me: Can you just put me straight through to escalations?
Sprint Customer Service: What are you calling about, sir?
me: My desire to speak to escalations.
Sprint Customer Service: What is the problem you’re having, sir?
me: Currently, the problem is that you won’t put me through to escalations. But since you’re being persistent, I’ll give you my story. (I tell her the whole story) So now, what I want is to go to my local Sprint store and get a new phone. Like now. I can’t wait another 4 days.
Sprint Customer Service: Sir, I believe I can help you with that. Let me call your local store and the insurance company and I’ll get right back with you. Can you hold for 5 minutes?
me: Sure.
15 minutes later
Sprint Customer Service: Sir, I have the insurance company on the other line and I believe I can get the phone to you in 1 or 2 days instead of 2 or 4.
me: That’s not what I asked for. I’d like to go to my local store and get a new phone now.
Sprint Customer Service: If you go to the store it will cost you to buy a new phone.
me: Obviously I don’t want to buy a new phone. I want mine replaced. If you can’t help me with that, then this conversation is pointless.
Sprint Customer Service: Well, that’s your choice, sir. Is there anything else I can do for you today?
me: Yes. You can put me through to a supervisor like I asked.
Sprint Customer Service: Okay sir. One moment and I’ll see if I can connect you with a supervisor at the insurance company.
me: No. I asked for escalations. I want a Sprint customer service supervisor. The insurance company is not going to be able to facilitate my going to the store and getting a new phone.
Sprint Customer Service: Oh, okay. I’ll put you through to a supervisor now. Can you hold for a moment?
me: Yes.
30 seconds later.
Recorded Voice: We’re sorry that we cannot take your call at this time. Please try your call again later. Thank you for calling Sprint.
*CLICK*
After staring, slack-jawed, at the phone for a moment, I pulled up a browser and went to The Consumerist. At that time, the post at the top of the page was entitled, “Poor Reception? ‘Go To The Hilltop’ Sprint Tells Customer“. So I emailed my post to the editor, Ben Popken. I haven’t heard back from him, but I’m sure he gets 500,000 similar emails daily.
That helped to arouse the gumption to try Sprint one more time. So I called the ostensibly “special” phone number that Sprint made available to Consumerist readers: 703-433-4401. It turns out that this is just the number for escalations. By this time it was after 5pm CST. I had been living the customer service dream for over two hours. The escalations people weren’t there after 5pm CST, so I called the main customer service number again. This time I demanded escalations immediately again:
me: I’d like to speak to escalations straightaway.
Sprint Customer Service: What are you calling about, sir?
me: (thinking I should have expected this – I tell her the whole story)
Sprint Customer Service: The phone that was sent to you, I think I can get it activated. Would you like me to try.
me: Well, if you think you can…
We try. It doesn’t work.
Sprint Customer Service: Let me ask the insurance company why they would send you a phone that was assigned to someone else. Can you hold for a moment.
me: Well. I’ve been down this path before and I was hung up on last time. Maybe you could just put me straight through to escalations?
Sprint Customer Service: Well how would you like this resolved.
I repeated my desire to get a new phone from the store like right freakin’ now.
Sprint Customer Service: That will cost you, sir.
me: I’m really starting to lose my cool here. I don’t want to yell at you, really I don’t. I thought I explained myself clearly. I want the store to replace this phone. I’ve been a customer for years. I want this to be made right.
Sprint Customer Service: (stammering) Well…I…uh. Sir, why don’t you just take the phone to your local store. They’ll take care of you.
me: But I’ve already been there. That’s how I ended up in all this mess.
Sprint Customer Service: Sir, I think if you just take it to the store and tell them the problem, they’ll take care of you.
me:
me: Okay.
So I call my local store and ask for a manager. They don’t have one in the store, they’ve got a “manager-on-duty” – a sort of manager pro tempore. They make a reservation for me to see him at 7:15pm.
This is where this story finally gets good.
I get to the store and after about a 15 minute wait, I meet John P. Nesselhauf, Lead Consultant, Retail Management. This guy treats me like a human right from the start. He’s apologetic. I can tell he gets treated poorly all day and yet somehow still wants to help. I’m amazed. He calls “inside sales support” and gets the background on the phone I received from Asurion.
He explains that he has no idea how the insurance company came into possession of this phone, but it does in fact belong to someone else; someone who has a seasonal plan. He explains that it’s sometimes military who get seasonal plans, so this poor person could be in Iraq right now and when they come home they won’t have a phone. He’s at a loss as to how Asurion could have sent me the phone or even come into possession of it in the first place.
Meanwhile the “inside sales support” guy credits back my deductible. Yay. Then John offers to swap out my old damaged phone for a refurbished phone right on the spot. I was ready to cancel my service before I walked into the store and he saved it singlehandedly. He was authentically kind in spite of the fact that the customer before me was cursing at him. There is little in the way of operational realities at Sprint that I find at all worthy, but this one person managed to keep me as a customer. It’s amazing what a difference one person can make even in the face of an entire edifice of abject idiocy.
I’m calling John’s boss tomorrow and demanding that John get a raise or a promotion or something.

