My internet stopped working today. I called clear and spent about 20 minutes trying to get them to fix it and refund me for the month. They told me that they won’t refund me unless I call them again when it starts working, and that it will take 2-24 hours to fix.

Given that I work from home usually, this really sucks. Clear also appears to have a history of bad service.

It’s inspired me to be way better with my own company.

Apologize

Clear never apologized to me. They never admitted any kind of fault on their end.

At my company, we always clearly apologize when something is our fault.

Explain what the problem is

Clear never explained to me what was actually happening and why it was broken.

My company can do a much better job is making it obvious to our customers what went wrong.

Don’t rely on customers for your issue tracking

In order to get an engineer out to fix the tower, Clear had to fill out a form that listed all the customers having trouble. The hilarious part is that THEY RELY ON CUSTOMER SUPPORT CALLS TO DETERMINE WHETHER AN AREA IS HAVING TROUBLE. I.e. if they get enough calls, then they decide to send out an engineer.

This is so silly. Why not have each modem check in every 5 minutes, and dynamically send out people to fix towers based on what modems don’t check in? I can’t imagine that would take more than a week or so to implement.

Either way, relying on your customers to tell you when you are failing is the worst strategy.

At my company, we have automated error tracking as well as other systems that constantly check to make sure things are working and alert is (munin, hoptoad, cron e-mails, lots of custom stuff).

Try to make everyone happy

Pissing off lots of customers is really costly. Word spreads.

My company can do better with this. There are occasionally cases where people are not happy with us after dealing with customer support.

Try to refund people for the opportunity cost

If your service costs $50/month, and it being broken costs a customer $100 (e.g. if they charge $100/hr), then refunding them for the 1 day that it doesn’t work makes no sense.

You have cost your customer $100, but you are only refunding them $1.60. Obviously, it would be silly to refund people based on their salary. The only thing that makes any sense then, is simply to refund people for an entire month whenever it breaks for more than an hour or so.

At my company, we generally already do this when someone has a problem. We should probably be making a greater effort to ensure that this always happens though.

If you are constantly having to argue with your customers, Something is wrong!

Clear obviously constantly has similar arguments with their customers. This indicates that something is very wrong.

It’s easy to start seeing customers as the vague masses beyond the castle walls—as people to be argued with and kept out. This is the wrong strategy though. In the long run, it’s better to deal with the underlying issues and welcome your customers in.

Solve common issues within 15 minutes to an hour

Waiting 6-24 hours for a critical service is unacceptable.

Don’t fall back on the industry standard

When I was complaining to the Clear person, she compared it to ATT and her cable company and how she has problems with them too. Are you kidding me?

Exceed expectations

Apple once replaced my phone despite it being about two weeks out of warranty. This made me really happy for like a week, and I told everyone about how awesome it was. Now I’m telling everyone about how crappy Clear is.

Don’t be sales rep driven

Clear is driven by sales, it seems. This screws the entire company, imo, because it means that in order to sell they have to have really good sales people, rather than a really great product that gets good reviews.

Make it easy to cancel

Clear is really hard to cancel. They try to lock you in as much as possible.

This likely just makes it even harder for the top management to see that their service sucks.

The easier it is to cancel, the quicker you will know about product issues.

Conclusion

I spend a lot of time trying to learn from really great companies. Learning from bad companies is great too.