An Outbreak of Caring
Stung by Complaints, Telecoms Stress Customer Service

By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Tom Maguire, Verizon Communications' new Customer Care Czar, is one tough customer. When served chicken tacos without the chicken recently, he first complained to his waitress, then went online to the restaurant's Web site to fill out a survey with scathing remarks about his experience.

That accept-no-excuses attitude serves Maguire well when dealing with his own customers. The straight-talking Long Island native knows how enraging poor service can be. He understands that perfect service is difficult to achieve. And he grasps how important it is that companies hear about it when they fall short.

Customer service problems in the telecommunications industry have been nearing legendary proportions -- last year's "angry 75-year-old Virginia woman attacks Manassas cable office with hammer" comes to mind. It's a challenge that telecommunications and cable companies are struggling to overcome as they compete for new subscribers paying $150 to $200 a month on average for phone, Internet and television services. AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are working to keep subscribers and lure new ones into subscriptions that bundle those services.

All the while, consumers have become ever more savvy and vocal about airing complaints, holding companies accountable through lawsuits and blogs such as Consumerist.com, which describes its mission as "consumers bite back." They have found powerful tools that resonate widely, such as the YouTube video hit of a Comcast technician asleep on a subscriber's couch.

"It's tough," Maguire said. "You always want to treat people as you want to be treated, but people also have the tendency to fly off the handle more quickly these days."

In an indication of how competitive the wireless service market has become, hours after Verizon Wireless announced a flat-rate monthly voice plan in February, AT&T followed with a competing plan, followed by T-Mobile the same day and Sprint days later.

Sprint knows too well how important it is to keep subscribers happy. In one year, more the wireless carrier lost more than a million subscribers because of customer service problems. The company cut off its most nagging 1,000 subscribers last July, saying they called customer service too often. Now Sprint is trying to woo back subscribers with the most aggressive flat-rate monthly plan in the industry, which includes voice, text and picture messaging, and e-mail for $99.

Comcast, which offers cable television, broadband Internet and phone services, has hired 15,000 customer service representatives in the past 18 months, launched live online chats with customer service agents and upgraded databases and internal technology for call centers.

Philip Doriot, a partner for customer service consultant CFI Group, said that bundling services has added another layer of confusion for customers already annoyed by complicated multipage billing telephone statements, long waits and transfers with call center representatives, along with shoddy repair service.

"These are complicated issues and technologies that can take longer to sort out or fix," he said, "and a consumer just wants to get good service for phone, Internet and wireless and doesn't understand why it has to be so complicated."

Verizon ranks first in the industry for customer satisfaction with traditional landline phones, according to a University of Michigan survey. Its wireless business is in the middle of customer service rankings; its Fios television service isn't rated among cable television service providers because it only serves 1.2 million subscribers.

Still, a subscriber such as Leslie Rogers of Bowie, who gets her cellphone, Internet, television and wirelines phone service from Verizon, cannot call one number and talk to one person to address problems.

Last February, she called Verizon's Fios center to fix a glitch in her Internet service and said she spent more than four hours on the phone in one day with service representatives. She was transferred more than 10 times among billing departments and technical service representatives, she said. When she had to answer automated prompts, the voice recognition system repeatedly misunderstood her and transferred her to the wrong departments. After two hours either on hold or being transferred, she was accidentally disconnected from a service representative who didn't call her back.

"I just don't understand why it has to be so complicated," Rogers said. "They are sitting in different places around the country and you're getting transferred from one place to another."

Verizon, based in New Jersey, hired Maguire last November to change that, creating a position overseeing customer service in 131 call centers from Laurel to Bangalore, India. He manages more than 46,000 employees who handle customer issues and oversees an elite staff of 90 members of an "escalation team" that who engages the angriest customers and those who have figured out how to reach chief executive Ivan Seidenberg and other executives by e-mail or phone calls.

Customer service has been made yet more byzantine as companies have merged into giant corporations such as AT&T and Verizon, requiring them to fold many operations into one.

At Verizon Wireless, the company's joint venture with Vodafone, customer service is handled separately from Verizon Communications, for example.

That frustrates customers such as Bill, a Virginia resident who recently called the Verizon Wireless call center in Laurel with questions about his texting plan. His identity was masked for a reporter listening in on customer service calls. In a conversation with service representative Luchanda Briggs, he was persuaded to join a flat-rate text-messaging plan. She and her colleagues have mirrors on their cubicle walls, meant to keep them in good humor.

"A smile is reflected in your conversations. You want to always be smiling," said Tami Erwin, president of Verizon Wireless's Baltimore-Washington region who began as a customer service representative two decades ago in Seattle.

Briggs, who trained for seven weeks and has a starting salary of $31,000, is expected to handle complex technological questions while remaining cordial. Pithy pointers pinned to the walls exhort: "Be Courteous!" "Be Engaged!" and "Avoid the Dead Air!"

Throughout her four-minute conversation with Bill, she talked about the weather in a soothing and polite voice. She credited $50 to his account for extra text messaging fees.

"You've been very professional and I appreciate that," Bill said. "You can tell your boss that."

But when he asked whether she could help him with his Internet service, Briggs said she had to transfer his call, which abruptly ended the conversation.

"Yeah, I'm not ready to do that," he said.

It's a problem the company hasn't been able to solve, even as it has hired hundreds of representatives in recent months. Since the company hired 400 employees in the division at its Fios service center in Freehold, N.J., the average time for customers on hold has been halved, to two minutes.

Employee Raoul Gravell recently received a call from a Fios customer whose Internet service was down after a power outage. Gravell rebooted the system through a few mouse clicks and key strokes.

Yet when a customer called from her daughter's cellphone to get her landline phone repaired, Gravell wasn't able to see a quick fix on his computer.

When he said he would have to transfer her to schedule a repair person, she pleaded: "Please, please don't go anywhere!" frustrated by a month of service problems.

Although she was a phone service customer, Verizon sees such subscribers as ones it hopes to grow into lifelong customers of other services.

"It's infinitely easier to grow relationships with customers we already have, so we want to make sure to care for them," Maguire said.

He has created a tiered system to handle the complexity of complaints. At its most basic level, call centers around the nation act like medical triage to handle routine service issues and minor problems. Complaints from "triple play" customers, who have Fios television, Internet and phone services, are sent to a special team of "personal account" handlers in Florida. The angriest customers and those who send e-mails and letters directly executives are handled by the "escalation team."

"What you don't want them to do," he said, "is leave or write up a blog or something."