I have the HTC touch. Over the weekend, it received some water damage and is completely inoperable. “No problem,” I thought. “I have insurance!” So I went to the Sprint store near my house, where I’ve always gone when my phone was damaged, to get a replacement. I was told I’d have to call the insurance company, have the replacement phone sent to me and pay a $50 deductible. I have discovered since then, that under the terms of my contract, had I, say, dropped the phone in a lake and then filed a police report, I would have simply gotten a new phone sans deductible. Word to the wise.
I spoke to a Sprint customer service representative on the phone before calling the insurance company and when I explained that I came to understand this odd discrepency about losing the phone and filing a police report, I received a condescending lecture about the machinations of insurance. Gee, thanks. After accepting that I would be without a phone for a couple days (they made no offer to provide a temporary replacement) I made the call to the insurance company, Asurion. After navigating their rather terrible phone menu software for a bit, I gave up and went to their website and filed the claim. It turns out that to get my phone quickly, I had to pay an additional $7. Nevermind that I’ve payed for the cost of 5 of these phones in insurance premiums over the last 5 years. Not a big deal. Insurance is what it is. At least I’d be getting a new phone.
So the phone comes today at around 3pm central time. I unwrap it and go through the process of activating it only to be unceremoniously shunted from the Sprint automated activation system over to customer service. The customer service representative asks for all the information I’ve already given to the activation system. They he asks me what I need today. I tell him I’m trying to activate my replacement phone, doesn’t he already know that? He seems confused and stammers for a moment and then asks me for the serial number from the inside of the phone. So I have to hang up with him, have him call me back on another phone, take the battery out of the replacement phone and give him the serial number. Midway through giving him this, he sighs and tells me in a frustrated tone that no, he doesn’t need the serial number, he needs the DEC ESN number. So I give him this. He then tells me to put the battery back in so we can activate. So I do.
At this point, he sits there silently for a few minutes. I’m waiting for the phone to boot. Finally I say, “hello?” Then we have this exchange:
Sprint Customer Service: Sir, I need you to give me that serial number again.
me: You mean the DEC ESN number?
Sprint Customer Serivce: Yes.
me: The phone is rebooting. You want me to pull the battery again?
Sprint Customer Service: Yes.
me: Okay. The number is _________.
Sprint Customer Service:
me:
Sprint Customer Service:
me:
Sprint Customer Service:
me: Hello?
Sprint Customer Service: Uh, sir, we can’t activate that phone. Where did you get it? Did you buy it?
me: (wondering if he’s insinuating that I stole it) It’s a replacement. I got it from the insurance company. Remember?
Sprint Customer Service: Oh yes. Well it’s assigned to someone else. I can’t activate it. Where did you get it?
me: I just told you. I’m reading you the number right from the back of the phone.
Sprint Customer Service: Well then what’s the HEX ESN number?
me: (reads number)
Sprint Customer Service: Yes, that phone is assigned to someone else.
me: How can it be? I’m holding it in my hand. Whomever it is assigned to is probably fairly non-plussed about not having their phone.
Sprint Customer Service: I don’t know, sir. You’ll have to call the insurance company to get a new phone.
me: So I’m out a phone for another couple days?
Sprint Customer Service: Yes, sir.
me: I use this phone for my business, is there anything you can do for me? A temp phone or something?
Sprint Customer Service: Do you have another phone you could use on the Sprint network that I could activate temporarily.
me: No.
Sprint Customer Service:
me:
Sprint Customer Service: Well. I can credit you a couple days on your account.
me: (giving up at this point) Okay. Thanks.
Sprint Customer Service: Alright sir. I’ll credit your account. Thank you for calling Sprint and have a great day.
me: Awesome.
I don’t even know what a “couple days” of credit on my account means. I pay a flat rate for unlimited minutes. So how does that even translate. I’m sure the representative had no idea either.
Now I’ve got two phones that don’t work that I’ll have to send back or they’ll charge me up to something like $200 each. I’m still without a working phone. What’s to guarantee that the next phone won’t also resist activation? If there’s another cellphone carrier out there that would like to pay my fee to get out of my Sprint contract, I’ll happily switch.

