Executive Summary: Saying “I’m sorry”; AT&T service outage; Pros and Cons of how it was handled.
Saying “I’m sorry”
After my tirade on go! the other day, I want to show that I can also use this blog to praise someone for doing something right. The power of “I’m sorry” is that it allows one party to take responsibility for their part in a problem. It also allows both sides (or more) the opportunity to move on to more productive ventures than bickering about blame and venting anger.
AT&T Hawaii Outage
If you are an iPhone user in Hawaii, you probably noticed the service interruption that AT&T experienced yesterday. Being a power user of my iPhone 3G, I was forced to go without connectivity (either voice or data) from about 7 a.m. until after lunch. Until that happened, I thought that would be doing the impossible. I wonder how President-Elect Obama is going to go his entire administration without his Blackberry, when I don’t want to give up email for even a day. However, I did “cheat” a little in that I had my office connection and could use my work Blackberry that uses Verizon.
For great coverage of the outage, check out Ryan Ozawa’s blog post about it. I was actually planning to say much of what he said, but he published his post while I was still compiling notes, so guess he got the blog scoop on me. I’ll leave it to the pro to do the scooping.
Coping With the Outage
It was an ordeal, but we had our Motrin Moms moment in Hawaii. We made our Twitter voices heard. Thank goodness AT&T has far better sense than Motrin did. And the best part is that AT&T said two powerful words: we apologize. Even former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s mistress can do that (not that it would always be accepted).
By assuring us via Twitter that even the PR guys were aware of the problem and they were looking into it, it showed AT&T really cared. They even asked us to report if and when our service was restored. Talk about instant and direct feedback from their customers!
First, here’s what I didn’t like:
- While they were pleasant on the phone, they weren’t very helpful: “We are aware of the outage…we are working on it…we have no estimate of when the problem will be fixed…we hope it’s soon.”
- Their email us link didn’t work, so that’s why I had to call them in the first place
- It took AT&T until 11:15 to respond via Twitter, nearly four hours after the problem started
- They continued to post AT&T PR releases after Hawaii Tweeps were reporting problems
Now, here’s what I liked:
- When I called AT&T, I punched in a few options and was connected to a customer service rep in about three rings.
- They specifically addressed Hawaii customers on their national Twitter account
- AT&T is offering a one-day service credit if customers request it. I was offered $1.25, so I told the customer service rep I’d pass. But it was a matter of principle and I’m glad to see AT&T was willing to make an offer. Note that works out to one day on my plan.
In the end, I have to hand it to AT&T for listening to our reports and really making an effort to let us know what was happening. I’m new to AT&T, having switched from Sprint, a company with the worst customer service I’ve had for anything I pay for. When I’ve complained to Sprint, they’ve never offered a service credit or even a solution to my original problem, so I am a satisfied AT&T customer and happy Apple iPhone user. Nice job on this one, folks!
Mahalo!
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