Guest Editorial: Walking the Line Between Service and Sales

I was at the market the other day, rushing like always to pick up a few last-minute items for the big dinner I was preparing for friends the next night. We all are rushing these days it seems, so often too busy to stop even for a minute to see what’s happening around us, and on this particular occasion, I was multitasking too -- catching up on my cell phone with an old friend in Atlanta. We both are retired from the phone company, armed with plenty of war stories, and we were sharing them that afternoon. I now work in the telecom industry as a channel partner, so the memories of hard times past return to me as insistently as waves lap at the shoreline.

I was at the self-checkout line, waiting for my change. My bill was $6.98, I paid with a $10 bill, and so I was expecting $3.02, but the machine was out of coins. How ironic it was that I didn’t get those 2 cents. I had been railing about an insensitive comment I had gotten from a service rep who either didn’t know or didn’t care about helping my customer, and here I was at the market, not getting my change. My 2 cents didn’t seem to count! I told the attendant, and she gave me my money, but she looked at me as if I was beneath contempt to even ask for such a paltry sum.

But let’s just think that one over. If the bill had been $6.98, and I was out of change, could I have still gotten my groceries? I don’t think so. The cashier won’t let me pay less than the total, because she’ll have to make up for it later. But how many people, in their hurry to get home, walk out without their change? And how often is it 98 cents instead of 2?

In so many ways, the system seems stacked against the consumer. We go to the doctor and can wait for an hour or more to be seen, and then only get five minutes of the doc’s time because he is being driven by some HMO or insurance company, or the partners in his practice, to focus on production. It just takes too much effort on the part of the consumer to fight back. Big business can wait us out.

As a liaison between business customers needing telephone service and the phone companies who provide it, I walk a very fine line. Often, my own objectives get lost in translation. As part of an interconnect company selling PBXs and key systems in the Southeast, my role mostly is to facilitate the sale of those boxes by providing seamless installations of network services. My bread and butter is business lines, DSL, PRI and point-to-point T1s. (Yes, I get to spread my wings occasionally installing fancy-pants networks connecting Georgia to Tokyo and the moon, but for the most part it’s pretty pedestrian stuff.) The one thing customers need is reliability.

What was the irritating comment I was railing about to my friend? The service rep said that forwarding calls from my customer’s old number to his new one was a “free service” and not supported by the company. She actually said to me: “If it works, it works, and if it don’t, it don’t!” I was beyond flabbergasted by her trifecta of bad grammar, bad manners and bad information! Bringing it to the attention of her supervisor only caused me further grief. Finally, I was able to get a more compassionate response by calling back into the company, and my customer’s business continuity was restored. But not before I was challenged by my partner to recall that my job is to produce revenue, not address customer service issues.

But how can I maintain any level of integrity, the sharpest tool in my toolbox, if I ignore service issues and treat my customers as only sources of revenue? The fact is I can’t. But the executives in my company are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They need the carrier partnership to be able to sell boxes, beyond the compensation it delivers. And I need the confidence of my customers to sell them anything. I can’t just put it in and then forget it. I have to do whatever is necessary to make things right. That’s pretty tough to do when I have someone like “Brandy” on the other end of the line with an attitude far beyond her competence.

This lapse of diligence is everywhere, and we allow it because we are harried and tired, and we are trying to carve out a personal life from the overcharged world we work and compete in. And too, because our livelihood sometimes depends on overlooking the very failures we try to prevent, we become as guilty as those we criticize. But as channel partners, we have the ability -- really, the obligation -- to make a difference. And when we do, we can get back to what’s really important -- that life we are all rushing home to.

Sue Martinez sells carrier services for an interconnect company in the Southeastern United States, a post she has held for two years. Martinez is a former Bell employee, beginning as a bilingual service rep for Southern Bell in 1973 and retiring as a major account manager in 2000.