Sam Part1

[Music] hello I'm Bob scab in ski in our jobs we come in contact with many people virtually all of them are telephone customers they express opinions about their telephone service and so did hundreds more who responded to questions posed through Sam service attitude measurement after reviewing Sam results I found many of the comments enlightening here are some of them I don't think there were any flaws in the installation or in any of the couldn't see that there were any problems at all had a nice relationship when I ordered my phone I asked for a 13 foot cord and was given a 25 foot cord I've been having constant problems with beeps to the telephone company however when I take them to the proper authorities or service representatives they assume nothing is wrong with the phones because they can't seem to find the problems a funny thing here I had the I have the jack will you people call him the Jack's Jack close and tell her the king was dull he had and this is ugly he had the telephone the irregular type that goes wires to the wall and an entirely different color and when our phone is not working it it's an extreme disadvantage we depend on the specific telephone for as I say 97% of our business I called the operator and said I didn't think I should be charged for the first telephone call well then when my bill came in I was charged for it the people you saw briefly are not actors they are customers of Pacific telephone commenting in their own words about our service I won't go into all the mechanics of Sam's operation other than to say that questionnaires were sent to customers the responses they gave measured quality of service from the customers viewpoint not ours that is important no matter what we think of ourselves it's the customers opinion that counts he or she is the one that expects the telephone to work to have the bill correct and in cases of trouble to have the telephone fixed promptly and efficiently now we may feel there are circumstances beyond our control but a customer calls them excuses and certainly we want to offer service not excuses the office girls are those who whom one calls for the installation of service are something under themselves however I find them to be extremely sweet and smiling over the telephone but in a rather obnoxious way in fact a somewhat snooty I think they try to give you the impression that they know all the answers to every technical question that might come up that they are constantly trying to sell you services which I as an individual I'm not interested in God she didn't call me back and Friday you see that it was they were still unable to find out about this I was very much impressed with the fact that she did call back when she said she was and that she took such a team to have such a personal interest in the call and since this is a large city and I know you have thousands of subscribers or knowing maybe a million subscribers it was very much impressed with that fact that they did take the personal interest most often well the total company is very courteous and and everyone is so helpful there and but I thought this time when she said to me well now do you really want to understand number or don't you seems like it wasn't in keeping with the courtesy of the telephone company seems to be a hallmark of the telephone company bebo falling everyone says this but she seems so out of patience but and Ike she wanted to get on with something else it just doesn't seem like this is the way they Jimmer they are the operators in Sacramento were very curious very helpful and very friendly and when I moved up here the operators were not very friendly I seem to be bothering them by calling them and although they were helpful they seemed to they didn't like it when customers criticized our company or our work we may subconsciously think they are being unreasonable or that they don't understand when they praise our company or our work we compliment them on their intelligence and good judgment well just the level things off of debt let's listen to customers who had contacts in a short space of time one good and one bad they should be objective well I don't remember the exact date no but as I told you my son is in the Philippines and he has a habit of calling collect at this time he had called I think it was three times our bill was up two bucks oh I think it was a $97 so I called up and told ask the operator I didn't know who to call who to contact whether I had not having done this before so I dial operator and after a while she comes on the line and I asked her with whom would I speak in regards to a bill so she was she was very annoyed I can't tell you what she said now but she did make me awful nervous and at the same time very angry I've always felt you don't call unless it's absolutely necessary and when you have somebody that is well I would say almost rude it sort of makes it a little harder what you have to say the problem we have to present so I didn't know who I was getting into after that she finally gave me to the business office which is here in Richmond wife died the woman I spoke there was mrs. King but she was she was one of the nicest persons I have ever spoken to over the telephone I tried to explain to her what had happened to me and she just well by the time it was over I felt quite at ease she helped me tremendously with what I wanted to know well next time I won't have to go through the operator I can you know just talk directly to of is that she told me how to go about it to get him in any case because she I think since that I was nervous anyhow when I spoke to her by the tone of my voice I was a little sharp too because I figured well this time I'm going in there ready to fight and [Music] like I wrote and I think in that little questionnaire I couldn't have asked for a nicer service and I got from this woman uh I really wasn't pleased with either alternative because I have seen the buttons and I just don't like a row of buttons on our nice walnut desk and I felt that the call directors were really just kind of clumsy for each of us to use and so that was really as we left it as well explained to me that this was real these were really the only two alternatives that I had ultimately we ended up with a very different solution and I feel that had the girl really tried to understand more specifically what it was that we needed and used a little bit more really any imagination she could have come up with the solution that by chance I came up with and that is that we added one additional line which only comes in on one call director I think that the young man who came into the office to do the actual installations was really just a pleasure to deal with he I guess enjoyed what he was doing just went out