TechCrunch decides to use its powers for evil | Hacker News Reader

TechCrunch decides to use its powers for evil

techcrunch.com

20 pointslotusleaf198716 comments

AT&T is going to fire this person's manager, and then buy the next company he moves to so they can fire him again. What a catastrophic breach of PR policy.

Stuff like this is going to happen more and more; people don't realize that Twitter is a broadcast medium, or that they are seriously getting published every time they reply to an online media story.

Unfortunately, the idea that AT&T CSR's see customers as "crazy idiots" is at least marginally newsworthy. You can't call this story "evil". Bait, yes. But valid.

It just seems completely petty and unworthy of TC's attention. Really a whole post on this girl who dared to challenge MG on Twitter? She's not even as bad as half of the TC commenters. It just seems like this girl at most tossed a dirt-clod at TC's tank, and TC dropped a nuclear bomb on her life. It seems like this is a subtle threat by TC to not challenge or oppose them.

I really hope it was worth the page-views.

I mostly agree. I don't think anyone would defend this woman's maturity level but it is her personal twitter account. She clearly wasn't representing the company and MG's been posting non-stop attacks on AT&T since the Verizon announcement. It's almost like he was trying to goad someone higher up at AT&T but when that failed he settled for a low level support rep.

Getting a young mother fired to take a cheap shot at AT&T is certainly not what I consider classy.

Holy, does that ever not matter. If you don't want to get in the news as a representative of your employer, don't talk about your employer in public. There is no such thing as a "private Twitter account". This woman picked up a bullhorn and announced that in her capacity as an AT&T CSR she deals with "crazies" and "idiots".

You're basically saying, "it sucks that she didn't realize she had picked up a bullhorn and maybe people should cut her a break". Nobody is obliged to cut her a break. I bet nobody does.

Petty? Sure. Unworthy? What does that even mean? Someone posted an insider's take on AT&T's customer service vis a vis network complaints. TC ran it. Would the WSJ do the same? Probably not, but at the macro view of the WSJ, AT&T network quality is too small a story to address anyways.

If Consumerist had run this same story, nobody would think it was "evil". It would get a comparable level of attention. The CSR, who made a grave error, would still have been fired.

customer service rep is an "insider"? Technically, they're "inside", so yes. But usually, the word indicates privileged information, not random bloviation (which is what this CSR was doing).

Turnover is high for customer service reps. If she was to the point of calling her users "crazy idiots" she was about done anyhow, at that point, customer service people either quit or are fired, unless something is very wrong with both the CSR and the company. Continuing on the job after that point is unhealthy for all involved.

Running a customer service organization well is /difficult/ - and being a CSR in a customer service organization that is not run well is /very difficult/

Story about something someone said on quora, story about something someone said on twitter, story about a tweet in response to a story about someone calling me fat on facebook, story about an idea seen in the comment section on hacker news, story trashing a competitor.

There, I saved you a few days of reading TechCrunch.

This is OT, but I'm surprised that AT&T hasn't come up with some way to automatically detect that your call has been dropped. It's not a trivial problem with solutions that are prone to exploitation, but it'd be a step in making customers happy. Your bill would have something at the top that says something like, "We noticed that we dropped 2 of your calls this month and are terribly sorry. We're going to credit you $X for the trouble. Thanks for staying with our company, and we value your business".

As it is, the best they came up with was an app where you could complain.

Imagine a mobile company that could detect that they had really bad coverage where you lived, and directed you to a competitor with better coverage. Wouldn't that inspire confidence and loyalty? That they're there to provide a great service?

"That my three year history with AT&T has been plagued by a massive amount of dropped calls, failed texts, and broken data connections?"

The really crazy thing for me is that someone would stick with a company providing them with really bad service for 3 years without looking elsewhere.

eh, I would bet you five bucks that I have much lower per customer margins than AT&T, and I'm fairly certain that giving a refund to 'every crazy person' is by far the best business decision.

First off, it means that you don't wear down your customer service representatives dealing with people who can't be helped. This person has been 'worn down' and is probably not going to be very helpful to your customers at all. It's a common thing; customer service is a hard job. It pays poorly and offers few opportunities for advancement. If you keep customers who can't be helped around, your customer service people often spend the majority of their time on people who can not be helped, something that would be incredibly frustrating even if the job paid okay and had reasonable opportunities for advancement.

Secondarily, even if the person still feels like you gave them poor service, the 'at least I got a refund' quite often mollifies them to the point of not complaining (or at least complaining less) in public. I mean, I don't want to let myself be held hostage by public complaints; some people will complain no matter what you do. But, I think that a refund when a customer is unsatisfied is quite often the easiest, most polite, and in the end, cheapest way to fire a customer who needs firing.

This is not that evil given the fact that she called ATT customers horrible things a.k.a "Crazies", but this is rather personal post. These type of personal posts/opinions are appearing more and more in TC, instead of publishing them on TC these authors should post them on their personal blogs.

Is it possible that the Twitter-er in question is not a real AT&T rep?

I've been in New York for 3 months and less than half of my calls go through without a problem. Haven't called to complain yet mostly because I don't want to spend an hour on the phone.

I swear I'm not crazy either.. :-)

I'm used to living in Canada where customer service is a joke, but Verizon customer service is unreal! I've never had to wait more than 2 minutes to speak to someone, and they actively look for ways to discount my bill when I call in.

Twitter is not your friend.

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