I also wanted to take a moment to respond to this comment by my friend and former colleague, Lori. She’s a shrewd one and the substance of her comment struck me as, “Quit being a blowhard and lay off this company. You don’t know what’s going on internally and you’re smearing them on your site. Furthermore, you have no right to expect them to communicate with you in any specific manner or really do anything you want them to do. It isn’t your company after all.” That is my interpretation, read her comment and draw your own conclusions. If it were a thoughtless comment or utterly lacking in insight, I might have ignored it. Rather, I think her comment cuts to the core of what is changing in the marketing industry in general. She has, in my opinion, succintly delineated the position of the proponents of marketing as we know it.
Hell, the more I think about it, the more I think y’all should read her comment. In case someone may not have the gumption to click the link, here it is:

Back away from the chip! One experience does not a brand make, either negative or positive. And who says the timeline you chose meshes with the one in their manual? Maybe they have launched an internal research program that is in fact testing how many pounds per inch of pressure it takes to open a bag. And their error is in not sharing this with you. So they have a few communications issues, that doesn’t erase the fact that they make a good product.
I don’t know when we moved into the “I expect to be listened to by all” era, but we’re in it. You have no idea what’s going on at that company or with the person responsible for handling these types of concerns, yet you assume that it’s a laissez-faire attitude toward consumers. I say not enough info is available to make a judgement. So it’s not best practice….are they a little company? Start-up? Two guys in a kitchen peeling potatoes & running a deep fryer?
I say pat yourself on the back for taking the time to share an idea that could improve something, and grab your scissors next time. Don’t slaughter them for not jumping on your suggestion. Little perspective people.