of his way to accommodate us it was kind of quite hectic as I recall in the office that day and he really was very accommodating in keeping well kind of out of the way and got things done and just was very pleasant the whole time one contact can determine a customer's viewpoint of our total service the way we handle a single job can from the customer's viewpoint determine whether we are confident or incompetent the Installer came out and met with us and went over the installation that we wanted and helped us to choose the equipment installation points and was very cooperative in planning he came out to do the installation before we had moved in but after the water had been turned on he found the downstairs bathroom floor flooded because of a faulty valve and he went to the neighbors and borrowed a mop and a bucket and cleaned up the mess for us and got the leak stopped this extra step was a certainly far beyond what would be expected of a man doing an installation around the end of May my husband phoned me from Guam and he called choleric and I said that I would accept the charges for only three minutes yeah that agreement and the operator said I'll notifying you in three minutes are up so I accepted them and she had agreed well she didn't notify me when the three minutes arrived well my husband had been giving a shot and he must have been alerted to the shock so he fainted so I revived him so then I put him in the bed and I went to the phone I tried to get the doctor the doctor wasn't home he wasn't in his office so I tried and tried for maybe about 10 minutes so then the operator must have sent I had some trouble so she why do you know who I wanted to get so I told her so then she tried for about 10 minutes so then I told her I said maybe you could get him at the hospital he might be in the hospital work so then she tried and she stayed on the line so I was able to stay with my husband otherwise I never could have managed because he was getting up and he was getting down and he was hurting himself because he didn't have strength enough to stand so then she told me that she had got the doctor so then the doctor told me what to do so then I did what the doctor said so my husband was all right so it saved us from getting hurt both of us and she was so patient and so kind I never forget her our business is helicopter service and 97 percent of our business is done by telephone we rarely see a customer so can our telephone is out of service it puts us at an extreme disadvantage and for about three months our telephone service was not very didn't function very well I should say our customers would call and rather than ringing through to the office it would ring and get the recordings that would say that our phone was either temporarily disconnected or that we were out of service or that we had moved and were no longer there and luckily some of our customers knew that this was not not true and would call the operator and ask her to ring through and this was the way we found out and it's discontinued for about three months and it was embarrassing because people sometimes get the idea that well they have paid their bill so they've been disconnected or that some of the out-of-town customers thought that we had gone out of business and this is a very bad impression to our client and to the customer that we're trying to service we're also on Rescue Service for the Sheriff's Office and if when they need us we're on 24-hour call when they need a sudden couldn't get through it put the people who were hurt in more danger than they were already because we couldn't get to them the telephone company said that they would be able to install the hundred word machine and and it would have it installed within the week and we said fine it's exactly what we want a week past we call it got a call from the telephone company saying that they did not have a hundred word machine and that they would have to install a 50 word machine and that the hundred word machine would be forthcoming in about two or three weeks we of course said well if that's the best you can do fine so they installed the 50 word machine which took about five days and starting off a business five days of working by the Installer on a machine is bothersome and it bothered us but he finally got it installed after he got it installed about a week later we got a call from the telephone company saying that a hundred word machine was available we said fine we would like the Hungerford machine they came unhooked the 50 word machine and installed a hundred word machine and this took about three days well we had just moved into our new home and we just been here a couple of days and we ordered the phone and he spent instantly he spent quite a long time doing and he did go up in the attic but after he had left we noticed this gray cord coming down from the cupboards to the phone and it was certainly didn't add to the attractiveness of our kitchen so we asked if there wasn't some way he could hide the cord or perhaps at least use a white cord because it was this ugly gray and he said there really wasn't any way he could fix it well we received your questionnaire and we indicated our problem under questionnaire and we had a call and the manager said that he couldn't fish that it would be necessary to fish the while in order to hide the court he said that he could not do this because it would take too much time but he told me how to do it and told me to explain to my husband which I did and my husband felt that this wasn't a job for him to do so we decided not to pay our installation bill the next month and we didn't well within a couple of weeks telephone men were over here and we had our phone fixed and they did a very nice job those examples show our competence our incompetence as expressed by customers the Sam surveys reveal another category as a problem area that is coordination coordination between company and customer and among departments within the company here I was at 8:30 you know with moving baskets and all sorts of things ready to greet the telephone man sat here all day well it's fine at 12 I had to I didn't know anyone being in a strange area had to you know hated to leave I thought he was going to come any minute fine twelve o'clock I took the rig ran back to the other house and which was terrible and it was really very inconvenient because I had all these things planned to move and a neighbor was going to help me move anyway so here she was mad at me because the station wagon it was there and and all this stuff so finally we come back and the man shows up at I think it was 3:30 or 20 minutes to 4:00 and this is the man that was supposed to come from 8:30 until 11:30 and to top it all off shows up very efficiently Clarkson the princess fell no problem but he comes out to this telephone and here is a yellow phone and she said that she be parted in that my phone was broke and she'd set him tomorrow to have it fixed so I said okay and she took my name and my phone number so that when I did get my phone bill I was charged for $10 something and so I called up the business office and I explained it yeah to them about it and he said that that operator should have reported it in she didn't well I was getting a lot of big busy signals on the telephone every time I called I'd get a busy signal or somebody calling me would get busy signals so I phoned this lasted for about a year so I phoned the telephone company and they offered to send somebody out to fix it or to look at it so I explained that there was nobody home during the week and could they come on a Saturday so they said they'd come out between 8 and 11 o'clock and I waited till 12:30 and nobody showed up and I was going out that afternoon also so on Monday I called the telephone company and a man said he would check it out for me after he checked it out he found that it had been fixed in their own central boxes wherever they are they didn't have to come out to the house to fix it you and I know that the telephone instrument is the customer's contact for the phone company he expects it to work most customers accept occasional breakdowns but the service lapses of our own doing often become major failures in the eyes of our customers they see us as incompetent or uncoordinated when we can't manage our own equipment the Sam survey shows us that in a surprising number of cases we don't manage well at all approximately three or four months ago we were having trouble with our telephones primarily when we pick up the phone to dial we were hearing all sorts of noises and people were unable to call us so at this time I called the telephone repair service and the repairmen came out he said there was trouble in the dial so he put a new dial the next day every time the telephone would ring we pick it up and someone else would pick it up at the same time we found that the telephone was ringing at two houses of simultaneously so I called the telephone repairmen again and the next day another repairmen came out at this time he said that the dial had been put in improperly that the wires were not in as they should be so he repaired it we were all right there for about approximately one week or two weeks and then we started having trouble again with the telephone noises and etc I called the telephone company again and the repairmen came out the following day and at this time there was something wrong with telephone wire so he changed the wire and we were okay again for approximately another week or two then we started having trouble with the telephone in regards to a constant ringing every time you picked up the phone and you were talking to another party you could hear a background noise of a bell ringing and this went on for about approximately 3-4 days and it got to be rather annoying so we called the telephone company again and the repairmen came out and checked out the telephone and at that time my husband was home and he told that there was probably something wrong at the breaker box down the road and he'd go and see what could be done and said take about three or four days so we waited three four days and there was nothing happened spectacularly so he waited and waited and I called again and they sent out another repairman and they said they see what they could do so we still had no results and I waited and I kind of gave up at that time because every time everyone would call they kept saying was what's all the ringing we're here what's all the noises we hear so I got a little bit annoyed with it and then the questionnaire came out and I was a little bit discussed at this time so I might not have been too polite and I sent the questionnaire in and now we're waiting to see what's going to happen my case is from San Francisco to Concord why I would frequently get a busy signal I have a private party line and in investigating the busy signals in my own household I find that nobody's been using the trunk and calling the phone company I was told that this was due to the fact that the equipment could not handle the load that was being placed on it well I don't feel this is my problem I feel that if you offer me service that you should be able to provide the service to me this is an indication of very poor planning on your part and I think that you I don't see how you can expect me to feel comfortable paying a charge for a service which I don't feel I've been received so I naturally call the telephone company and they sent a repairman who stated that he could temporarily take care of the thing but evidently it was a two or four four party line and that he couldn't promise any permanent repairs to it so evidently they'll continue to have this this kind of trouble there is no surefire way to eliminate equipment failures there will be accidents storm caused damage and equipment which simply wears out basically though people aren't surprised by a limited amount of human or mechanical error a customer judges us on how we handle these cases given help respect and understanding they usually will accept a mistake with grace the following comments illustrate the point No the repairman was polite and courteous and had the phone in working condition probably all within 20-30 minutes he stated that he felt that he knew what the problem was when he first came to the door and because he had been called to this thing previously and had other complaints on the on this hill and he but he was apologetic and that he felt that until the two or four party line system was done away with that nothing permanent could be done to alleviate the problem well I had called the telephone company because we were had this constant clicking on the line and it was so loud that you couldn't hear the person on the other line and so each time a call came in it was continued so I called the repair department and they said they would have a telephone man out there very shortly and so I didn't think anything of it and I hung up and it was in about 15 minutes telephone repairman was on the pole working in the line and not too long after that and he called me and told me the service was completely restored which I was very grateful for and in the meantime not too long after that the repair department girl called me and she said mrs. palm questi said that she said the telephone repairman is on his way and I said well he's already been here and gone and I said well I can't thank you enough for the prompt service because of having an answering service in my home the telephones a recent restoration was very