Another customer service story

I received a double than normal response (two instead of one e-mail!) to my story last month on customer service that I decided to write another one.

You have heard of Destiny’s combined service of cable TV and cable modem, right? The competition for cable modems includes the dial-up service of Pacificnet, aDSL of PLDT and the other cable modem services. I personally subscribe to Destiny and I am quite satisfied. (Mind you, not delighted!)

Broadband is such a godsend for Internet addicts like my wife and me. It is always on with no worries about how much time we have to pay for because we have a monthly rate. There is a downside where you have to buy extra software to protect yourself from hackers and viruses.

"Always on" is a great concept that does not apply to dial-up services like Pacificnet and Sky Cable which, with Zippeedee, is a cable modem service charging on a per-byte-of-download basis. (Pricing on per byte defeats the purpose of broadband as jpegs, mpegs and mp3s are huge downloads.)

PLDT’s aDSL service is the fastest of all services, but I went with Destiny because of the combined offering of TV and Internet.

In the recent debacle that Sky Cable got into with its content provider, Destiny has had a major surge of new subscribers for cable TV, and some converters to both cable TV and cable modem. This happened just about when the World Series was on. This is a very fortunate scenario because as early as a year ago, the Destiny folks had trouble because they had a senior technical guy who knew nothing about taking care of their customers. (Guess that is why they keep the technical guys in the backroom.)

These days, Destiny is acceptable as a cable TV provider and satisfactory as a cable modem service provider. (FYI, I am not being compensated by Destiny for writing this article, hmmm…) In fact, I refer a lot of my expatriate friends to Destiny, not because of its reliability or its value added, but because of the customer service level of one lady…Sherry Del Mar. She is there 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and is quite responsive. Keep it up, lady! (If Destiny is smart, it needs to figure out how to keep this girl.)

My Two Cents: Funny how customer service can add to your revenue line even if your service level is just satisfactory. This is a clear case where the strength of referral is your cheapest form of marketing. Let’s not forget customer retention as your second cheapest form; this is where your product service level needs to deliver.

Of games and memories

Do you remember the days before Gameboy, Nintendo, Dreamcast and Playstation? I sure do because these video games do not exist in my house and are actually banned from my household. Why? Most of the games are violent and the player is usually so engrossed with the game that the player becomes anti-social. It is for this reason that the wife banned it, not from the kids but from me. (Or was it because it was expensive?)

Just being nostalgic this weekend, I thought about what games my neighbors and I played while we were growing up at the Nagtahan apartments.

We played patintero, kicked the can, made our own Pe-to (literally "flying knife" in Fookien or ninja star darts for some) from bottle crowns (always ready to fight the bad ninjas led by Konggo of Koga, while we allied ourselves with Shintaro the samurai and his sidekick Tombei, the Iga ninja).

We played hide and seek (these days hide and seek involves a big chunk of ransom money and is quite a serious non-game) and of course, marbles and tops. The girls played garter and jackstones (okay, I played it too!). We made our own kites from Japanese paper. (I broke my brother’s kite because his flew higher and better, boy did I get into deep trouble with Mom, but we can discuss that some other time or not discuss it at all.)

Nowadays, my two sons and daughter play with Legos, some educational computer games and some Internet games. They all love soccer and baseball. And sometimes they would catch Dad at his weakest and let them go to a Playstation center. Times were simpler then, things are different now, a little more complicated because of the logistics but they still enjoy their friends and their games.

I recently found a game that my son and I have been playing a lot lately. The game is called SimCity 3000. The premise of the game is that you are the mayor of the city that you build either from scratch or from a template. You start with US$50,000 and have the right to raise taxes and borrow money. With the cash, you have to build schools, roads, power and other infrastructure, playgrounds, police stations and firehouses. The objective is to build up your population without going bankrupt. You decide on zoning areas for residential, commercial and industrial. You even have advisors who recommend what issues the people care for. It is so uncanny that the simulation would have people and businesses walk away if the taxes are so high, the infrastructure so unreliable, and traffic so bad. (Hmmm….)

My Two Cents: Perhaps, our national and local government teams should all get free copies of this game just for them to realize what factors are important to their constituents and how they have to be balanced.

(By the way, though my population was growing and I had a decent reserve in the treasury, I still could not fix traffic. Just imagine what the MMDA has to go through with limited funds and no taxing ability.)

Dickson Co is CFO (C is for Cheap) for both Dfnn and HatchAsia.com. For comments and suggestions, e-mail [email protected].