First, I totally agree with the fact that they are doing a poor job building relationships doesn’t mean that their product doesn’t rock. It does. I still buy them. I just use scissors to open the bags now. But I have a somewhat philosophical perspective on the whole thing. I have a fairly passionately-held opinion about the dramatic changes taking place in the marketing universe. Most consumers don’t share my passion or philosophical outlook. Most consumers, when met with a company that simply refuses to respond to their concerns, will simply choose a competitor’s product next time. If anything, I was trying to help them because I was willing to forgive them where others will not. I also hoped that a little pressure from a fan might be better than a lot of pressure from someone who is genuinely pissed off.
Where I started to realize how much Lori found my experiment offputting was with the “I expect to be listend to by all” thing. I also talked to Lori on the phone for several hours about it. She isn’t the kind to concede a point easily. She’s told me before that she’s got a lot of brothers so she’s comfortable holding her own. What became clear the more we spoke was that she felt I was being rather impetuous. She felt that I was pretending to access I didn’t deserve. She seemed to think that I was trying to suggest that the inmates should be allowed to run the asylum (if I can be excused for comparing customers to inmates at an asylum—well I’m sure the oh-so-perspicacious Neil Boorman would find such a sentement simply exquisite). Suffice to say, I don’t think I’m owed anything by Terra Chips or anyone else.
My assertion is simply that as the tools that empower mass communications continue to evolve, there is a greater pressure for those responsible for the mass communications act more like regular people and less like clergy or arrogant pricks or cooler-than-thou. One of the first ways this evolution has become relevant is with respect to customer service. Inasmuch as the internet empowers consumers to make their voice heard, don’t be surprised if they take you to task for treating their concerns lightly.
Twenty years ago, an organization could blithely assume that any steps they took to communicate with their constituents/customers were just fine. They were the ones footing the bill for all this mass communication and they weren’t going to waste that money dealing with individual cases—the technology available to do so was just not good enough and therefore too expensive. As the technology has evolved, so have people’s expectations. This isn’t consumers becoming uppity or something. This isn’t the “I expect to be listened to by all” era. It is simply consumers recognizing that there is no excuse for a bad experience when there are other options that provide a good experience.
I’d like to say more about this, and as I mentioned, I’ve got this “Marketing Can Go to Hell” post brewing that will hopefully elucidate further. I couldn’t get on writing that post until I had brought this Terra Chips thing to a close and tried to offer a thoughtful response to Lori. Reading back over this, I’m not sure I pulled it off. I’d say I’m amazed that I can write 1,100+ words without really being particularly thoughtful, but then I remember that I’ve been working in marketing for over 10 years.

I’ve sent them a last notice of sorts. It reads:

Dear Terra Chips Consumer Relations,
Eliot Frick here. I’ve sent you three emails through your “contact us” form. This one makes my fourth. By now, I have a hard time imagining that no one there is aware of my attempts to get a response from someone other than an autoresponder at your company. I’ve been discussing it at my blog. You can find the discussion here:

http://high.bigwidesky.com/

Read the “Grounded Chips” posts. There are links at other blogs now as well. For example here:

http://loop.integritycorporation.com/2008/02/chipping-in.html

…and in the comments thread here:

http://www.ideasonideas.com/2008/02/blogs_can_kill_brands/

Per the suggestion of one of my readers, I’ve decided to set a deadline of the day that we finish the bag of chips to receive a response from you. At that point, if I (and my readers) haven’t received a response, I suppose I’ll have to conclude that you don’t really care about my questions and comments. We’re down to crumbs at the bottom of the bag as of this evening (Sunday the 17th). I want y’all to pull it out at the 11th hour, so I’m going to give it until the end of the day tomorrow before concluding anything.
I suppose it doesn’t really matter that much if you don’t respond. I mean, the world will keep turning. You’ll keep selling chips. But this has been a genuine, good-faith request on my part. I think anyone who reads the blog will agree. They may also come to some conclusions about your brand based upon your response, or lack thereof.
Best Wishes,
Eliot Frick

Not looking good I’m afraid. But I won’t rule out a last minute save. Good luck, Terra Chips Consumer Relations! I’m pullin’ for ya!

I really want to give them every opportunity to respond, so I just sent them another note:

Dear Terra Chip Consumer Relations,
I really want to give y’all every opportunity to be a part of the conversation that is happening on my blog about your brand. I’ve already contacted you twice through the “contact us” form on your site. You’ve yet to respond. Which is okay I suppose. I’m not too bothered per se. But I thought you’d be interested to know that a Google search for “terra chips hard time opening” now lists my blog post as the first result and a search for “terra chips consumer relations” has my blog as the second result. So, y’know, people are reading about your brand on my blog. They’re taking note of the fact that you’re not participating in the conversation. They’re drawing conclusions.
I have every hope you’ll participate in the conversation. Certainly, you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have the temerity to demand you participate. I still like your chips. I wish you the best in determining how to respond to this. There’s also nothing wrong with asking for help. I’d be happy to offer council as to the most effective way of getting into the conversation. You’ve got my email address after all, ask away!
Cheers,
Eliot Frick

Third message in three days. There’s about an eighth of the bag left. Still no response.

