the multiple pressures put upon such 'costly' customer interactions that generate no revenue; human capital, telephone, quotas, managers, reviews, and projections directly impact the service department of a larger organization.
Here is my original email to Comcast:
Hi. We've sent some emails from our business domains today (kreptonic.net & mclcomp.com) to Comcast addresses (xxx@comcast.net). Unfortunately, every email we have sent to a Comcast address has bounced with a server error describing, "Unable to connect to remote mail server." Our emails contain no attachments, are basic text emails with no HTML, and are sent individually (not batched or multiaddresses) We are located in Portland, OR and access the Internet over a multihomed DS3 provided by Broadwing & Qwest. [removed info about IPs] We are able to send email to other domains and providers, all of which work fine. Can you tell me anything about this issue? Thanks!The above email was based on a calculated notion that our email would likely go to a tier 1 Customer Suppport Representative. By providing the additional connection details and a description of our setup I hoped we might have our email forwarded to a tier 2 or 3 CSR. I was extremely pleased to see an email stating they had received our message and would be contacting us today (note: it was an obvious system generated response). And sadly, the email I received three minutes later was a copy-and-paste job.
Dear , Thank you for contacting us regarding your Comcast High Speed Internet service. I understand you are experiencing difficulties with your Comcast Service. I will be more than happy to assist you with this matter. However, I need a more detailed description of the issue you are facing to do so. Please respond to this e-mail and provide a detailed description of what is happening. Please review the questions below, and provide as much information as possible so I will be better able assist you: 1. What were you attempting to do when you received the error? 2. If there is an error message, what is it? We don't always need every word; however being specific helps us tremendously. 3. What program and version are you using? Internet Explorer? Outlook Express? What Operating System? Windows 98? XP? Macintosh? 4. Has this issue happened before? Are other programs affected? Are all web pages affected or just some of them? 5. Did you recently install any new programs, or plug-ins? Have you recently changed your hardware, or software preferences? Even a seemingly minor change on your computer, or with some of your software could directly affect your ability to get online or access your e-mail. Thank you for your patience. I know your time is important. If you would prefer to address this issue in a real-time format you can chat with one of our Online Customer Support Specialists 24 hour a day, 7 days a week at http://www.comcastsupport.com/sdcuser/asp/default.asp We value your business. Thank you for choosing Comcast.The 'experience' gained when people communicate with a brand directly informs their current and future behaviors. Such an experience with Comcast informs me to not utilize their email service should I ever have the opportunity, as they would be unable to help me should I ever have a problem.
