How to contact any CEO: a guide
So you’ve bought product X and it has stopped working right. Your calls to customer service have been met with mediocre results when you could even get your point across. You’ve even tried using the IVR cheat sheet to get through to a human. Have no fear I am about to explain how to make Joe CEO your personal CEO using the same type of system they use to obfuscate customer service.
Step 1: go to Google, find out where your problem company’s headquarters is located. Sometimes you can find this on the corporate part of the company website as well.
Good search terms include
Company X headquarters
Company X corporate offices
etc vary the wording til you find it. The information is available! You just need to look for it.
Step 2: find the phone number for that location. Use switchboard.com, Google, superpages, or yp.yahoo.com.
The number you want is for the main receptionist or main number for the office.
Step 3: Use Google or the company site to determine the president’s name or the name of the executive you are looking for.
Step 4: Call the number after the main offices have closed. Generally one of the first choices available is the option of using the directory.
Start by dialing the CEO’s last name generally and in my experiences you will get taken to the CEO’s voicemail box or one monitored by his assistant which is generally good enough if you make your case.
Making your case: General strategy
Successful strategies for me include
Praising the company’s past service or products.
Focusing on one problem and failure while maintaining a positive tone and pleasant demeanor.
Always being professional and concise.
If you follow these steps you should at least reach the CEO and if they are worth their salt they’ll get your issue taken care of.
It worked for me when I had an issue with a rebate from NEC (story link)
I was also able to reach the voicemail for the CEO of Time Warner Cable but did not need his assistance.
My guess is that after this becomes used it may become less useful as CEOs may remove themselves from the directory. However if they do that they are failing in my opinion as a CEO.
Best of luck becoming educated consumers.
Technorati Tags: CEO, Consumer
Time Warner Conclusion
I was able to speak with Lori from Time Warner today. She had called yesterday at home rather than my office. After a bit of phonetag Lori asked a few questions and then straightened it all out. Monthly bill after tax $105 and only $20 for the prorated phone in December. This is an amazing feat for Time Warner CS in my opinion. Congrats for doing the right thing. Side note I did not even have to yell at someone this time.
Coming Tomorow how to reach the CEO of your choice.
Fun with Time Warner
Gather round young ones and listen to a tale of Billing coed errors and poorly written billing software.
Time Warner Ohio had a billing error which charged every person on a recurring payment program was billed the amount they should have normally been charged later in the month on the 4th of January for me and according to Company CSRs sometime between the 1st and the 5th. That amount has been credited to my account as of the 9th.
The billing mix-up has brought to my attention the fact that Time Warner put my account on a $137.84 plan instead of the $99.95 plan I should be on for the next year which includes Cable Classic, Road Runner, and Digital Phone. The bill I received on the 7th was for $218.94.
The Original Charge of $137.84 appeared along with an $8.31 Partial Month Cable charge even though I was charged 95.08 on the 22nd of December for Cable from Dec 13th through January 14th. And 57.26 for a month and a half of Digital phone which would be right if my plan didn’t include digital phone for ~5 bucks more than I was paying.
I called Time Warner’s CS line and was told after much back and forth the installer put the wrong box in and thus had us moved into a Digital Cable package upping the price and voiding the package we should be on. The CSR said to go in to the local office and they can get it all taken care of since she couldn’t figure it out.
The Office: Time 4:30 Friday January 6th
Amber and I get to the local office and after wafting in line for about 20 minutes the person figures out that we need a supervisor to set the account right since the promo doesn’t exist anymore. After taking all our info and explaining that in order to get 7 channels of HD programming we would have to pay 40 bucks more a month. The CSR informed me that I would have to wait for the Supervisor to call me since no Supervisors are located at this (and many other) offices. I was told that a call should come on Monday in order to get the problem fixed and settled. Well it is now 10 PM on Tuesday and I have not received a call from the supervisor.
Bottom Line the Supervisor is getting a call tomorrow and can solve my problem with $115 for the three services including HD programming or 99.95 a month for just the three services with the price being god for one year. Any else falls considerable short of a solution and I will have to start contacting someone higher up at Time Warner.
Check back for more on the situation as events warrant.
HD Tivo and HD Cable
Tivo has announced the Tivo Series 3 DVR which will record in HD and supports 2 Cable cards, HDMI etc. It looks really cool.
Megazone says The unit has two CableCARD slots on the back and it will support Multi-Stream (CableCARD 2.0) or Single-Stream (CableCARD 1.0) cards. If you have multi-stream then you only need one card, but as long as only single stream cards are available you can use two of them. Yes, it supports digital and analog cable, digital ATSC OTA, and analog NTSC OTA. The unit has front panel controls clustered on the right, and a nice display in the middle with a very cool feature – it displays the title of the show(s) tuned at the time, so you always know what it is recording at a glance. The remote is also sleeker – a slick update of the Series2 peanut with minor changes for HDTV (such as an aspect button). But the big change is that the remote is backlit! TiVo will also be selling an external SATA drive for easy storage expansion, and they have that on display here too.
Info found on Zatz Not Funny
I am eagerly awaiting a HD Tivo I can use with Cable. I am looking at the offerings form Time Warner for HD and they don’t have any real great deals even though they do offer a HD DVR. To get HD programming form Time Warner you need to pay 7.95 for a set top box, it is not clear to me what you get with this and I hate calling companies which should be reachable by email so I have not found this out yet. Then they offer an HD tier of 5 channels for 8.95 which is the only way to get ESPN HD (also included INHD INHD 2 some movie channel and another I can’t be bothered to remember). The HD DVR is another who knows how much on top of this and the last DVR I had from Time Warner just plain didn’t function right I got maybe 15% of the shows I wanted to actually record.
