By Kathleen Davis, senior editor, Electric Light & Power magazine and Utility Automation & Engineering T&D magazine
The biggest splash in the Internet world this week here in the U.S. of A. is Canadian band Sons of Maxwell. Apparently, a year ago, the band flew United Airlines and United managed to break the lead singer’s prize Taylor guitar, and those aren’t cheap. After a year of phone calls and getting the wild-goose runaround from call centers and service agents, the band wrote a song and filmed a video about their experience rather directly titled “United Breaks Guitars.” (Pop that title into You Tube, and you’ll get the video. But, I warn you: That song will be stuck in your head all day.)
Now, this amusing little tidbit on bad customer service and how it can come back to bite a company in the tokhes reminded me of a local problem here in Oklahoma from a few years ago. You see, airlines aren’t the only people with bad customer service and problematic call centers and service agents. Utilities often have similar issues.
Here in Tulsa, around 2003, an irate customer got so angry with the local gas utility Oklahoma Natural Gas—commonly referred to as just ONG—that he started a website titled ONGSucks.com. Not only did he start a website, he started a campaign. There were billboards all over the city that advertised the website and encouraged visitors to share stories. He spent money from his own pocket (as Sons of Maxwell did with United) to “fight the Man,” as it were.
There were local news stories about the onslaught. There were barbs back and forth. The website was taken down only to be replaced with an ONGStillSucks.com website and a new round of billboards. Now, both of those sites are defunct in 2009, but it plagued ONG for years. And, it’s an incident that is still remembered, fondly, by Tulsans. Seriously, it was funny. And, we’d all felt his pain because we’d all been in a position where we felt belittled and without options trying to fix or complain about a service that we can’t go without.
A lot of times people in necessary service industries—hospitals, airlines, utilities—have a rough and tumble mindset. Since those services are necessary, and they’re usually a form of local monopoly without serious competition, they adopt a surly, bully ‘tude, a “We’re Necessary, So You’ll Just Take What We Dish Out” response. But customer service is key, whether you’re selling eggs or electrons.
In the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of Electric Light & Power magazine, author Cynthia White wrote that “until recently, consumers did not hold utilities to the same customer service standards they held other businesses.” But, she also noted that those old attitudes are changing, and it’s time for utilities to be more focused on the consumer as a customer. In the same issue, Jerry Duvall, CEO of CS Week, examined the “strategic importance of improving the customer experience.”
Granted, with electric and gas service—and sometimes airlines—you don’t really have a lot of (or any) options to change your service provider. Changing the service provider is the typical way to show disapproval. I can do that with my car insurance company, but not with my electric company, unfortunately. (I shall never, ever, ever work with Allstate again, but I have to work with AEP as long as I live in their service area.)
However, as our ONG Sucks guy and our United Breaks Guitars band prove: Where there’s a will—and passionate, pent-up annoyance—there’s a way. In the past, maybe it wasn’t important to utilities to have happy customers, since, happy or unhappy, the dollar came down the pike. But, a happy consumer doesn’t post You Tube videos or plaster hate speech on billboards to vent frustration. And, to quote Martha Stewart, that’s a good thing.
