How companies plan and execute awful ideas

November 7th, 2008

Just the latest example of awful customer service. T-Moblie in the USA allows you to choose to page mobile users instead of leaving a voicemail. Problem is that if the person you’re trying to reach has turned off paging, they just throw away the message – and they always offer to let you page people.
Any sensible person would know that the right thing to do is to turn off the option to page people who’ve turned off paging right.
T-Mobile’s response is a rather opaque and crazy justification which makes absolutely no sense. Evil bastards right?
Well, I don’t think so – even though companies like T-Mobile may very well do nasty things in the pursuit of money but this doesn’t make them money and annoys their users – there’s no sense here at all.
I suspect that this was thought through by someone who got it wrong – not an uncommon outcome. But they justified it, and everyone agree it and internally they’re lined up behind it.
And now people are complaining and T-Mobile are trying to explain what they were thinking instead of re-thinking why they’re doing this. They’re frantically asking internally “Why don’t people understand this?” not “Oh God – they’re right”.
I can think of maybe 20 examples off the top of my head where I’ve been in a small or large company doing exactly this. Somehow clients become the enemy when they depart from our perfect logic – people we’d happily buy a beer any other time become suspect when they ask for a refund. Even when they’re obviously not operating by our rules, they’re often doing the obvious thing and are baffled by why we don’t see how dumb we are being.

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