Yesterday, I wrote a long post about the problem I had with Cablevision. Today, things were made right. It’s a pretty crazy story. Keep reading for the story, or just skip down to the bold bullets at the bottom by Chuck Norris to see the bottom line of what they did right.
As I mentioned, I wrote a post yesterday about my Cablevision experience, and posted it on Twitter and Facebook. That night, I think around 8:00, I got a tweet from someone who said he worked at Cablevision. Turns out, he’s the VP of Media Relations for the company (on a side note, I followed him, and he seems like a really cool guy, totally independent of anything related in this post, and disregarding that he’s a Viking fan. I recommend following him @jimmaiella [*Edit – I don’t know how I made the mistake, but Jim is actually a Jet fan. I’m sorry for what you will go through this year as a Jet fan Jim, and for what you’ve been enduring]). He wanted to make things right. I sent him an email, and he said he was going to make things happen first thing in the morning. He seemed sincerely sorry for what had happened.
By 11:30am, I received a phone call from someone else who apparently had the power to act. He also seemed sincerely sorry and tried to work with me. First, he gave me more than the promised 2/3 month credit on my bill. Second, he said he’d send out a senior tech to see what he could do, even if it was temporary, so that I wouldn’t have to have waited a total of 3-4 weeks. This guy was Scott, and he was awesome.
Within an hour, I had three techs at my house, all at a fairly high level from what I gathered. These guys were a class act. I don’t know if it’s appropriate to mention their names here (but one did have the same name as a super hero who would dominate Wolverine…looking at you Terrence Knight), but every one of them was friendly, professional, informative, and worked hard to make things happen. I did pass on their names with a positive report to both Scott, and Jim, who are apparently pretty high up. They spent an hour here, and found a problem. Oddly enough, it was a problem that could have been fixed on the very first visit. They took care of that, and my internet has been working flawlessly ever since.
It’s funny, you’d think I’d be pretty mad that the whole situation could have been avoided right away if the first tech didn’t miss something. I’m not though. People make mistakes, and that happens. I’m honestly more frustrated with how things were handled and the lack of internal communication early on. That was just people being ill equipped at their level, and people dropping the ball along the way. All that is done now. Here’s the bottom line: Eventually people that “shouldn’t” have been involved did, took initiative, and made things right. That’s what a good company does, and here Cablevision did it.
So, here’s the bottom line, and what Cablevision did right:
-They had people looking for problems and monitoring social media. And it wasn’t someone with no power, it was a VP. They know how important this stuff is.
-Someone at a high level cared enough to take action. I’m sure this guy has more important things to do. He didn’t think so. He contacted me and personally made sure this was taken care of.
-Someone who had power tried to make things right. You can let people deal with phone calls all day. If they don’t have the power to do something about it, it means nothing. Someone who had the power to do it, did.
-They made sure I had continual contact. Scott, whose position I don’t know other than it was significant, gave me his personal direct line so I could contact him for anything, now and future, and didn’t have to go through Cablevision’s system. That is trust, and that is helpful. The only reason that I used it was to tell him how great his team did when they got here. Having it though, made a huge difference.
-They made it right. Scott understood the situation, got people involved, and fixed it. He also helped with the bill. He apologized, claimed fault, and backed it up.
So there you have it. There was a problem, but they fixed it, and I’m impressed with the speed that it came with. Service like that dwarfs the tough waiting period and mistakes prior. Thank you Cablevision.
Holy szhniit, this is so cool thank you.