Take pride in your work...

Please forgive me for getting up on a soap box – a recent experience with my cable provider has me seeing stars.

 

·      Companies

·      Need competition

·      To keep them on their toes.

·      It seems to me that Cable companies

·      Have limited competition and thus no reason 

·      To be thoughtful enough to provide excellent service.

 

Last week my internet service was “down”. A visit to the provider’s website and chat service showed that they were aware of the outage, but not when it would be fixed. I’m okay with that, but not with the fact that they won’t keep users (like me) updated. These are technology companies; but any problem – big or small, requires users to deal with off-shore low-tech call centers whose employees are minimally trained, given no access to real-time system or account information, and limited authority to deal with problems. They’re given scripts to follow and anything beyond those is beyond their capacity. And the field technicians fixing outages don’t seem to have the ability to provide real-time status updates, which sounds incredible to me. Since I presume they could if they wanted to, they apparently don’t think that’s necessary. So, back to my original point, without competition, they’re not motivated to be innovative, thoughtful, or service minded. Despite that, I would hope they’d have enough pride in their work to get this right. Don’t be like these cable companies: take pride in your work today.

 

Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856 – 1915): American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several U.S. Presidents.