Communicating with Businesses

So I was struggling all of last week to think about a time when I have used social media to try to communicate with a business. I think that it's safe to say that we have all had a point at which it's been difficult to make contact through traditional methods... the perfect example being the DMV. One experience that I would like to share where I had difficulty was when I was trying to figure out how to keep one of my student loans from defaulting because I had no record of statements telling me that my loan was due. I had taken a semester away from school and was apparently supposed to do something called "loan exit counseling", which had never been done. I had a terrible time trying to figure out how to fix the problem because the finance aide office was telling me one thing and the company with whom the loan was through was telling me another. Not to mention the fact that the loan company was based on the east coast so their hours were different and it was difficult to get through to a live person. It took 3 days of being on the phone, keeping records of exactly what had been done with each new agent that I talked to and cross referencing with my school. I'm not sure how this could have been better handled by social media because it was between the two institutions (Chapman and the loan company), but I know that I found myself frustrated by the long wait times, changing agents I talked to, and inauthentic script that I was lead through.

     Now onto my good experience. Over the weekend I noticed that my internet was not working. I immediately dreaded having to go through the process of finding a contact number for AT&T customer service and expected that it would take me a good half an hour to an hour to just get the problem sorted out. Luckily, there was a troubleshooting page that helped to diagnose the problem and when resetting the proxies and then the router didn't work, it offered to allow me to "Live Chat" with an agent. I should mention that the only reason that this worked is because I was able to use my next door neighbor's working internet to communicate while running back to my own apartment to check on things. I'm not sure that it would have worked over my iphone. The representative was obviously a live person and even though I was definitely being taken through a script, they were able to determine that I would need to be sent a new router and answered all of my questions. Even now as I write this, I wonder if their search engines will see that I used the company name and locate this unofficial review. Powerful stuff. I liked the immediacy of the live chat and I also liked that the troubleshooting data was already in front of the agent when we began talking. I still think AT&T is overpriced and wonder if the "self install" of my router is going to require me to have another chat session, but at least the issue is in the process now of being resolved. I can see how feeling heard and responding to problems quickly is important.