Anyway I am hoping to get the HD cable listing up in the near future at least for NW Ohio and I would love to get HD cable in the net 3 months since we have an HDTV but student loans are consolidating slowly and the process is a giant pain.
Movie Theatres Propose Ban on Cell Phones
Movie theatres are looking to get power from the FCC to jam cell phones in order to promote a better movie experience.
From the Head of NATO(National Association of Theatre Owners)
Some of the proposed solutions may not be so popular. The trade group plans to petition the Federal Communications Commission to permit the blocking of cellphones inside theaters, Mr. Fithian said. That would require changing an existing regulation, he added. But some theaters are already testing a no-cellphones policy, asking patrons to check their phones at the theater door.
as pointed out later in the article fat chance I am letting Samantha the girl with no short term memory or Paul Popcorn Mckenzy hold onto my ~$700 phone.
From NYT Via Boing Boing
More on books and life later tonite
Saturday Ranting
It has been a crazy saturday.
Spent alot of time at the mall but we should be set for presents etc.
Gripes
People: If you are in a store and do not have a gameplan for where you need to go next get outta the freakin way.
Malls: Plow your lots so all the available parking is available in crunch holiday time.
Gamefly: Work with your customers to change an address so you don’t have to cut off service because my postal route is “insecure” (Re upped with a different credit card work address though)
Postal Workers: The mail area has locked boxes for a reason USE THEM,
Meth Head Drug Dealing neighbor: Don’t steal my &*$%#’n games.
This rant has been brought to you by Inept postal workers, horrible Ohio drivers and the letter P.
Gray Tuesday: Download American Edit
I have started listening to a genre of music called the mashup. It takes several songs and or clips and places them into one song in a remix fashion but separates itself by placing two very different styles together like Greenday and Ashanti or 50 Cent and Queen.
From Wikipedia
Bastard pop is a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the a cappella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts.
More on Mashups here (wikipedia)
Info about Gray Tuesday form American Edit
Only 10 days after its release, the mash-up album American Edit, which pays tribute to the acclaimed Green Day album American Idiot through some of the best mash-up productions of 2005, was shut down reportedly after received a cease & desist order from Green Day’s label, Warner records, despite the fact that it was released as an internet only release with no commercial gain for the team of mash-up artists involved. In fact, the only possible profit to be made from the release was a plea from the creators of the album (known only by the shared alias Dean Gray) for fans who enjoyed the creation to donate to one of three possible charities that Green Day have been known to support. Furthermore, the mash-up versions were such fantastic productions that they were truly a departure from the standard Green Day performances and would not compete for consumptive dollars.
If you like Greenday or any kind of original music basically if you are sick of Clear Channel’s “selection” check this out.
More info and DL Links at American Edit
Satire Soda: Faux Fueds
Last week Tobias Buckell Posted about starting a fake fight in cyberspace in order to drum up traffic since controversy = traffic.
I was chatting with someone the other day about how to grow traffic to your site’s blog.
“It’s easy,” I said, “All you have to do is get involved in a major controversy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well look, if you want to grow traffic what you need is a good online spat. Look, it works for Ann Coulter. Everytime she calls someone stupid the press is happy to write up reports about how mean and nasty she is, thus getting everyone to talk about her. All you have to do is get pissy about some shit or the other and you’ve got guaranteed attention. Why do you think political blogs can grow their traffic so quickly?”
…….
“Okay, okay. I have an idea though… Will you be my arch enemy? We can have a fake argument, falling out, and pretend to hate each other. We can even attack each other virulently online.”“Let’s not, I think that would provoke too much controversy when we reveal the truth of it.”
“I guess…”
Then Sadly No put a Lime on his head and quoted half his post making him look like an attention whore.
Eggs and bacon in the pan! Let’s go see if Pajamas Media has magically turned around since yesterday.
……
Tobias Buckell, enemy of…Nah.
Then Tobias Responds
So in my gently satirical post about how to gain traffic by starting a faux feud, anti-Pajamas Media site ‘Sadly No’ excerpted the opening part of my post, and utterly failed to read the rest of it to realize I was poking fun of using controversy to gain traffic, thus proving the adage that those who choose not read have no advantage over those who can’t.
And Sadly No shoots back
Well, maybe it looks easy.
After our gently satiric post on gaining traffic by starting a faux blog feud, enemy of humanity Tobias Buckell once again attacks his blood-smeared keyboard with pounding fist, howling vile and deadly insults across the Internet.
And thats about where the situation is as of 4pm on December 10, 2005. Either they are both geniuses and we are all being duped or Sadly No tried to cover up an attempt to tarnish Pajama’s Media and Tobias Buckell by jumping on the Satire bandwagon with Tobias.
I don’t claim to know everyone’s intentions but I wanted to collect some of the info in one place. Now all I need is a traffic summary for each site to see if a Faux/Real Feud improves Traffic. Hopefully this is as unbiased as can be but I do know Tobias and not posters at Sadly No so take that for what you will.
Josh Smith is a blogger, database manager and adjunct professor of business and technology. 
