Perhaps we ought to be proud of it, perhaps it ought to be something to see as a status symbol, a sign that we are doing something right, but instead it made us very very angry and upset – our phone bill.
For a company that focuses on Networking and Connecting people and does so worldwide, we use our phones all the time. We are reknown for getting back to people at the weirdest times of the day (or night) because we are always looking at our PDA’s and texting on our phones. We feel, as we explain in our book The N Factor, that you owe it to people to respond to them and that it makes an awful lot of sense to ensure they get a follow up mail or call from you quickly. So yes, we really use our phones and PDAs, (or, as some people may say – we are used by them ) 24 hours a day.
Now everyone knows that phone bills are expensive, and ofcourse we built that into our business plan. Particularly given the fact that we travel quite a bit so you are almost always roaming. But these past few months, the bills were ASTRONOMICAL. and it was not our supplier, AT&T, who alerted us to that fact – no, it was our bank! They had the courtesy to call and warn us that our bill was "rather high" and should it be paid – which is great customer service….but hang on a minute, we buy our phone minutes not from our Bank, but from AT&T…so what’s going on? AT&T, like every other phone company, monitors your phone behaviour all the time. They can tell you when your phone gets stolen, they can see if you call at funny times, or from a strange-not-like-you location….and ofcourse they can tell if you spend more then normal. So why not a simple call to your customer that says "hey, just a warning, you seem to be spending rather more then you normally do?". Instead of that, they seem to be leaning back and raking in the money at the cost of our heart-attacks and sleepless nights.
What is even worse, we actually called their "customer service" to discuss our outrageous bills, both months that we received them. We spent HOURS on the phone trying to talk sense into the people on the other side that this just COULD not be right, that we never spend that much (AT&T: "well, how do we know that" us; "check your files!" DUH!) and that this was really not acceptable…but literally no-one there seems capable, intelligent enough or able to adjust their rules and tell us that they would deduct some amount from the bills. Let alone, figure out what was going on and offer some suggestions on how to prevent it happening again!!
It also shows how bad for consumers/businesses these tie-ups can be between big companies. We got onto AT&T because we purchased an iPhone…and ofcourse Apple has an exclusive contract with AT&T. Great for those two – I am sure AT&T paid big money for this exclusivity….but very bad for the customer since now Apple eliminated competition on phone costs entirely. So perhaps that is why AT&T does not seem to care in the slightest whether we are happy or not… they have some bills of their own to recoup!
This is one great example of what happens when these companies get money-greedy and start applying rules that their customer service people have to adhere to…which are often not at all customer-friendly. Instead of thinking of a long-term relationship with their customer, they are more worried about their short-term financial gain. The result? Very simple, you lose you customer very quickly – despite all the clauses in your contract that you have to start putting in to try and make it impossible for them leave. And not only that, you now have a very disgruntled customer using the internet to share their bad feeling with thousands of people out there.
So what to do in these cases? Well – try and be pro-active, think about your customer and how you can help them, come up with suggestions before you are asked the question and know that if you do this right – you don’t even need complex contracts trying to prevent your customer going somewhere else. They shouldn’t even want to and at the end of all this …you will see the power of the internet work in your favour! It’s really that simple….