A Great Service Encounter Courtesy of Cincinnati Bell

Cus­tomer ser­vice is mar­ket­ing.  In fact it is one of the most impor­tant ele­ments of mar­ket­ing.  You may not ini­tially think of it that way.  Many equate mar­ket­ing to adver­tis­ing.  I would bet that if you asked most peo­ple about Cincin­nati Bell’s mar­ket­ing, they would say “who is Cincin­nati Bell?”  Those who actu­ally know  of Cincin­nati Bell might likely men­tion recent ad cam­paigns fea­tur­ing Nick Lachey as a either a kind of Santa like pitch man hand­ing out phones or run­ning around town being chased by scream­ing girls like some­thing from an old Bea­t­les movie because he has wifi enabled on his phone.  Their adver­tis­ing, like most adver­tis­ing,  is good, not great.  It is not some­thing that you would feel com­pelled to remark about.  Their cus­tomer ser­vice how­ever, is remark­able — hence my post.

A few days ago our Cincin­nati Bell Wire­less bill arrived in the mail.  Nor­mally, I don’t pay much atten­tion to bills, but it seemed a lot heav­ier than usual, so I opened it.  It turns out that we went over our allo­ca­tion of min­utes by quite a bit.  The added weight was due all of the extra pages detail­ing the numer­ous calls we made last month.  While there were sev­eral log­i­cal rea­sons for this anom­aly in usage, the bot­tom line was that our monthly bill had nearly dou­bled.  AAAGGHHH!

I reviewed the bill with my wife, and it looked as if it checked out.  Yes we had some valid rea­sons for the extra calls, but we clearly went over our allot­ted min­utes.  It looked like we were going to have to suck it up and pay the higher amount.

I decided that it might be worth mak­ing a call to Cincin­nati Bell’s cus­tomer ser­vice line to see if they might be able to help us out.  Based on my expe­ri­ences with other cell phone providers I was not very opti­mistic about what was about to hap­pen.  I fig­ured that I would be given the run around, passed to a man­ager, and told TOO DAMN BAD — but I am a glut­ton for pun­ish­ment so I called anyway.

To my pleas­ant sur­prise, I was treated to the best cus­tomer ser­vice I have ever expe­ri­enced from a mobile phone provider.  My call was quickly answered by a nice young woman named Jen­nifer.  I explained my sit­u­a­tion to her, and that I was clearly at fault.  I said I know that you don’t have to help me, but I was hop­ing that you might be able to do some­thing.  She could have eas­ily said no, and I would have paid.  Again, I was at fault.  This would have been a sat­is­fac­tory response.  But because Cincin­nati Bell appar­ently views this as an oppor­tu­nity to mar­ket their ser­vices, they did some­thing remarkable.

Jen­nifer did a lit­tle research and informed me that Cincin­nati Bell had a new pro­gram that would increase my min­utes and LOWER my bill.  Because she val­ued my busi­ness, she said that she would apply this plan retroac­tively — low­er­ing my old bill too!  No has­sle.  No pass­ing me to a man­ager.  I had a prob­lem.  She fixed it and actu­ally improved my sit­u­a­tion with­out me hav­ing to ask.  That is great marketing.

I then asked Jen­nifer to con­nect me to her man­ager.  When her man­ager got on the line I took a minute to com­pli­ment Jen­nifer and the ser­vice offered by Cincin­nati Bell.  I told her that now I under­stand why Cincin­nati Bell does not require cus­tomers to have con­tract — because they take care of their cus­tomers.  I fin­ished the call by inform­ing her that I would be writ­ing a post about the entire expe­ri­ence on my web site and telling every­one I know about how won­der­ful Cincin­nati Bell Wire­less is to work with.

So back to Mar­ket­ing.  The most pow­er­ful form of Mar­ket­ing is Word of Mouth mar­ket­ing.  By cre­at­ing a remark­able ser­vice expe­ri­ence, one that is so dif­fer­ent from the com­pe­ti­tion, Cincin­nati Bell Wire­less gave me some­thing to talk about.  I am now spread­ing the word for them — free of charge and in a way that res­onates more than any adver­tise­ment.  Bot­tom line.  If you are shop­ping for cell phone providers and cus­tomer ser­vice is impor­tant to you, I encour­age you to check out Cincin­nati Bell Wireless.

Thanks to Jen­nifer and the Cincin­nati Bell Wire­less team for fix­ing my bill and mak­ing my night and giv­ing me some­thing to write about.

Cincin­nati Bell Cus­tomer Sup­port Overview