John Linton .........when you clearly have absolutely no customer handling skills?
Someone sent me an email today asking why I was so incompetent in this key aspect of business management and why "my superiors" didn't fire me for my attitude to customers. Apparently his/her understanding of the relative status of a CEO who also happens to be a majority shareholder vis a vis the ability of anyone to "fire" him was obviously lacking.
My personal contribution to "helping Exetel customers" consists of:
1) Working the best part of 16 hours each week day, and over 8 hours each Saturday, Sunday and public holiday (except Christmas Day), on a wide variety of tasks that are all focused on delivering better services at lower prices than any other provider in Australia to Exetel's current and future customers.
2) Personally helping over 60 customers a day in the ways in which I am competent via direct email, forum or telephone contact (incidentally a higher number than we expect our CSRs to help).
3) Answering and writing another 200 emails each week day and 50 each weekend day dealing with various internal and external issues that relate to improving the services provided to Exetel's customers.
So, the short answer is that the person running any small business that lasts some sort of significant length of time usually understands very well how to handle all sorts of things and that includes how to communicate with other human beings. I stress that communicating with other human beings is the key aspect of all aspects of business and conferring different stati on different human beings using some arbitrary tags such as "Supplier", Customer" or "Employee" is a stupid and totally pointless distinction.....and one that my personal upbringing and education ensured that I would never make the mistake of attempting to do.
This particular enquiry about my "customer handling" skills was prompted by me posting on the Exetel forum a letter I had written to an Exetel customer who had made a complaint about four separate Exetel support engineers and who had then elaborated 'her' list of all things incompetent about those four Exetel engineers on a public forum. In the event that the details of what I said in the original response to the complainant and then my subsequent 're-clarification' of some other points are relevant to someone reading this they can be found here:
http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=288&t=30804
While I may be biased in reviewing the words written (being the author) I would think that an impartial reader would deem them to be courteously and moderately phrased in circumstances where one person is claiming that four other people acted in ways that each of the four other people categorically denied. The only collateral documentation/facts supported the four people's versions of events while contradicting the complainant's version in several key aspects. The other claims/statements by the complainant, judged on their standalone self determination, indicated that the complainant was far from correct in 'her' views on how ADSL connections work or how major carriers treat weekends and public holidays.
My personal views of individual people is that everyone should be treated with elementary courtesy until they clearly give up their rights to be treated in that way by their own actions/statements. I have been brought up to believe that no distinction can be made in dealing with other human beings irrespective of their age, gender, race or any other attribute. In other words no individual human being has any specific claim on how they should be regarded or treated other than how they conduct themselves. Not quite an OT "eye for an eye" view of relationships but its less violent social intercourse equivalent.
I have written over 550 entries to this blog during the past 20 months and over 12,000 Exetel forum replies and statements over the past 5 years and it should be obvious to anyone who had ever read what I write, and how I write it, that my view of the people I write for is that they are adults and that they have the same rights to express themselves as I do. Neither party has any claim of 'special privileges' in any dialogue - interchanges are between adults expressing their views - and in some cases choosing to express their views in ways that other people may not deem appropriate.
I don't regard anyone as a "Customer" when they write whatever it is they choose to write - I simply look at what is written and make my own personal determinations of what I think has been stated - and sometimes I make a guess at why statements have been made - by a human being.
In the latest case of some sensitive soul taking exception to how I treated a "customer" - get over it - anyone who maliciously attacks four people whom I am familiar with in public is not going to be meekly allowed to spread their lies and other calumnies without me taking exception to their cowardly rantings. While people I employ might not be my best friends or members of my immediate family I am certainly not going to allow them to be defamed by some random a**hole simply because 'she' thinks she can say whatever 'she' likes.
If running a business means letting a**holes demean the people you employ because they are a "customer" then the world has become a place that I'd rather not be associated with. Paying a few dollars less for the lowest priced broadband services in Australia confers no status or ability on anyone other than saving a few dollars a month - it certainly doesn't provide a license to behave like a total d***head.
So, I guess, I'm incapable of running a commercial business - unfortunately, at least right now, I see no other alternative so Exetel's 90,000+ customers will have no option in replacing the current CEO but, of course, have an easy remedy for any dislike they may have of how Exetel is managed.