On December 15, 2007 my parents had a fire at their home. The fire gutted the garage/shop and smoked the inside of their house. Days after the fire, my mother called the various utilities to stop them while they waited to rebuild and clean their house. They knew it would be months before they would be able to get back in their house and didn’t want to have all that money going out the door for services that they couldn’t use. One of the calls my mother made was to Qwest to put their phone service on hold and forward the number to their cel phone. She told the customer service agent multiple times that she wanted to keep the number that they had been using for the last 19 years and have it forwarded to their cel phone and would pay whatever was necessary to do that. The customer service agent said that wasn’t needed and that they could cancel the service but keep the number forwarding to the cel phone until my parents got back in the house.
Two weeks after the fire, my father died of a heart attack. Needless to say, my mother was living through the toughest time of her life. You can imagine the tough times we went through and then you can multiply that times ten and that will give you a sense of my mother’s experience. She has handled it all amazingly well.
Last week my mother was able to move back into their house. The place looks great and it has been a great feeling for my mom to finally come home. After getting in and slowly unpacking some of the boxes my mom called Qwest to get her number turned back on. The customer service agent said that they had given her number away three months ago and that she would have to get a new number. When my mother explained that she had been told they would hold her number and forward it to her cel phone until she was ready to move back in the customer service agent said sorry but there was nothing she could do. My mother was quite angry about this and started thinking about alternatives to Qwest.
My mother’s sister works at Qwest in their engineering department. When she heard the story she was also disappointed. She decided to email the president of Qwest to tell him personally how Qwest had let my mom down. It wasn’t long after the email was sent that my mother was contacted by the president’s personal assistant. She told my mother that she was very sorry for the situation and they would contact the person that had her old number and ask if he would consider giving the number back to my mother. We all thought this was a long shot and was probably not going to happen, but to our surprise, about 3 days later the personal assistant called back and told my mother that they were able to get her number back and she would have it working at her house by Friday. I was amazed. Qwest took a bad situation and made it right. Sure, they had given the number away originally, but I was impressed that they took the time to get my mother’s number back. I wonder what they offered their other customer to give the number up………
Awesome. Give a small amount of credit to the person that gave it back. He likely had already informed all of his acquaintances of his “new” number, and now has to tell them, “I changed my number again.” Not a huge deal, but he did have to put some work into it rather than just sitting back and being lazy. (I think most people, when the situation is explained to them, would give up the number. But there are people who would not.)
This is kinda silly, but whenever I see your blog in my feed reader, I always read it as “Everybody Loves Your Mommy” instead of “Everybody Loves Your Money”. With this post, it really does seem like everybody loves your mommy :D :D :D
…but how many times does this kind of thing happen (i.e. customer screwed over) that we DON’T hear about, and isn’t resolved because they don’t know someone on the inside?
This is a heartening story; however,it certainly is the exception.