Posts Tagged customer service

Ameritech and me

For the two and a quarter years that I have lived in Bloomington, I have restrained myself from complaining about Ameritech.

I’ve finally had it — I cannot hold back anymore. I had to call them for customer service last week and had yet another bad encounter. They just cannot get things right without making it complicated or taking multiple tries.

The sad part is that I am but a minor cog in the Ameritech system; other people have gone without service for a month and have never had their problems fixed. These problems have been so bad for so long that the five states that Ameritech has screwed over are finally ganging up on the company, and, thankfully, Indiana is in there.

Regulators from these states voiced their displeasure to the company in a meeting in Chicago. In response, Ameritech promised to have its service restored to “normal levels” by Dec. 31.

The problem is that it’s not good enough. Hoosiers need at least decent, if not good, phone service and Ameritech’s “normal level” of service is somewhere between awful and terrible.

When I moved here, it took them about three tries to get my phone service right — they gave me features I did not want and did not give me the features I wanted.

Let’s just say that of all the utilities that I’ve had to deal with in Bloomington, Ameritech has been the only one that has caused me any headaches. The others actually resolve problems quickly when they occur. On the other hand, Ameritech has lied to me about service issues, including a huge mistake that left me without phone service for several days last year.

Since then I have been on a personal quest to reduce Ameritech’s profits, and trust me, the company and its parent are making a lot of money.

After an exhaustive search in which I couldn’t find another local carrier, I decided my only recourse was to reduce the number of features on my phone, so the latest item I dumped was voice mail. It too proved to be a problem.

You see, I called the number listed on my phone bill for Ameritech Local Service, and I was routed into a telephone push button hell. First, they wanted to know if I was calling about service on the number I was calling from. Then, they wanted to know if I was calling to add or subtract service, and finally, they wanted to know my great-grandmother’s aunt’s uncle’s first name and country of birth.

I finally was rewarded with a human being, who immediately tried to convince me that dropping Ameritech’s VoiceMail ’98® service was going to be a terrible tragedy.

I explained to her that I was switching from Ameritech Voice Mail to a cheap Web-based voicemail service from www.evoice.com, and she said it wouldn’t be able to pick up while I was online. I told her it would, once I implemented call forwarding and busy line transfer — for less than the $5.95 Ameritech was rooking me for.

She deferred and asked me the next critical question, “How long have you had voice mail?”

I said, “Oh, two and a quarter years or so.”

“You’ll have to call another number, we can only cancel voicemail accounts that have been active for less than 30 days,” the voice on the other end of the line told me.

I told her I wasn’t going to press another button on my phone to disconnect my voicemail service. Between her and her supervisor, they transferred me directly to the voicemail help center, where the human being I connected with first asked me my phone number and then told me again that switching off Ameritech VoiceMail was going to be a terrible tragedy. I had to explain myself to her again before she gave up and told me that my voicemail would be disconnected within a few days.

Other relatively inexpensive alternatives to Ameritech’s voicemail service exist, including services that will pick up your phone while you are on the phone and send you e-mail alerts that somebody has left a message.

Hopefully, real competition and choice in local residential service will be the end of Ameritech, because trust me, as soon as a true competitor comes to town, I’m gone.

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Good service rare in Bloomington

Bloomington is, without a doubt, one of the nicest cities in the state of Indiana, in most categories. But there is one place where Bloomington has managed to be more miserable and God-awful than Indianapolis: restaurant service.

There is a great deal of potential in Bloomington, very little of it even remotely fulfilled; the restaurants usually make a reasonable effort at food quality, but then when it comes to the wait staff, Bloomington restaurants fall flat on their faces.

One recent example comes to mind, a restaurant that I enjoyed in the past, but has now been struck from my list of places worth visiting: Sangamar.

After returning early from my spring vacation, I met up with Jay, one of my friends here in Bloomington, at Sangamar, 110 N. Walnut St. We selected the restaurant over the Malibu Grill because I had enjoyed meals at the restaurant in the past, but little did we know the evening was going to be a disaster.

We entered the restaurant at 6:30 p.m. Our food arrived on the table about three minutes before 8. It took them an hour to tell us our waiter had given us the lunch menu by mistake and the items we had ordered were not readily available and they were preparing our items especially for us.

A mistake that could have been corrected by informing us of the error when they saw what we had ordered was magnified into an agonizing hour and a half wait; and when we finally got our meals, we were informed that we would only have to pay the lunch price for the meal.

Very kind of them, but I told the woman who delivered this “good news” that I wasn’t sure if she had given me a reason to return for another meal yet, and she told me other people would come to eat at the restaurant, even if I did not return.

Certainly this example is a bit on the extreme side; service is rarely so bad in this town that I won’t ever return to the restaurant because if I vowed never to return to restaurants that gave me bad service in this town, my dining experiences would be limited to Laughing Planet, Soma and Nick’s English Hut, the three hangouts within my normal budget range.

I have had a number of mediocre experiences in this town when it comes to wait staff. For example, waiters at the Malibu Grill have taken longer than necessary to bring me food and drinks and the staff at Denny’s ignored me standing at the door waiting to be seated. (I never went back. I go to the Waffle House instead).

All of this leaves me in a quandary. Every once in a while, I want to have a really good dining experience: a meal where both the food and the service come together to make it all worthwhile.

Sad to say, I have to have those meals an hour north in Indianapolis, a city so dreadfully boring and pointless I actually prefer going to the dentist for a filling than taking the time to visit it.

It would be really nice if one day Bloomington could have a real sit-down restaurant that featured good food and a decent wait staff. Here are my suggestions for ways to try and change what is Bloomington’s biggest restaurant problem.

First, stop tipping the bad waiters — tipping bad service only encourages bad service. For example, Jay and I left no tip for our waiter at Sangamar.

Second, tell your friends about the really bad experiences you’ve had, suggesting they try alternatives to the worst spots in town.

Third, tell your friends about the good experiences you’ve had in town. I never would have known about the Limestone Grill (the one beacon of light in the up-scale Bloomington restaurant category) if friends had not told me about it.

Finally, for all the restaurant owners out there, most of you do a really great job with the food, so it wouldn’t hurt to focus a little bit of attention on service. Good food and good service will make your restaurant the hottest joint in town.

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