Customer Service Advice
AT&T Yahoo Sucks...And It Doesn't Matter
AT&T Yahoo sucks. They did me wrong today. When you get "SBC Yahoo! services suspended" on all your business email accounts, you know it will be a bad day.
I often wonder if there are others out there like me.
When I get really bad customer service, I abandon a vendor for life.
I make a personal vow never to do business with them again.
I don't do it easily. The poor service has to truly be egregiously bad.
To date, there are only three vendors on my never-again list: Citibank, Sony and HP. HP even annoyed me to the point where I wrote an HP Sucks article that you can find on my site.
But today finds me adding a fourth: AT&T Yahoo. Actually, I think I have to ban them both --- so I'm really adding a fourth and a fifth.
AT&T, you are officially banned for life.
Yahoo, you are officially banned for life.
(OK, it may take me a month or two to transition to somebody else but you both are on notice --- soon you will be banned from my life once and for all!)
I don't enjoy this process. Sometimes, it's like getting a divorce. You love the person but you can't live with them. In a matter of minutes, these vendors' poor service converted me from being a vendor-lover to being a vendor-hater.
On this most recent banning, I do have a few regrets. Previously Ameritech Yahoo, then SBC Yahoo, and now AT&T Yahoo - the name seems to change all the time, but this is a vendor that was good to me for quite a while.
Using my SBC DSL lines and my Yahoo email accounts, I started and grew a number of businesses.
I won't go into the details on how badly I was screwed by AT&T Yahoo just recently. It was one of those classic things where it was partly my fault but their processes and systems were stupid beyond belief, and the end result was that I lost an entire day and a few clients as a result of their idiocy.
What annoys me most about it is that their poor customer service will barely slow them down. The heads of customer service at these companies no doubt continue to collect their large paychecks, and shareholders keep throwing money at these companies, driving up the market valuation.
As a startup entrepreneur, if I screw up, my customers walk and it hurts me. But AT&T and Yahoo will never notice that I am gone.
Lord knows, my boycott of Citibank and HP certainly hasn't yet sent them down the toilet.
I think these big companies realize they can screw us little guys and live to tell the tale.
Their motto must be something like this: "We can happily screw some of the people some of the time, but just make sure we are never screwing all of the people all of the time."
Most of the articles on my site have a point to them. This one is more of a ramble.
I guess the moral of the story is: It's good to be a big company because you can screw up and you can screw people, and life goes on.
Small companies don't have that luxury, do they?
p.s. you can link to this article from your website and support this cause by copying the following code and adding it to a page on your website:
Share this article
Additional Resources for Entrepreneurs
Conversation Board
Have you had a similar poor customer service experience with AT&T or Yahoo? Please contribute so others can benefit -- or just to vent your frustrations. You are definitely not alone.