Quick Recap:
Two years ago I approached a national organization that rents office conference rooms and office space, and I arranged conference rooms for a series of meetings I was having around the country. One of the meetings had to be canceled. I contacted the organization to let them know,as per our contract and in fact received confirmation of cancellation. As per the contract, I would not be charged anything for that reservation.
Fast forward almost two years and I receive a letter from that organization –a collection letter. The amount referenced is almost a thousand dollars. Of course, I was very concerned and quickly called them to ask what the charge was for. If I did owe them money, I would pay it, but I was pretty sure I didn’t.
click for Part 1 of “Crazy Town”
It was clear that Mary had no authority or ability to do anything about the matter. In fact, her very wan answer was that although she accepted my story, apparently somebody in billing did not. I told her I’d like to speak to that person, or her supervisor, and she said she would give me her supervisor’s name and number, which I asked her to send to me in an email.
I arrive at my hotel that night and it’s waiting in my inbox. It was late, so the next morning I composed an email to that person, the manager, detailing in 8 points exactly what had taken place, including all the necessary attachments.
Before I pressed send, a voice in my mind (not a crazy voice) stopped me.
I paused and looked up the company (a pretty well known company) on the web, and I realized their email convention was “first-name.last-name@…” and so what I did is I found their entire executive suite – the CEO, CFO, SVP of Sales and Marketing – and I CC’d all of them on the email message. I wrote “Outrageous treatment of a customer” as the subject line, and I included this tale of woe.
It went out on Tuesday morning. By one o’clock Tuesday afternoon, the National Director of Customer Service called me up and said “Uh, Mr. Palomino, I’m calling to take care of this matter…” and sure enough, I received a letter of apology, a release letter from the collection agency, and I even got a credit worth about $500 of their services for some future use.
So now the lesson here is this: the person I spoke to originally was not a bad person. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. But she had not been empowered by her organization to keep a customer happy. This is a pure business services entity, so these could be big ticket items. It isn’t like somebody who says I’m not ever gonna buy a slice pizza there again – these are thousand-, even multi-thousand-dollar arrangements, and their representative was clearly not empowered to resolve it, or even to think through the logic of what she was telling me to do. Is your organization making your customers go through “crazy town” experiences without you even being aware of it?
Had I not escalated this matter, I have no doubt I would have been bouncing around lower level functionaries and a collection agency with no interest in hearing my side of the story. I wasn’t going to deal with this back and forth. I took it right to the top and it got their attention.
It’s an important story, and it was very frustrating, and only ended this well because I had the wherewithal to go about escalating this immediately. I don’t know if the CEO actually saw my email himself, but somebody in his staff did. Somebody saw it– somebody empowered enough to get it fixed.
These days you can find out who that is in most companies and find ways, whether email, Twitter or snail mail to contact them directly. That’s the other message, of course, from a consumer point of view– go to the top.
Crazy Town – don’t create it for your customers and don’t tolerate it from your providers.
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