As a subscriber to Brighthouse Networks cable television service in Orlando, on December 8, 1008, I tuned to a popular TV show only to find a blank screen. “What’s wrong with my TV / cable box?” I wondered. Switched to a different channel — another blank screen… then another and another. Now I knew I really did have a problem! What to do about it?
Call Brighthouse, of course! See if they can remotely discover my problem and fix it… if not, perhaps send someone over in the next day or two to diagnose and repair. Busy signal on the phone!!!... Try again. Same result. Try again and again. No joy! Now what?
Try their website! Why didn’t I think of that first? (Well, because they have a reputation of “24-hour live service” of course… I prefer to deal with a living, thinking human being!). Got through to the website right away, but no mention of any outage, so I looked at the troubleshooting page. Not really any help there… Guess I’ll just wait it out. If it’s my problem, it will still be there tomorrow. If it’s Brighthouse’s problem, they’ll fix it…
Next day, everything had returned to normal. Guess it was a systemwide problem, not an individual one. Case closed; back to “life as usual.”
Imagine my surprise when I got a special letter from them a few weeks later. They described the problem, the cause of the problem, and offered some surprising compensation: a pro-rata credit for the service interruption, and in addition, free Showtime and Movie Channel service for the entire month of January, 2009. Sure, I had to go on line to register, but upon doing so, the complimentary service was up and running immediately. Wow!
Though the outage interruption was not handled well at first (in my opinion, as well as lots of other affected subscribers), Brighthouse did an exemplary job of Service Recovery. They explained what had happened, they apologized, then they offered atonement in excess of the injury. Well done, Brighthouse! I’m now a bigger fan than I was before this incident.
On the other side is my experience with mycokdrewards.com. On a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke they promote, “Find the code under the cap. Enter code at: mycokerewards.com or text code to “2654.” Hmmm… must be some kind of promotion. Let’s see what it’s about.
Found the code on the inside of the bottle cap. Logged in to mycokerewards.com. Found the “Enter Codes” arrow and was greeted with “Please sign in or register before entering a code.” Oh, well, I’ll go ahead and register…
First they demand your BIRTHDAY (month, day and year!), then “Are you a U.S. resident?” Well, I guess they need to ensure that players are “qualified…” Next page: Email address (twice!), password (twice!!), and a “security key.” Oops… the Security Key is case sensitive… have to re-enter… Starting to get pretty intrusive! But then the fun really starts: First name, Last name, Gender, Address (discovered that it won’t take my PO Box address !!!???), then three check-boxes for “I understand and agree to: the Privacy Policy, the Rules, and the Terms of Use”…
Hold it! Too much information for me to disclose — especially when I don’t even know what I’ll get (if anything) by giving out all this personal and confidential information.
Hit the “close window” box and abandon this fruitless effort. This, in my opinion, is NOT “a consistently Remarkable Customer Experience”!
The only good outcome of this frustrating experience is that I can now ignore and disregard the “my Coke Rewards” promotions! One more interruption off my list!
Kudos to Brighthouse; five lumps of coal to My Coke Rewards!
//Richard Randolph
Florida Customer Service Institute
www.FloridaCSI.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment