In a previous post, I shared my negative experience with ATT after they initially refused to work with my dad, who has Parkinson's. This one obviously hit close to home (I was MAD), so I blogged, tweeted and facebooked about it... as I mentioned in that post, I became "that guy."
This is a long-overdue follow-up to my original post, with how ATT made the situation right.
So, what does it take to make an angry customer happy? What does it take to make an angry customer turn into a fan? ATT succeeded in making this happen.
In this post, I'll share what ATT did to turn this situation into a positive one, what I believe they could have done to avoid it in the first place, and what we can all take from this situation.
After my dad having no luck at the ATT store, and receiving no help by calling ATT's customer service, my social media campaign began. I started by Facebooking about it. I was just venting at that point, but I was joined by many friends who had less than stellar opinions of ATT. Within a very short amount of time, a dozen of my Facebook friends had commented about how bad they thought ATT was.
I then wrote my blog post about the situation and sent it to @ATTCustomerCare.
After I sent my previous post to @ATTCustomerCare and @ATTtina, I received a direct message followed by a phone call within hours from @ATTtina, a customer service manager in Baton Rouge. She immediately identified an existing policy at ATT that provides exceptions for disabilities. She emailed me with the form, and followed up to ensure that my dad's situation was taken care of. They provided an exception for him (existing policy for disabilities), including not only activating his service on the new phone, but providing free 411 and voice dialing for him.
So, what can we take from this?
1) Ensure you have the training & communition in place to prevent misinformation in the first place.
2) Empower your front line people to find solutions and satisfy customers.
3) You will have slip-ups. Be willing to clean up the mess and work to fix it, like @ATTTina did for me
ATT, you probably could have avoided this with better broad-level training on existing policies, but at the end of the day, you made this angry customer happy. Thanks!
