June 5, 2012 at 3:53 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Canceling Customers
June 20, 2012 at 8:59 am
The best comment I ever heard was:
The customer may not always be right, but the customer is always the customer!
I remember working for a family that took things very seriously when it came to how their employees were treated. A person who can best be desribed with words that should not be posted here had called up and was using extremely profane language while yelling at one of our sales reps. The owner asked why the rep looked so upset. When we explained what was going on, he reached over, grabbed the phone, hung it up, and told the rep to go take a break for as long as he needed - no questions asked!
He then called the customer and fired them! A few hours later, the owner of the company had his employee call back and apologize, and the owners then worked to repair the damage to the relationship.
What is really cool, is that the customer was almost 50% of our business. Our owners cared enough about their employees to set that aside because it was the right thing to do. I will always respect them for how they treated their staff.
Dave
June 20, 2012 at 9:21 am
The only difference between raw data and "information" is the format.
Apparently, someone at Sprint mistook this for knowledge.
That is ignorance.
June 20, 2012 at 9:36 am
Whether you are big or small company, you cannot expect your employees to give good customer service if your managment treat your employees like crap everyday. One hand washes the other. It's sad that a lot of CEO's, CIO's out there today is either oblivious to this or they just don't care. Your employees are your customers, and then it trickles down from there. 😀
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
June 20, 2012 at 9:45 am
TravisDBA (6/20/2012)
Whether you are big or small company, you cannot expect your employees to give good customer service if your managment treat your employees like crap everyday. One hand washes the other. It's sad that a lot of CEO's, CIO's out there today is either oblivious to this or they just don't care. Your employees are your customers, and then it trickles down from there. 😀
Also, from an employee point of view, we need to keep in mind that our coworkers are also our customers! Too often people forget that we all rely on each other, and how we treat our coworkers can be as important as how we treat our boss, the owner, the external customer, et cetera.
Dave
June 20, 2012 at 9:54 am
Might I add a different thought. Just because you have the technology to do something does not mean that you should do it. To identify clients just to fire them because they over use your service is the wrong motivation. What you should be doing is to determine who is asking and what they are asking and see if there are ways that you can cheaply get an educational message out to all your users to answer the questions, avoid the calls, look like you are more customer friendly, and lower the frustration level of your clients and lastly add to your bottom line.
Silly how we do things backwards and hope to be seen as forward looking.
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
June 20, 2012 at 10:57 am
Some of those "pinheaded MBAs" are narcissistic pinheaded MBAs that climbed over quite a few bodies to reach where they are, and lack any personal connection with their customers (maybe "marks" would be a better word) or human beings in general. And then some pretty good people find themselves in a workplace run by such people and after a while they start to behave like their bosses. Quite a bit has been written about how this factored in the housing boom & bust. There has been a lot of post-crash soul-searching by people that were sucked into nasty behavior.
BI is a tool that can be used for good or evil. If you make it easier to use, you will see even more of the latter usage. In fact the very term "self-service BI" (i.e. self-serving) suggests such potential.
June 20, 2012 at 11:00 am
mbrooks (6/20/2012) In fact the very term "self-service BI" (i.e. self-serving) suggests such potential.
I do not agree that "self-service" is synonymous with "self-serving" or that the term "self-service BI" suggests that it will be used in manners that benefit only the user.
Jay Bienvenu | http://bienv.com | http://twitter.com/jbnv
June 20, 2012 at 11:52 am
jbnv (6/20/2012)
mbrooks (6/20/2012) In fact the very term "self-service BI" (i.e. self-serving) suggests such potential.
I do not agree that "self-service" is synonymous with "self-serving" or that the term "self-service BI" suggests that it will be used in manners that benefit only the user.
There is a double meaning in the term "self-service BI" that I had not noticed before, and it relates to the editorial:
...So you dig in and see that by manipulating the report variables in your Cognos or Proclarity report, you can find customers that call support more than 25 times a month and customers that roam too much and set a monthly report to auto generate a letter to these people canceling their service. You get this brilliant idea approved and ...
I don't know where being "synonymous" came into it, or anything beyond "potential" for misuse. Wasn't me.
June 20, 2012 at 12:09 pm
I also do not agree that "self-service" is synonymous with "self-serving". But knowing people and how they see things, I should say that the term "self-service BI" suggests that it could and probably would be used in manners that benefit only the selfish and heartless.
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
June 20, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Good article and comments. While I have never used Sprint and cannot speak about their customer service, I have seen their commercials. They brag about offering truly unlimited data plans without restrictions. I guess that is only true until you actually use it and then they drop you. This is not the first time that I have heard of Sprint doing this. A company should never over promise and under deliver.
June 20, 2012 at 6:12 pm
mbrooks (6/20/2012)
Some of those "pinheaded MBAs" are narcissistic pinheaded MBAs that climbed over quite a few bodies to reach where they are, and lack any personal connection with their customers (maybe "marks" would be a better word) or human beings in general. And then some pretty good people find themselves in a workplace run by such people and after a while they start to behave like their bosses. Quite a bit has been written about how this factored in the housing boom & bust. There has been a lot of post-crash soul-searching by people that were sucked into nasty behavior.BI is a tool that can be used for good or evil. If you make it easier to use, you will see even more of the latter usage. In fact the very term "self-service BI" (i.e. self-serving) suggests such potential.
Narcissism and "pin-headedness" aren't specific to any one job, so I don't think there's any value in throwing one single job or group under the bus. Assigning broad cloth motivations to a profession just simply isn't warranted (nor is excusing anyone silly enough to go along with something they know is wrong).
The failure isn't that someone used BI to identify a problem area: finding customers that cost you money and trying to turn them into customers that are profitable should be something all companies at some point. Sprint no doubt mishandled this one, but that doesn't negate that it's a valid search.
It would be about the same as a DBA going up to the servers they manage and looking for jobs that are sucking the life out of the engine. *Finding* the processes and *doing* something about them is commendable; turning them off and disabling them without talking to anyone or considering the consequences = pinheaded?
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
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