An entry in the “They don’t get it” list: Cox

I used the chat function on Cox Communication’s web-site this week because there was an outage. Actually, they claim they were “doing maintenance” and that is why Cox was down, but at 2PM on a Monday, unless it is emergency maintenance, they are not doing maintenance. In other words, it’s an outage.

The chat agent was a little slow on the uptake, but I don’t know how many simultaneous chats they have to run, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

There had just been another outage two days before, so I have two recent data points on the script that the agents seem to be following. It goes like this:

1. When the customer says, “Hi this is Joe Blow. I would like credit for the service outage that is occurring right now.” Type back, “May I ask who I am speaking with? [sic]” The customer says, “Joe Blow.”
2. When the customer has re-given his name, the agent types: “Hi, Joe. What can I do for you today?” The customer says, “I would like credit for the service outage that is occurring right now.”
3. The agent then says, “What is the date of the service outage?” The customer says, “Today, December 8.”
4. The agent says, “The system generated an unchangeable credit of $X.XX. Should I go ahead and process that?” Yes, of course. Since this is generally one day’s worth of service charges, take it and wrap this up.
5. OK, so far this is just highly inefficient, but nothing is wrong. The agent then says, “We have a promotion to go to 2 GB/s speed at an additional cost of only $50 a month. May I go ahead and process that change?”
6. Whoa! We have not finished with the dealing with the current OUTAGE and the agent is trying to upsell. When the customer says “No thank you.” the agent moves to…
7. “I notice you have an older modem. We can upgrade you to a newer modem [that won’t work with the extenders you own] for only $40 more a month. Should I go ahead and do that?”
8. “No, thank you. All I need is the service credit.”
9. “We are running a promotion that you combine your cell phone with your WiFi. Should I go ahead and tell you more about that?”
10. “No, thank you. All I need is the service credit.”
11. Agent disconnects.

Someone at Cox should reconsider that the time to up-sell someone on services is not when the person is saying there is an outage. Maybe put more effort into providing a network that works?

UPDATE: The THIRD service outage in a week occurred yesterday. Same script. Same attempts to upsell.