I received a pleasant email earlier this week from Ann Nishida Fry, Senior Manager for Corporate Communications at Hawaiian Telcom in response to my earlier post about problems encountered trying to fax requested documents to the company’s customer service office. I guess this means someone on their staff checks this blog at least occasionally.
She explained:
I understand you’ve had some trouble faxing in required documents to our Customer Service office. Please accept my apology on our company’s behalf. The fax machine (643-0001) malfunctioned over the past weekend and has been fixed. This fax machine is normally operational on weekends.
She said arrangements can also be made to hand deliver documents by calling the company’s Consumer Sales Center in downtown Honolulu and asking to speak to a supervisor.
That is useful information. It would also be useful to have customer service staff, and their written communications, make the same offer to other customers.
That said, my document fax went through smoothly this time around, and I got a quick telephone response from a friendly customer service rep to wrap up the account changes I was making.
Both Oceanic and Hawaiian Telcom have their detractors, often based on which company has pissed you off most recently. So I’ll probably be trying to compare their services side by side and see what I think.
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I challenge anyone and everyone who is not the owner of a popular local blog to call Hawaiian Telcom sometime and make the recommended request to speak to a supervisor. You will find out pretty quickly what really happens.
I used to think they must train their people to lose the message, or to deny these supervisors actually exist, but after many years of problems I’ve changed my thinking about that. I believe it’s more likely that there are penalties for any customer service rep who refers a problem to a supervisor, even though they are not entrusted with enough power to actually resolve anything but the most basic problems. That’s bad management IMO and why HT has such a poor reputation. We only keep the land line for business purposes and advertise as little as possible in the HT Yellow Pages, due to consistent and ongoing problems.
In my experience there has been some ebb and flow in Oceanic’s customer service over the years, but Hawaiian Telcom’s has been almost universally bad.
Can’t think of a single reason for the comment I left on this post to have been deleted, since there was nothing abusive about it. OK, that’s not exactly true. I can think of only one, and it’s not making me feel very open to future participation.
I didn’t delete it. Just got off the plane from Atlanta. I’ll try to track down what happened. It was a great comment.
the telephone companies fax machine broke. that is really really humorous…