Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

I'll start with the more positive encounter.

My family and I use a Triple Play package from Cablevision where we receive Internet, voice and cable TV services bundled together. We'd experienced no disruptions for the first nine months of the service.

Then one morning last week I discovered I didn't have a dial tone for my business line. After a brief (and failed) attempt to troubleshoot the problem myself, I called Cablevision's customer service line. Previous calls to Cablevision customer service have sometimes resulted in long delays. But using an automated touch-tone feature to pinpoint the source of the problem I was experiencing, I was quickly connected to a live agent.

After answering a handful of questions (we still had service on our other phone lines), the agent reset our modem and the dial tone was immediately restored. I was on the phone all of five minutes with the contact center agent. Granted, it was a simple problem but it was a huge relief to have it resolved quickly. And the agent was very helpful and courteous.

My experiences a few days later with PGi, an online meetings provider, was considerably less favorable. In my efforts to learn more about my options with a conference call I had previously recorded, I tried using PGi's chat service to connect with a live agent. I chose this channel because a) I had trouble locating a contact center number on their web site, which I found annoying and b) I thought it would be worth trying to resolve my problem quickly. Boy was I wrong.

After entering the details of my chat request, I was greeted with a prompt which informed me that I was second in queue with a wait time of 0.00. Ten minutes go by. Then twenty. Then thirty. Mind you, I'm busy multi-tasking while my chat request idles. Finally I gave up.

Here's the rub: two days after launching the chat request for help, I received an email from a PGi technical support leader apologizing for technical difficulties which prevented my chat request from reaching an agent.

I appreciate that someone finally responded to my request and that the tech support leader answered the questions that I had in her email response. And companies obviously encounter unpreventable technical snags. But I was miffed that I had to wait two days to receive any kind of a response.

The experience won't turn me off from trying chat again with PGi or any other company. I've used chat before and found it to be efficient. But the problem and corresponding delay in response illustrates why companies sometimes have such a tough time incenting customers to use lower-cost support channels instead of voice.