Mind your manners, TSTT

I write in response to Vicki Boodram’s article: ‘The Lost Customer Service Art’ in Newsday’s Business Day, July 13, 2005. Here is an experience I had recently with a Miss Redhead at TSTT when I informed her that I had not received my March, April, May and June bills. My phone had been disconnected in May without prior notice, and I only found out the amount on my March and April bills when I went to their Trincity office to pay them, and was forced to pay a reconnection fee of $34.50 in order to have my phone reconnected that afternoon. This seems to be the latest TSTT scam to get more money out of their customers, as I was surprised at the number of people who had lined up that morning to do the same thing.

Miss Redhead asked if I had called TTPost, and when I asked her what for, she said maybe there was some problem with my address. Excuse me, I said, I have not moved from this address recently and TTPost had not found anything wrong with it since my last bill in February. She was obviously trying to shift responsibility to TTPost and refused to apologise for TSTT not sending me my bills. She also did not offer to rectify the situation. I then had to ask her to see to it that copies of my March, April, May and June bills be put in the mail immediately. She said she would do so, but I have no confidence that she will, as throughout the entire conversation she had refused to take responsibility for her company’s negligence.

So this is another item to be added to the list of Miss Boodram’s ten items on customer service. Refusing to apologise, taking responsibility, and “passing the buck” is done with alarming frequency in this country, no doubt as a result of mimicing the example set by our “leaders.” Further, I am sure that Miss Redhead has been trained by TSTT in “good customer service.” (see item 9), or she wouldn’t have been put to answer my call in the first place. So what’s the problem here? Why didn’t she, in spite of being trained, apologise and offer to solve the problem, but left it up to me to ask her to do so? What advice would you give her and TSTT? More importantly, would either of them read it and act on that advice?

The article also noted the well-known saying, “If you don’t take care of your customer, somebody else will.” In this case, where else can I, a customer, go for good customer/telephone service in Trinidad and Tobago?  I’m always very distressed to read in the local media, canned/US/textbook advice-articles, downloaded from the Internet or cribbed from some book or article published in the US which bear little or no relationship to the social, cultural, economic and political realities that impact on “customer service” in Trinidad. That “saying” applies to the North American environment where the word “monopoly” does not exist, and the customer can go elsewhere! The US society is based on a free enterprise system, unlike ours where monopolies such as WASA, TTPost, TTEC, TCL, TSTT, to name a few, affect our everyday lives negatively, and are largely responsible for holding back our development and that of the wider Caribbean.

Sandra Barnes
26 Plumrose Court
Maracas Gardens
St Joseph