important to me and she was very charming and very very accommodating well from those comments I think you see what I mean even though we have human error equipment failures or plant investment problems beyond your capability of solving we can still do a good job in the eyes of our customers if our attitude is helpful and pleasant I don't like failures of course and neither do you but I do repeat that breaches can be healed with curious and accurate assistance we can salvage a good impression out of what might otherwise be a disaster we know that the initial contact with our company is usually with a service representative her commitment to the customer is a commitment by the entire company we must honor that commitment personal experiences often dictate opinions the individual customer having a personal contact with any employee rates the entire company on the basis of that contact the Sam survey shows this to be true this film which encompasses all of northern California indicates there is no single factor among people which would lead them to have good or bad opinions of the telephone company rich or poor educated or uneducated politically oriented or apathetic their opinions are motivated by personal experience with us a good contact generally means a good opinion of telephone service a poor contact usually downgrades all categories of service therefore what we as individuals do and say shades opinion in all phases of telephone service so I can out from where I was living I took off work and came out early this that morning and was working around and at ten o'clock no one showed up I waited around say well maybe the person is late and I went back and worked a while longer but just before noon I went out to public telephone and I call the business office here in Richmond and asking about the serviceman who was supposed to make the installation and they couldn't find the order and at this time I was somewhat upset as I say because of having taken off work and then they said they would check further into it and I could call them back or they could call me at my residence at that time in Berkeley but the next week I called them back and they didn't have the order so one of the representatives right there in the office took the order and said we would make an appointment with you that Wednesday from 10:00 between 10:00 and 12:00 you know some leeway and fine so I took off work again and I waited until noon and of course at noontime the serviceman showed up and he said well I'm sorry mr. Gordon but [Music] it's lunch time and if I install this doing the lunch period my Union will get down my neck and I said well okay what time can you be back and he said well maybe I can be back at 2 but I have another appointment or another installation how long will you be around and I said well I took off for the day I can wait around and of course the man wasn't able to return on that particular day and then of course I call the other well I called the business office again later on that afternoon and we made another appointment this one again was between 8 and 10 a.m. and that was the time the follow the telephone was installed we arrived on a Thursday and right away I noticed the phone was in and very little later in that morning a telephone man came by one to pull out the phone that was in and I said oh please don't do that because I knew there would be an extra cost if you pulled it out and he said well when you be sure to call right away and get the telephone man tomorrow or today that's why I said well alright I'll do that so I did go down to the market later in the afternoon and I made a phone call to the telephone company right away and I asked if they could come out right in the next morning which was a Friday and they said sure that's fine and they came very promptly 9 o'clock the next morning and I asked him if they'd keep the wall phone in and then I asked them what other phones I need in the house and the man was very pleasant and he said well let's go through the house and see what the size of it is we're unit might need one there was only one phone in the house because there'd been only three older people living in the house and they didn't even use the downstairs and they had to use only one and of course we could see right away we needed more than one we have two teenage children and they obviously weren't gonna put up with this so we went through the whole house and he said well now we do need one downstairs I was which I agreed and you do need one on the other end of the upstairs because it's too far from your present phone to the back bedroom and that happened to be our bedroom so I said yes that's exactly I want it I don't want it in the daughter's bedroom because there would be too many phone calls made so he said all right let's put it back in here and then we'd had to decide where in the rooms we wanted the phone and he said that it would be most convenient to certain walls and these seemed fine with us too I couldn't see any objection he said well he could put it in another wall and I said no this is a fine this is very good location so we proceeded then to show him where we wanted them my husband was home and he also started to converse with him he turned out the akkadian following very pleasant so they had to chat about Canada bits because my husband had lived there for 10 years this man explained how long he'd been with the telephone company and all the time he was working away he didn't stop and he kept it up and then you want to know what type of phone we wanted a princess or not a princess or colored or not of color and that's where the whole family had to get into the act because they wanted to choose the colors I feel unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it you have us in your power you know we have you have no competition there's no one we can turn to to give our business to the days of tom-toms and homing pigeons are out or else I would really I'd try that there you have a variety of comments about Pacific telephone I think you will find at the comments compliments and criticisms are fully justified let's not fall into the trap of explaining away our failures by saying they don't understand our problems the point is that our customers don't have to understand they merely want and are entitled to good service I firmly believe that lack of equipment or equipment problems account for only about half of our difficulties the remaining half can best be described as people problems and these you and I definitely can do something about now let's all remember this the customer doesn't have good service until he thinks he does with a good attitude and perhaps a bit of extra effort on all our parts he will have the service he deserves [Music] you