Great Service!

A few weeks ago, one of our Public Radio stations here in the state of Iowa was off the air. It was a good week or two that it was out. I had a strong feeling that they knew about the outage, but I figured I would send them a quick note just in case. Here’s the response I got:

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Matt —

KUNI suffered a burnout in its transmission line last Saturday. We are currently off the air. We have a tower crew scheduled to arrive on Thursday – if all goes well it may only take a couple of days to repair.

Thank you for writing!

Barb Reid

Iowa Public Radio

First off, it was a really fast response. I got my repsonse in under 15 minutes. You could tell that they gave a damn about their listeners.

Second, it was truthful. How many times do you hear some fake apology from some higher up in a company that you know if full of shit. I’m willing to bet that most outages are caused by a certain amount of risk that managers allow to exist in systems. In a perfect world, you would never have an outage because all of the redundency that is supposed to be in place would be there. But in the real world, there is always a certain amount of risk that we just have to live with. And its usually when that blows up that you get a half hearted apology that you were ‘inconvienced’ for the outage. I love it when I see a provider fess up. Things like ‘We screwed up on this one’ Or ‘its our fault’ then follow it by an apology and I’ll believe it.

I’m sure if you look at just about any customer survey out there you’ll find room for improvement. If everyone would be like Barb in this email, we’d be a lot better off. Fast, honest, sincere. Well done!