We Just Tried to Kill Our Cable

$227.00.....I opened my latest Spectrum cable bill rather than mindlessly auto paying it as usual. After I caught my breath, I wondered what happened to my $99.00 per month "commitment". Surcharges, equipment fees, bundles and HBO had all conspired to do me in.

Time to strike back at the multi headed beast. But being my skeptical self, I realized that the path to freedom would not be easy. Separations never are. While not looking forward to the experience, I had to set out on my task if for no other reason than to let "them" know I was annoyed. Actually, I asked my wife to do this, since she's so much better in these situations....ok, I'm weak.

A simple email should suffice, explaining our dissatisfaction and requesting a response and appropriate consideration. Wait for it......nothing. No acknowledgement what so ever. So we decided to fall back on that channel of choice for my generation, a phone call. While it initially started out well, it ultimately morphed into an upsell effort, at which point my wife came crashing into my office while on the phone livid. By now, all we wanted was to have Internet provided so we could stream our services, but the message was simply being ignored by a heavily scripted agent. You could almost see the scripting tree being played on the agent's screen as Nancy went from one shade of red to purple in anger. Finally, message received. All we had to do is take our existing equipment to the nearest Spectrum office and our service would be converted upon delivery.

Appointment set and delivery made the next day, except for the fact that the store had never heard of our conversation, nor appointment. Time for the nuclear option. Just stop our service entirely. Certainly they replied, but you have to call into their office to do that.

You get my point.

Our business could have been saved for Spectrum, possibly at a lower monthly spend, but none the less we could have been salvaged. But given the total breakdown between communication channels within Spectrum's organization, this quickly degenerated into our looking for the exit. Whether this is a technology flaw or cultural with Spectrum, situations such as this are played out possibly thousands of times every day by a variety of companies and their customers. Communication channels are heavily siloed within organizations and cross channel coordination is simply nonexistent. This environment simply will not stand the test of time in today's customer centric market since they expect answers regardless of their choice of modality. And they expect their conversations and records to be up to date and current in the case of recurring calls/contacts in different channels.

The CX industry talks about omnichannel as a feature within any number of platforms, however it really has to be part of the company's culture as well. Well thought out plans and models of customer interactions which seamlessly allow for the customer to have easy access to answers regardless of the contact method. And that information to be consistently available even if the contact channel changes during the interaction.

Then there's the empowerment of the agent, moving away from heavily scripted responses in time of extreme customer dissatisfaction.

But I won't even go there.......