I know some people despise Qwest/CenturyLink customer service. But personally I’ve found them to be pretty good. Latest case in point: changing up my phone service. As I mentioned before we’ve been getting a lot of harassing phone calls from a local charity (or at least their telemarketer fundraiser), and we got sick of it. It also reminded me that I’ve been meaning to turn off our voice mail service so that we can go back to using our answering machine.
So I tried calling CenturyLink. They have specific hours for customer service, so I was too late. I then went online to see if I could figure out anything we could do there. It turned out I could at least review what phone services we already had, at least. We had Call Blocking. I hadn’t realized we had that.
So I proceeded to find out how to use it, then blocked the annoying charity. We haven’t heard anything from them since then. But while I was on their site I saw an option for changing your service. I tried it, hoping I could also switch my voice mail off and trade it for Call Waiting.
Here is my only gripe with the experience. Their interface was terrible. I couldn’t tell if I was getting both the option to turn off voice mail and to add Call Waiting. It kept resetting the screen, also. I finally got an order placed, but I couldn’t tell from any of the subsequent screens if it had registered the voice mail part of the request.
Other than that, however, everything went well. The site gave me a date the change would be completed, sometime in early February. The next day I got a follow-up email saying they would have the work completed by the end of January. The day after that I got an email indicating the work was completed. But just what work had they completed?
The day after that we got a phone call from them also, reporting the work was done. Since no one there to answer the phone at the time, it went to our answering machine. That could only happen if they’d turned off voice mail, so there was confirmation that the most important part of the work had been done. We still haven’t verified the Call Waiting, but I’m not so concerned with that.
So even though I had some initial difficulties with placing the order, the order itself was completed earlier than expected, and their follow-up was excellent. Not bad at all.
This past weekend we bought two bike locks for our older two kids. One worked just fine, but the other gave me difficulties resetting the combination. I had to turn a dial that was very stiff, and when I applied enough force the entire lock fell apart. I quickly took it back to Target where we bought it. They exchanged it with no difficulties. The next lock worked just fine. This is about what I’d expected, really, but sometimes it’s nice to just have your expectations met without any unpleasant surprises.