What Taco Bell and MetroPCS have in common
by Randall McCarley
September 18th, 2006
Yesterday my wife had some bad food. She has been very (violently) ill ever since. Since we suspect food poisoning she can’t even breast feed our daughter.
Over the weekend, Metro PCS turned off my phone. That made me very ill, though on a different level.
So I have been taking care of my wife and our 1-month-old baby and trying to be calm while my phone wasn’t working.
Being a very internet-oriented person I went to Taco Bell’s web site and was told that the latest version of Flash is needed to display the site. Because of security issues I don’t use my computer as the admin so updating on the fly is a problem. When I said “no thanks” I was directed to the “noflash” version of the site… oops, there’s nothing there.
So now I can’t even get a phone number to call because I didn’t have the latest widget installed. I guess I could try calling information but since I’m not sure where the Taco Bell customer service center is located I don’t think that will do me any good. We don’t keep phone books in the house because 99.9% of the time I can find what I’m looking for online in less than 30 seconds.
The problem with MetroPCS is that they applied my payment to the wrong part of my account. This is not the first time this has happened. We got the issue identified and they were set to resolve it and I thought that would be a good time to bring up how I love their phone service but that their billing department had become a “serious customer service issue” with me. It was made clear that the woman I was talking to wasn’t interested. Now I have two serious customer service issues.
You see, MetroPCS offers the ability to make payments through their web site. This is so convenient that some of their branches use the site to make payments for their customers. I don’t use the web site because every time I do my phone ends up being turned off and it seems to always happen on a Friday and their billing department is closed on weekends.
I recently moved and didn’t realize the local branch uses the web site for payments. When I saw the receipt my gut twisted. And sure enough, there was a problem. A problem that took days to remedy.
Now the point of this post isn’t to knock on MetroPCS or Taco Bell. I like them both a great deal and don’t expect them to be perfect. The point is to show how their online business is considered a separate entity from the core business and why that is a problem. When I talked to the woman at MetroPCS it was clear she wasn’t interested in feedback about the web site because there wasn’t anything she could do with it.
That’s a problem.
Taco Bell may want to wake up to what Target is going through. It’s bad form to require users to have a plug-in and creating alternatives is not difficult. Taco Bell is excluding a big part of their audience - including the search engines by having their site structured the way they do.
MetroPCS is failing their customers by not readily accepting feedback or having the systems in place to work with that feedback. If a customer is going to take the time to explain how you can improve your service it is worth listening to!
Anyway, my phone is back online so if you were trying to reach me please try again. If you are one of the people I owe a phone call to, don’t worry - you’ll get it tomorrow and I apologize for any inconvenience. I guess it’s time I looked into backups for my phone service so that I can avoid future bad relations with my own customers.
And in a very similar vein you may want to look at this post at cre8asiteforums that covers the power of blogs and how customer reviews can greatly influence a business reputation. This is also covered in the book I am currently reading and I will post more about this later.
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