Kevin Slimp: Is he the ultimate customer?

In the spirit of full disclosure, the writer of this article was an AT&T employee until a little over four years ago and left on good terms. The interview was done on an AT&T Mobility phone with no dropped calls/ This writer has also known Kevin Slimp for about two years. He was featured in Across Tennessee in a May, 2010 article here.

The first time you meet Kevin Slimp he acts like he has known you for years. The Knoxville newspaper consultant, who also gives seminars on technology and taking care of the customer, seems to have never met a stranger. Due to his cheerful persona when he goes after a company he does it with a disarming smile. Despite the smile, or maybe because of it,  his words burn like uncut sulphuric acid. Could Slimp’s approach to business become the future of customer service?

In the world of high technology it is easy for a company, especially a large one, to hide behind voice mail jail, outsourced call centers and impersonal service. But technology is also in the hands of the consumer and in case of a happy or, more likely an unhappy, customer and Slimp shows it can be used to get a company to pay attention to those who have had enough voice mail jail, outsourced call centers and impersonal customer service.

It all started about the beginning of the year. “At my building where I have my office we have had AT&T for several years. The internet was incredibly slow. We had a dedicated T1 line. Secondly we were paying well over one thousand dolars a month for phone and internet. Comcast had internet twenty or so times as fast for about third of what we were paying,” Slimp said.

AT&T was realizing they were about to lose a customer so Jessie from AT&T in Saint Louis, Missouri called and offered to “put in new system which would keep the phone lines exactly the same as before with 7.5 megabyte download. When they came for the install and said it was done, I checked and realized the internet was slower than before. It was about 1 megabyte maximum and we were having problems with phone,” he remembers.

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These were not just any problems. Faxes were cutting off before they were complete. They had about five seconds to make long distance calls before the phone cut off.

Slimp called technical support “Usually we called and got what I guess was India and they said I needed to buy something else.” Or others told him to go back to his customer service rep. “Finally I got ahold of someone so I can get the name of my customer service rep and  ’that would be the one who sold you the equipment.”

Ok. So just find Jessie in Saint Louis. It is 2012 and all can be called up via computer. Simple enough.

“Finally I received an email from a person in Saint Louis named Joe who said he knew that person and that he wasn’t there because he was called away on a family medical emergency but he would try his best to help. But he was a sales rep, not tech support,” said Slimp. “He said he would call this person or that person but nothing happened.”

“Then one day a box arrived from FedEx. It had a modem/router device inside. I called Joe and he said ‘someone was supposed to be there to install it yesterday. Did anyone come?’ No one had been there. He said let me check on it.” Slimp says. Days went by nothing happened

“I called technical support in India and I got variations of ‘you need to install it yourself,” he remembers. “I finally realized Joe wasn’t helping with me.”

In the middle of the day on Jan 10 Slimp made a post on Facebook about his frustration. That is when an old friend from Atlanta contacted him. She was an AT&T employee and contacted Loretta to help him. And she figured out who Jessie from Saint Louis was. Remember him? He was the original sales rep who sold the device. He and Joe were subcontractors for AT& T.

Loretta also got a hold of Joe who told Slimp Jessie was no longer with the company.

She called Bryson in Denver and advised him of the situation. “Loretta was nice enough to keep calling and checking,” he said.

At about the third day, Bryson got a hold of him advising Slimp he was working on it.

Slimp’s office is not far away. It is in the city of Knoxville on Montbrook Lane. Also on Montbrook is an AT&T facility. The AT&T office is next door, at roughly the distance between the goalposts of UT Knoxville’s  Neyland Stadium. He wondered if, by any chance, that could be the office for business services. “I have confirmed with the people in the office this is the business service in Knoxville.”

He walked over with a colleague from his office and a camera and shot a quick video. January 13 at 1:43 PM it ended up on Facebook for his 1200-plus friends. It also ended up on Kenandkevinroadtrip.com, a blog he does with a friend. There was AT&T’s door. A quick pan of the camera showed AT&T’s service trucks and another pan showed Slimp’s office.

“Next thing I know I get an email from Sandy, who is a wonderful person, who works I believe in the online division at AT&T. I worked with her years ago when she was a teenager. She said ‘have I been living under a rock? I haven’t seen anything about this story. Call me.” Sandy let others in the company know Slimp was not the type to let things rest. Not only is this his business, he has had experience doing similar things when he felt pushed around by a company. Starting in June, 2010, Delta Airlines had five incidents in a row where the airline was not able to get him to his destination city and he had to rent a car – without getting reimbursed. He took the Delta story to social media and it created heavy duty bad public relations for the airline. Facebook friends were spreading it around and the news media picked it up. Sandy “ told them ‘I know what this guy did with Delta we don’t want to get on his bad side,” Slimp says.

Monday January 16^th, he went next door and introduced himself. There he met Gaylord. Slimp got Loretta from Atlanta on the phone to talk to him. “Gaylord is a nice person who had never been contacted about the problem.” Slimp was being contacted by this point by the news media. His video was entering the realm of the “viral video” phenomena and it had been just three days since the video hit the web.

“Finally I got a phone message saying I will be hearing from a man named John, a vice president who oversaw  business services for AT&T. He was in Dallas. He called me and he was a very nice guy,” he says. Slimp said to him “John, you are a vice president. Shouldn’t you be able to pick up a phone and call someone next door to my office and tell them to send someone down? He said ‘You think it would be able to work that way, wouldn’t you?’ or something to that effect.”

January 17, AT&T installed a new system, again with slow internet connection. On Friday the 20th, AT&T returned to Slimp’s office and said next week the problems would be fixed.

There are different types of customers. Take a restaurant. There are the types who wait and wait for a table while others get served much quickly, yet say nothing. There are others who call the server stupid for bringing diet Coke instead of regular and putting in too much ice. Slimp seems to be both nice and aggressive. He often refers with praise to those employees who wanted to help. “In America they had a lot of nice people. I get the sense the majority want to do what is right but there hands are tied and they could not,” he says. Many in the company acknowledged he made a good video and that others in the office agreed. AT&T employees even saw the humor in it. But he holds no punches in speaking of the company. “A company the size of AT&T, for whatever reason, has gotten out of control. I think maybe because of terrible leadership, poor leadership or horrendous leadership,” he says. “ATT is a big company I am just a thorn in their side. But if enough people put thorns in their side they will take notice.”

“The average small business would have been at the mercy of AT&T and would not have gotten any mercy.” Slimp says people are emailing him and thanking him. “I am a very nice person. I don’t have any mean side. But I will stand up for what’s right. I was in a negotiation once with a client. The vendor had lied to them and was trying to get more money from them. I am nicest guy in the world but there is a thing called righteous indignation. I think I have a load of it in me. I got so mad I got a hold of the CEO of that company and chewed his butt one side up and down the other. And by the time I was done he was begging me to let him fix it. I hate to see someone in power take advantage of people.”

More will hear the story today ( Sunday, Jan 22, 2012)  on Knoxville’s George Korda show on 98.9 FM at noon Eastern Time.

Social networks, as he learned from the Delta experience, have power large businesses need to understand. And perhaps the information age that power will only grow in the future.  Most people who work with customers probably heard in their training class that satisfied customers will tell three friends and an upset one will ten. Who knows how those numbers will be revised?