In the interest of the benefit of the doubt, I just sent them another message through their contact form. Here it is:

Dear Terra Chips Consumer Relations,
I used the form on the “contact us” page of your site to inform you of the difficulty I have opening bags of Terra Kettles. I was going to leave it at that, but my experience with your website was frustrating and so I decided to let you know about that experience and share it with the readers of my blog. It is now approaching the end of a second business day since I offered these insights and despite being told in the auto-reply that my “questions and comments are very important to [you]” I haven’t received any response. I’m sure this is an oversight on your part.
I don’t want to assume that you in fact do not consider my experience with your brand important so I thought I would write again and let you know I have, in fact, written about the experience on my blog. You can read about it at http://high.bigwidesky.com/ – the title of the post is “Grounded Chips”. I’m still awaiting some kind of response from you so that I can tell everyone what a responsive and authentically human brand you have.
Here’s to your great-tasting chips and the expectation that you will be in touch post haste.
Thank you,
Eliot Frick

Looking at the site, one can see that they don’t seem to have any hesitation displaying the positive feedback they receive from customers. Let’s hope they don’t have any hesitation dealing with critical feedback. At some point, if I don’t receive a response, I’m going to have to conclude otherwise.

I had a little trouble with the site. Not unlike the way I had trouble with the bag of chips. Perhaps this is a little like Charlie Brown in the Halloween special where he comes to the party in a sheet filled with holes and explains that he “had a little trouble with the scissors.” I admit it, I have brain damage. But putting that aside, the bag really is hard to open and the website really does leave something to be desired. I could explain further, but I’ll just let the bit that I wrote them do the explaining for me.

To begin, your product tastes great. So consider my criticism in light of that. I have a small complaint, which is unfortunately exacerbated by your poor online mechanism for communicating it to you.
My complaint is simple: your bags are too difficult to open by hand. Not a deal-breaker, it’s just annoying. I still buy your product, but if I find an alternative that matches the quality of your product and is packaged in a manner that allows easier access, I would likely switch.
However, I did not want to have to provide you with my address in order to tell you this. I would suggest you unhitch the opportunity for your consumers to provide feedback from your marketing efforts. Just because I might care enough about your brand to tell you about a problem with it doesn’t mean I want to give you my personal information. If I wasn’t feeling benevolent, I would have just put bogus data in your form. I mean you actually have the audacity to require me to give you this stuff just to submit the form. I’m not signing up for a service. I get absolutely nothing in return for telling you where I live, whereas you get another address in your database. Not a fair exchange.
From a user experience perspective, “contact us” is a poor navigational device to lead users to an opportunity to offer insights such as the one I’m offering. I don’t have to tell you. I could have just switched to another brand and you would have never learned the insight. I would encourage you to call out the opportunity to offer feedback more directly with nomenclature like, “tell us how you feel about terra chips” or similar. It should be conversational and approachable in order to be effective.
Further undermining user experience is that when I navigate to the “privacy policy” page from your contact form, when I return to the contact form, state is not maintained. What is meant by that is that all the data in the form is lost. You probably lose a significant amount of comments right there because people fill out the form, see that they can read your privacy policy, click the link and then come back to an empty form and decide it’s not worth the trouble to fill it all out again.
Now comes the fun part. I have a blog. I’m going to write about this experience. You’re lucky. I’m telling you about this. Most won’t. I would charge my clients for this knowledge. Frankly, I’m not even sure why I’m offering you all this valuable advice except that I really do like the way your chips taste. That and I’m sitting here with a bag of them that is half empty because the force required to open the bag tore it apart and chips went everywhere. So let’s see what you do next. I’m interested to find out. Maybe I’ll get to praise you in my blog. Maybe not.

