“I am extremely disappointed to discover it is impossible to get it fixed today.”
That’s a sentence you don’t want to see or a phrase you want to hear from a customer. Yet, CLtel Vice President Chris Lovell read those words in an after-hours chat on a Saturday afternoon.
The problem? Cable TV wasn’t working.
Studies show that redemption is almost impossible once a customer has a bad experience. According to “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner, it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.
This customer’s frustration started with an unresolved help-desk interaction and led to a chat on CLtel’s website. While an after-hours virtual team from the Midwest worked on his issue, he left a very telling message on CLtel’s website through chat.
“I had cable TV installed yesterday. Today get signal unavailable.”
Lovell saw the notification flash across his phone. He called CLtel Plant Manager Brad Emerson. As fast as you can send a text and forward an email, Emerson was on it. His text to Lovell.
“I’ll get this handled.”
Emerson has nearly 30 years of experience walking customers through installations and service requests. He’s seen problems that tip the scale from easy to ridiculously difficult. His approach to troubleshooting issues has been compared to popular TV and movie detectives.
“A million things run through your mind,” Emerson said. “Is the set-top box (STB) unplugged or shut off? Did the customer lose their wi-fi connection? Did they move the STB?”
In this case, the services looked like they were working, but the STB couldn’t speak with CLtel’s services. Emerson ran through a short series of questions to investigate the customer’s problem.
Is the blue light on? Yes. That means it isn’t a switched outlet problem.
Did anyone move the box? No.
A few more questions led Emerson to ask the customer to shut off the STB and turn it back on.
Moments passed, new screens flashed by, and within a few minutes, the customer said, “Oh! I have TV. What did you do to fix it?” Emerson humbly replied, “you fixed your own problem.”
Within 30 minutes of reaching out to CLtel through the online chat, this customer had a resolution to his problem. And while this service request tipped the scale toward the easy side, Emerson’s quick analysis saved the weekend for this customer.
“I’m so happy you got this fixed. This made my day!”
Use this list of troubleshooting items if you experience cable TV issues. You expect your TV service to work – and we do too – but if for some reason it doesn’t, CLtel members like Brad are ready to go above and beyond to get it handled.
