Untie Their Hands or Let Them Go!

AT&T is at it again with the "Big Brother" act. My frustrations with them from years ago notwithstanding, it seems to me if you're going to 'have' employees you need to 'trust' employees. Giving them no semblance of independence in the performance of their daily tasks seems overly paternalistic. If you can't trust them to do the right thing, especially on minor tasks, then why even have them doing anything at all?

Case in point: I travel to the Naval Air Station at Whidbey Island, WA several times a month. Whidbey is on the coast of the Salish Sea and has a direct line-of-sight view over to other islands in the San Juans. Among those is Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Inevitably when I travel to Whidbey (USA) AT&T's coverage weakens and the cell service from Victoria, BC (Canada) wins out. And even though I'm not using my phone to place or receive an international call, AT&T sees fit to automatically charge me $10/day for International Day Pass. No opt-in... just an auto-charge applied to my bill. And every time it happens I have to contact them and have the charge credited.

That $10 charge today took 23 minutes with a Customer Service Agent to resolve. The worst part of the experience? When the polite agent indicated that they understood the issue but had to wait for their supervisor to intervene and review their work to "approve' issuing the $10 credit to my account. 23 minutes of a rep's time and a supervisor's approval to authorize a clearly warranted $10 credit. How empowering is that for poor Rhea who handled the call?

C'mon AT&T... if you can't let your CSAs determine validity for routine minor credits like this one, why even have them in the first place? I guarantee it cost you more than $10 to resolve the issue and you still made me hacked off at you for doing so. Untie their hands and let them actually make intelligent decisions independently. Give them a delegation of authority process that makes simple easy issues like this a 'courtesy' for the customer rather than a painful aggravation.

You'd be surprised what granting a little autonomy will do for employee morale. All these years later and you still haven't figured that part out yet. Sigh.