So we’ll see what happens. I’ll let y’all know. I mean, given that no one has posted here in months, “y’all” in that last sentence may refer only to myself, but Google will index this post like a good little monkey and people will read it and the Terra Chip folks will either reap the benefit or the negativity. Or maybe they’ll hire me to consult on how to improve their relationship with their consumers. Or maybe I’ll get a clue and just use a tool to open the bag next time. Y’know, like a blowtorch.
Update 1: Well, their autoresponder works. Yay. I got an email saying:

This email is to confirm that we have received your email and will reply as soon as possible. Your questions and comments are very important to us.
For immediate assistance our Consumer Relations Team is available to help you at 1-800-434-4246 (Monday – Friday, 7:00am-12:00 & 12:30-5:00pm MT). Thank you for your interest in our products.
Sincerely,
Terra Chips Consumer Relations

So far, so good I suppose. I find the tenor of the email pretty cold. But hey, it was sent by a computer. Also, “Terra Chips Consumer Relations”? I know, 99% of all CPG companies have a customer service or relations group that calls themselves something like this, but it’s a damn terrible name. It’s got a real Terry Gilliam’s Brazil kind of thing going on. How about something like “The Chip Herding Team”? Oh, and I’ll take you at face value that my questions and comments are important to you, but my experience with the site kind of belies that. In fact, maybe don’t even tell me that. I should be the judge of whether you really think what I have to say is important. Show it, don’t tell it.

Henry is the Director of the Comparative Media Studies graduate program at MIT. I read one of his books several months ago, “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide” and it was very much one of those right-book-at-the-right-time kind of things. The book is about the ways in which new communication technologies are empowering and encouraging participation in media by people who would not have otherwise had the opportunity to do so. It also discusses the gamut of response to these new possibilities; some welcoming, some smug, some fearful.
But I thought of Henry, because I knew he’d be thinking about how the whole YouTube/CNN debate format is appears to be an almost watershed moment for these technologies. And he’s blogged an edifying post about it.
To wit:

In the 1990s, an alternative — the town hall meeting debate — emerged and Bill Clinton rose to the presidency in part on the basis of his understanding of the ways that this format changed the nature of political rhetoric. In the town hall meeting format, who asks the question — and why they ask it — is often as important as the question being asked. The questioner embodies a particular political perspective — the concerned mother of a Iraqi serviceman, the parent of a sick child who can’t get decent health care, the African-American concerned about race relations, and so forth. We can trace the roots of this strategy of embodiment back to, say, the ways presidents like to have human reference points in the audience during their State of the Union addresses — Reagan was perhaps the first to deploy this strategy of using citizens as emblematic of the issues he was addressing or the policies he was supporting and in his hands, it became associated with the push towards individualism and volunteerism rather than governmental solutions. These were “individuals” who “made a difference.”
What Clinton got was that in this newly embodied context, the ways the candidate addressed specific voters modeled the imagined interface between the candidate and the voters more generally. Think about that moment, for example, when George Bush looked at his watch during a Town Hall Meeting debate and this got read as emblematic of his disconnect from the voters. Contrast this with the ways that Clinton would walk to the edge of the stage, ask follow up questions to personalize or refine the question and link it more emphatically to the human dimensions of the issue, and then respond to it in a way which emphasized his empathy for the people involved. People might make fun of Clinton for saying “I feel your pain” a few times too many but this new empathic link between the candidate and the questioner shaped how voters felt about this particular candidate.

It seems that increasingly, the prize will go to those who know how to navigate this new media landscape. And by that I don’t mean those who learn to game the system, I mean those who recognize that the transparency it creates demands that they be genuine humans.