Can You Hear Me Now?

Here's a job for New York's City Council: a law requiring companies to provide customers with contact information for the highest-level customer service department upon request. Sounds simple. But many companies reserve their most helpful customer service experts for those of us who become detectives to track them down.

When companies initially sell us a service, government should have no regulatory role beyond banning fraud. At that point we're not customers yet and the free market allows us to pick a competitor if we don't like how we're being treated.

But what happens when we're already customers and the businesses profiting from our patronage put up roadblocks to meeting their obligations? Switching to a competitor at that point is a cumbersome option that generally won't solve the immediate problem. The free market suggests companies that provide inadequate service will lose out to competitors who do make customers happy. But we've reached the point where government needs to make sure they're doing the right thing. Keeping customers by keeping them happy isn't enough of an incentive.

AOL won plenty of unwanted attention recently for efforts to prevent subscribers from cancelling their subscriptions. This is perhaps the most glaring example of a growing problem with companies that seem to think customers can be treated like roaches visiting the Roach Motel ("they check in but don't check out.")

Customer service departments at phone companies, cable providers, credit card issuers and most other services use a tiered system for helping us. The first person is authorized to do little more than read back account information and fix obvious errors, like an interest charge on a credit card that was actually paid in full. The second person, a supervisor, can do a little bit more, and sometimes there's even a third uber-supervisor who has actual authority.

But the holy grail of customer service is the "executive" complaint department that customers can only reach by calling the company's headquarters directly and asking to speak with someone in senior management like the president of the whole place. The senior managers obviously don't want to talk to us. So the executive offices have special departments designed to satisfy customers who've been so badly served they took the time to track down the company's leadership.

There are plenty of good reasons why a business would want to use a progressive escalation system to manage complaints and concerns. The problem is when companies routinely hide the executive office behind a maze of barriers designed to keep customers from contacting the only department truly able to help us.

These highest-level teams seem to operate out of secret military installations. They possess tremendous power to solve our problems, but are purposely hidden from our easy access. If companies have these refuges-of-last resort they should be required to tell us about them, at least when we ask.

I've come to conclude this law was needed after a recent problem with T-Mobile. I asked a representative for a phone number at T-Mobile headquarters and also for the company's headquarters address. She would only provide me with a toll-free fax number. The representative's supervisor provided me with the same option. Both refused provide basic public information such as T-Mobile's corporate headquarters and phone number.

I turned to Google for help, and after a little while — longer than I expected — I found some names and phone numbers for the company's headquarters in Bellevue, WA. I also learned a trick. If you need company information, including management and phone numbers, www.hoovers.com is a great resource.

I called T-Mobile's corporate offices and asked for the president, Robert Dotson, knowing full-well I'd never speak to him. His assistant seemed eager to help and within a few minutes I received a call from Jessie in the "executive" complaint-resolution department. The point is that tracking down Jessie's department should have been simple. The most annoying part of this process was that Jessie kept telling me I should have called him earlier. I told him I'd wanted to call him sooner, but customer service wouldn't give me his number.

T-Mobile was wrong to put up so many roadblocks between the toll-free customer service number and the people who were actually authorized to help me.

Mayor Bloomberg has his own frustrations about cell phones. After he ordered 311 to collect information about dead spots, carriers markedly improved service in the city. Municipal intervention, or at least the implied threat, quickly won results for all New Yorkers. Municipal intervention is needed again.

When a customer asks for the name and contact of information of a company's highest-level complaint department, that information should be immediately available. Given that these executive complaint departments struggle to avoid dealing with customers, their accessibility will give them incentive to make sure customers don't need them. That would mean better customer service at the initial level, surely a win for all of us.

For readers who have T-Mobile problems, shoot me an e-mail, and I'll send you Jessie's number. I'd send you his address but he wouldn't tell me where he worked, other than that he's somewhere in the Mountain time zone — hidden away right near those secretive military bases.