And Some People Have Blogs

Stanley Fish had a bad trip with the AT&T folks last month, and then he wrote all about it.

Seems that among the standard issues, chief among them the system lacking any iota of common sense and the difficulty in getting to talk to the correct person, Professor Fish tried to help AT&T with their grammar, which is terrible and apparently institutionalized.

Which reminds me of the episode of This American Life that documented one of the crew members' battle with Verizon over a phone bill that included Verizon claiming that they didn't have individual numbers at their desks among other malarkey. In the end they got everything straightened out but it left you wondering what you could do if you didn't work for a nationally syndicated radio show.

I wonder if the rise of blogging and the internets generally have had or will have any effect on customer service?

Comcast Must Die seems to have been pretty effective at least.

(despite my best efforts I was unable to locate the episode of This American Life in question. While google searches turned up other online references to said episode searching the TAL site for verizon and for 'phone bill' returned no hits. If you want to subscribe to the podcast the site is useful, if you want to look through the archives, well they don't really have them organized at all.)