Selling to one big customer is usually better than selling to a lot of individual ones. It certainly makes the customer service operations lean and efficient.

The new service was preceded by a good marketing campaign, selling the benefits of helping the planet, saving resources, reducing costs, and decreasing the vendor’s carbon footprint. What’s not to like? The only thing we’d have to do is to use the some containers provided by the vendors; we could discard the ones we’d been using and which we paid for directly.

Came the Great Day, but we found that what was provided was way too big and massive for our particular needs and requirements. Not a problem! The vendor will exchange the big ones for some small ones, in a week or so. This was good news indeed, because we didn’t have any room to adequately store the big ones.

Well, it’s been some three months, and we still have the big ones for which we have no room. The online customer service web form doesn’t work much of the time, throwing various and sundry .NET error exceptions. At least that was an unequivocal result; we had no idea what happened, if anything, when the ‘Thank You for…’ message displayed instead of the error exception.

So we called the toll free number and after an interminable wait, enduring the usual canned nonsense about the importance of our call and how valuable our input is. Each time we’d explain the problem (‘X was promised by this date, which came and went’) to a different person, get a different tracking number, and apologies that were fanciful and, at least in the beginning, reasonably plausible.

In all cyclic activities, patterns sooner or later become discernable. Like, maybe the online customer service web form we just there for show, not for effect. And maybe the person who answered the customer service call merely had the duty, or it was farmed out, in either case requiring little by listening politely and offering a resolution and issuing a tracking number. It least, such dark musings fit the discerned patterns.

But more likely the real reason for all of this is a growing reality. Although we, as individuals, indirectly paid for the containers, we as individuals are not the vendor’s customers. The real customer is the City, which granted a service monopoly, similar to cable and ambulance and such. The City, or more accurately some city officials, are the ones that the vendor listens to, the ones that really count.

And that’s how this issue finally got taken care of after some three months. A few crafted words to the proper city official, who has a phone number not shown on the vendor’s web site, somehow resulting in a call from the vendor’s management, and problem solved. I try not to argue with success.

© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG

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