TXU Energy: a dank, unpleasant pit of bad service

We’ve written about how customer service is part of your marketing, and how bad service can undo all the great marketing in the world. Yesterday I came across a prime example of this from TXU Energy, an electricity reseller here in Texas (and a pretty large one). 

TXU does lots and lots of advertising. Before I became a customer, I got a ton of direct mail from them; they’re doing outdoor, print, sponsored search, the works. They do it quite well, too. 

Unfortunately, yesterday I had to interact with them and all that brand awareness and effort was replaced by irritation and firm resolve to dump them when my contract is up… and it’s all completely avoidable bad service. 

There was a big thunderstorm, and the power went out. This isn’t unusual in my older neighborhood; honestly, I don’t think the infrastructure has kept up with the growth in the neighborhood (infill development and increased density as people realize that living near the center city in a modest space means buying less gas, living in walkable historic areas, and a generally high quality of life). That’s not TXU’s fault; in our new electricity industry, you don’t buy your power from the people who generate it. I’m sure this has all kinds of benefits that aren’t obvious when I look at my ever-higher electricity bills… but that’s a whole other topic. 

Anyway: the power went out. The power stayed out. I called to report the outage and to see if there was any information about when it would be back on. I had a very specific reason for doing this; I’d had a big order of groceries delivered in the morning, and if a whole bunch of meat was going to sit in my powerless fridge spoiling, I wanted to know so I could take it to a friend’s house for storage. 

So I called. The automated attendant asked, “Are you calling about a power outage?” Why, yes I am! “A customer advocate (that sounds like a nice, helpful person, right?) will be with you in less that one minute!”

Great! A second later, a different recorded voice said, “Your wait time is greater than three minutes.” Huh? Why are two recordings within seconds of each other giving me conflicting information? 

The hold music began. Hold music is never great, but it’s much worse when it’s kind of scratchy-sounding and keeps dropping out, giving you the beginnings of a headache. It’s even worse when ever 10 or 15 seconds it stops and a voice says, “Thank you for your patience! Please hold!” 

That effectively forces you to pay attention to the fact that you’re on hold, making the whole experience more painful. 

At 12 minutes (I was looking at the timer on my phone) I was about the give up, when suddenly the music stopped and I heard a phone ringing. Great! The recorded voice returned and said, “Your wait time is still longer than three minutes. You may continue to hold, or call back at another time.”

Call back at another time? I was calling to report an outage on the line specifically set up for that purpose. I should pick a more convenient time? How do I get to pick the time for outages? I’d love to know, it would be a lot more convenient that having my work day interrupted unexpectedly. 

At that point, I yelled something that I will not repeat here into the phone and hung up. 

Say “TXU!” to me today and my reaction is an increase in blood pressure. 

Everyone will have a bad day, of course, but the things wrong with this are all utterly avoidable and suggest that TXU’s customer service is simply incompetent at its core. Here’s what they did wrong:

1. The call center is obviously not staffed properly. 
2. If you want to take outage reports, why not automate it? I’d be happy to punch in an identifier, hear a recording about the status of the outage in my location, and be done with it. I don’t need to talk to a “customer advocate” unless he or she can magically turn my power back on. 
3. Giving out expected hold time information is great, but not when you contradict yourself with two different messages within a few seconds of each other. And when you give it out, give useful information. “More than three minutes” is not useful. Five minutes - I’ll wait. Fifteen minutes - maybe. Thirty minutes - I won’t. Tell me something I can use. 
4. If people are going to be on hold, make it painless. Don’t play badly-recorded music that’s like having a mosquito buzzing in your ear and interrupt it several times a minute with the same spoken message repeating the same utterly useless information over and over. People would like to pay attention to something other than the drone from the phone on hold; don’t make that difficult.