Changing Changes Everything

It happens. We all know it.

Changes come around and make us women and men, in one form  or the other.

This past week Marie and I moved from Manhattan to Westchester country, about 20 miles north of NYC. This quiet bucolic setting just seemed more in tune with our immediate needs of being close to the "craziness", but no longer having to be in it.  

The packing, moving and unpacking is always a chore, but given that this is our fourteenth move in our four decades of marriage, we are pretty experienced at it and pretty good about the changes.

What we are not good about, and I suspect that many of you feel the same way, is the feeling of being disconnected either by phone, email, Facebook or Twitter, etc.  So before we moved, I diligently notified Verizon who assured me that my move to FIOS phone, Internet and TV would be painless.

Four days later, I am still in pain and unable to receive emails on my fredkap@verizon.net Internet account.  Having placed two calls and received an official "ticket order", I began to feel that this problem would be solved.

I even received an email from Verizon assuring me that my problem would be fixed by 9:38pm on January 27, 2012.  This hour has come and gone with no assurances of when it was to be fixed.

So I began to wonder, what do our customers feel like when their problems aren't fixed immediately or within a short period of time?  How do they feel when our "customer service" people cannot make a decision without speaking to the owner, manager, boss, supervisor, etc?

Do they feel as frustrated and helpless as I do now?
Do they swear they are not going to buy from us again?
Do they tell their friends about their bad experience?
Do they choose other activities other than bowling to spend their precious entertainment dollars/

My guess is "all of the above."
In these economic times, we cannot afford not to make every customer experience a great one.

 It all starts with Hello.