Want to Enrage Your Customers? Learn from Time Warner’s Embarrassing Support Team

Thanks to my countless direct interactions with executives and organizations who "get it," I am more perceptive than ever to customer service failures. If something is less than stellar, I am going to notice it. And I am going to be annoyed to a far greater extent than the average customer would be.

Unfortunately, even if I were a card-carrying member of the "Customer Disservice Organization," I would be able to find fault in a recent Time Warner Cable experience. One of the worst customer service experiences I have ever encountered, this seemingly-endless saga includes a seemingly-endless supply of slaps to the face.

Natural monopolies have their justifications from an economics perspective, but this pathetic series of encounters with Time Warner, the only legitimate option for cable and Internet in my New York City apartment, should provide ample ammunition for those opposed to the constructs.

Not thinking like the customer

Something tells me Time Warner never asked its customer service representatives to read "Think Like a Customer."

Throughout the process with Time Warner, I never once got the sense that the company gave a modicum of consideration to how its policies and strategies contribute to the customer experience.

Despite persistently informing the company’s representatives that I had no interest in home phone service and was only signing up for a "Triple Play" plan due to the belief it was cheaper than buying cable and Internet a la carte (which was the case on Cablevision), no agent informed me that my understanding was mistaken. No agent let me know that I could save $15-20 by only buying a cable and Internet bundle. No agent, upon hearing my mockery of the idea that anyone would need home phone service in 2012, questioned why I was greenlighting a home phone installation.

And had my case not been escalated to a supervisor who closely examined my account, I likely never would have realized my mistake.

But Time Warner’s disinterest in thinking like a customer goes beyond account planning. Its product strategy seems to have also been designed without any respect for what subscribers actually experience.

Thanks to its customer-disrespecting new cable modem fee, the cable giant effectively encourages users to purchase their own modems for use with the Time Warner internet service. Unfortunately, despite claims by other manufacturers declaring their certification for use on the Time Warner network, TWC actually only approves two modems for purchase, one of which is not available at retail stores. The one that is, meanwhile, is a joint modem-wireless router gateway that delivers weaker performance than would be expected from a separate modem and router setup and yet comes with too high a cost for users to justify buying an additional router.

Upon installing my cable television, the technician noted to me, "I have this box at home--this box is super slow. It lags and you’ll notice a delay with the remote. Don’t think it’s broken." Excuse me?

Even ignoring the customer-disrespecting fact that the box TWC provided me does not have native 1080p support—a laughable notion in 2012—one cannot help but dispute that technician’s utterly absurd claim. Sorry, pal, but the box is broken. If a fresh box from Time Warner comes with a noticeable, obnoxious delay and slow processing speed, it should not be offered as the default box for new customers. If Time Warner truly cared about its customers, it would not make excuses for poor performance—it would immediately find a box that performs correctly.

Illogical policies

All customer-facing organizations have a policy or two that ultimately works to the detriment of the customer experience. But few have policies as mind-boggling as Time Warner.

One primary culprit in my "week from Hell" was Time Warner’s inane policy of being unable to activate Internet while a work order for phone and TV service is outstanding. Even though I was already paying for Internet (my roommate maintained an Internet account—we upgraded to cable TV this weekend), I was told that the new modem simply could not be processed until the technicians came to install the rest of my services. No justification was given for the absurd policy, which is so ridiculous that at least one customer support representative did not know it existed (and promised our Internet would be activated without being able to make good on his promise).

As ridiculous as that policy is, I had no choice but to tolerate it. That toleration exposed me to another policy of equal insanity.

The actual activation process is fairly instantaneous, so I was very clear in letting the Time Warner account representative know that if she had to cancel my appointment to push the Internet through, I wanted to make sure she immediately rescheduled the appointment for the same time. Her response—"I’ll do my best, but I can’t guarantee that since it might already be booked"—made, and continues to make, absolutely zero sense.

My installation appointment was formally slotted from 2-4PM on Saturday; the existence of the appointment was an irrefutable reality. Once that appointment was "cancelled," a spot within that window would unequivocally open up. There is no conceivable way the timeslot would have been too booked up to accommodate me because I was the one occupying the slot. As such, there should have been no issue re-inserting me into that slot—one that already existed and belonged to me—once the Internet activation went through.

Why, then, did I spend the near-entirety of the next day arguing with at least five representatives to get my appointment back? How was this not cut-and-dry?

Other policies, including prohibiting customers from returning old modems and cable boxes to installation technicians (luckily, our technicians were nice enough to ignore this rule) and forcing customers to go to one of only a handful of physical locations to swap out equipment, wreak of neglect for the customer experience.

If the business cannot articulate the link between a policy and a beneficial part of the customer experience, it needs to drop that policy.

Omni-ineffective-Channel

Maybe I am crazy, but does it not seem logical for a multi-channel customer support strategy to involve supporting customers in multiple channels?

Unfortunately, Time Warner’s multi-channel platform seems more about balancing workload and giving the appearance of customer-centricity than actually solving customer issues on their terms. My Twitter exchanges were redirected to phone calls from local dispatchers. Chat conversations, which rarely featured any knowledge beyond what could be found in FAQ and self-service troubleshooting, occasionally ended with requests to call support and/or admission that chat is unequipped to solve the problem.

That is not multi-channel customer support; it is multi-channel customer disrespect. Brands, multi-channel is a very simple concept: the customer, not you, determines where his issue is resolved. If he wants to get an appointment rescheduled via Twitter, you reschedule his appointment via Twitter. If he wants to cancel one of his account functions via chat, you cancel it via chat. Multi-channel is about empowering the customer, not deflecting him.

Knowledge Management

For all of the aforementioned reasons, Time Warner is a particularly egregious customer experience offender, even by the drastically-reduced standards of the cable industry. To bombard customers with policies that hurt—rather than help—them and make getting proper support difficult takes more than a lack of effort; it takes a clear disregard for the importance of customer service.

But in all of those cases, a customer can at least take some solace knowing those inane policies apply to all customers.

When poor knowledge management is the problem, that solace is difficult to locate. The issues start to become unique and personal, and as such, particularly disrespectful.

Time Warner’s failure to really know its customers began during my very first call to request new services. The agent had my address and had every reason to know I was a New York City customer. And yet, as she went through her upsell script, she questioned, "Don’t you want to upgrade to the sports package to get local Lakers coverage?" She, knowing I was begrudgingly ordering phone service but had no intention of actually using it, asked, "Don’t you want to upgrade to the deluxe voicemail package?" Umm…

The issue never went away. A misprint on my work order suggested I was receiving a standard-definition digital box rather than a high-definition one, and it took a surprising amount of time—and interactions with multi-channel reps who did not seem to be in communication with one another—to confirm that I was due to receive the correct box.

The frustration came to an absolute boil when discussing the aforementioned installation scheduling snafu.

After articulating why I should be able to keep my Saturday appointment despite needing to temporarily cancel it for the modem activation, I was told by the phone representative that I made a good point and that her supervisor would call to confirm the details.

Interestingly, the next correspondence from TWC was not a phone call from a supervisor but an e-mail confirming my appointment had been moved to Monday. Not only was this appointment made without my approval, but it was made in a timeslot that I specifically said conflicted with my work schedule.

Things only got worse when I contacted live chat about the situation. In addition to showing no sympathy for the issue, the representative actually implied I was lying. He said that I did not have an appointment scheduled for Saturday, and despite my insistence that I did, forwarding of the email confirming it and pasting of my confirmation number, he maintained his refusal to acknowledge the appointment was ever made.

Even while a representative on Twitter was simultaneously confirming the existence of the appointment, he offensively continued to intimate that I was misinformed and/or fabricating the appointment.

A very nice, courteous escalation supervisor eventually rectified the situation and confirmed the appointment for Saturday, but he, too, ended up falling victim to poor knowledge management. Upon realizing that I could save money by getting rid of the phone service I did not intend to have, he, despite being clearly told which of the connected modems was for my phone and which was for my Internet, disabled the Internet modem, putting a comical exclamation point on the horrific service experience.

It takes more than a warm heart

With so many systemic failures in place, it is virtually impossible for even a truly concerned, legitimately-customer-centric representative to deliver the service Time Warner’s customers deserve. Some of the escalation representatives and Twitter managers with whom I dealt seemed like lovely people, but their sincerity and desire did not translate to service any less flawed.

And, worse, due to the culture espoused by Time Warner’s poor customer service, it is not as if every representative showed a proclivity to care. Many were content to echo lines from their script, regardless of whether those lines had any relevance for my situation. Saying "I completely understand" when you are making no effort to actually understand is not good service.