What I am talking about here are tips on getting to someone who has the power and intelligence to change things.
I am again having to deal with a pesky insurance company. I had the name of someone in my electric rolodex and I am confident he will fix it for me. It has to do with not receiving a 1009 for 2025 and having a large capital letter R in front of my name on the provider website. Already spent several hours dealing with incompetents.

Go with the monkey. Make sure you don't block the cooling capacity

If it is a public company, get the name of the CEO and the name of the General Counsel from their SEC Filings. Write an actual letter to the CEO, cc the General Counsel, and cc the idiot with whom you are having trouble.

This, in my experience, has never failed to work.

4 times in my adult life I've sought out email addresses for CEO's of major companies (Amazon, Amex, American Airlines, and AAA) and sent emails.
In three of those cases I had a complaint, in one of the cases I wanted to compliment an employee.

In all cases I also included other executives whose job title sounded like it might be relevant.

In every case the response was very positive, particularly the compliment about a basic customer service rep at AAA. She went above and beyond and was a great ambassador for her employer and I figured someone should notate it. I also assumed it might be nice to hear the good instead of the constant stream of negatives. I was correct.

To sum it up: I've had good responses when I've emailed the top of the food chain, but only after I've truly down my best to work within the normal channels of communication.

Maybe everyone knows this, but companies have an email “scheme” for email addresses, such as firstname.lastname@xyzcompany. So while the CEO’s email address might not be publicly available, if you know the scheme it’s a pretty good bet you can reach the CEO or anyone you want if you know their name and the scheme. And it’s the same for lower level people.

I needed a new power pole installed at the cabin. Winter was coming rapidly with snow & frozen ground and with any further delay, the entire hookup wouldn't occur until spring the following year.
The utility company install crew screwed the pooch for many months.
I wanted the new pole set first, and then I would dig the trench from the meter board to the base of the pole.
They wanted me to dig the trench first, and then they would set the pole.
I asked the fools, what if you hit a Volkswagen sized boulder and have to use the bucket truck mounted earth auger in a different location?
It didn't matter, talking with them was like having an intelligent conversation with a 4" x 4" post. They wouldn't budge.
Because there had never been a residential power drop at that rural location before, we were locked in at the $300 price, for the entire job.
So they simply didn't care about timeliness.

New pole. New transformer. New residential drop connection.
I "Googled" the CEO/President email address for the utility company and found it in a Public Service Commission online document.
One quick email to the CEO/President, and the following day the pole was installed, the new transformer hung on the new pole, and I had the email address and phone number for the crew doing the actual wiring connection. The power hookup for the cabin is underground, buried in conduit. I was up there in mid December digging the trench and backfilling with my backhoe.
Yes, they set the pole first, and then I dug the trench from the meter board to the base of the new pole. They did do it MY way.

I love it when ordinary folks get what they want from a large corporation or even better, a governmental entity,

Winston Wolfe, he solves problems.

quote:

Originally posted by honestlou:
Maybe everyone knows this, but companies have an email “scheme” for email addresses, such as firstname.lastname@xyzcompany. So while the CEO’s email address might not be publicly available, if you know the scheme it’s a pretty good bet you can reach the CEO or anyone you want if you know their name and the scheme. And it’s the same for lower level people.

Maybe at little companies, but not my experience at large corporations. They have a scheme for regular employees but with exceptions (eg if there are 2 John Smith they'll have unique email addresses). CEO isn't getting an easy to guess e-mail address or it'd get buried in spam, and even the real email address is being screened by an executive assistant and CEO only seeing e-mails the executive assistant puts in special folder(s).

Can’t recommend this but it worked for me once.

In GM’s world,for years we in the dealerships had a customer assistance center aka SPAC that was there to assist us with parts procurement problems. Worked great but post bankruptcy it took a turn for the worst. Everybody in Grand Blanc, home of SPAC, was cut loose or reassigned, the phone contact personnel was now outsourced overseas, Philippines to be exact. Later on it was brought back to the U.S. citing dealership concerns with language barriers, level of service, etc.

Well,scripted responses, brick walls, communication problems. One time I had been working for two months to get a seat belt, pyrotechnic tensioner so while there were a few in other dealers around the country unless they had haz-mat certification they could not ship it. And of course the ones that had it didn’t have the certs nor were they close enough (several hundred miles away) to send a driver which we were at that point with the insurance company, our body shop, Cadillac Customer Service and the owner of the car.

Belt was finally produced, Mexican factory. Was transported over the border to Texas, was now stuck at FedEx because the label wasn’t right. Day four of an overnight shipment, FedEx couldn’t get anyone on the phone at the facility, SPAC did nothing,my factory rep was also trying to no avail.

So I called again, two or three times a day to SPAC and requested a supervisor, almost impossible to get on the line even they were in Saginaw, about a hundred miles from us, those calls had to be passed from the Philippines and they were very reluctant to do so, maybe a bad reflection on their abilities?

Anyhow I kept asking for a supervisor, the SPAC person kept insisting he’d just order another one. Who knows how long that would take? I finally lost it and let loose with “LET ME SPEAK TO A *************** SUPERVISORS, DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?”

Well, I hear “One moment please.”, a short pause and a lady on the phone. I ask her if she’s in Saginaw. She said yes. I game her the case number(s), told her the problem. She said “give me five to ten minutes”. She came back on the line, she had a phone number at the plant and they corrected the problem, next morning the belt was on my desk!

In 47 years of dealership parts that was the only time I lost it to that degree with GM SPAC.

A practice you might adopt...present "what" you need rather than "how" you want the party to act.

If you restate "what I am hoping to accomplish..." or "what would be an ideal outcome is..." over and over again, you can let the other party solve the problem.

You may not have the best path to achieve your goal. And, letting the other party solve the problem gives them a chance to exercise their own creativity and exert what little power they have in that organization. This changes their ownership and they often will accomplish what you want.

I am currently having a problem with my AT&T account (fiber internet service). Tried to solve the problem through normal customer (NO)service channels, three times.

Each time that I have discussed the problem with an agent, I have been transferred to a supervisor who clearly understood the problem and absolutely, definitely, positively, guaranteed that the problem would be solved within 48 hours. Needless to say, the problem has not been solved.

I wrote a clear letter to John Stanky, AT&T's CEO, describing the problem and the attempts at solving it through normal channels, and requested that the problem be assigned to somebody on his staff to solve it and follow up as necessary. Mailed the letter a few days ago, currently waiting to see if I receive a response.

^^^^^^
AT&T – a once-great company gone sour.

quote:

wrote a clear letter to John Stanky, AT&T's CEO, describing the problem and the attempts at solving it through normal channels, and requested that the problem be assigned to somebody on his staff to solve it and follow up as necessary. Mailed the letter a few days ago, currently waiting to see if I receive a response.

^^^^^^^^^^^
I am having similar issues. Landline out for extended period of time, threats that if I do not go to fiber immediately service will be terminated without warning. When the tech finally arrived he had a completely different work order. No Indians this time but service is even worse with Americans. Normal channels do not work.

From my POV and while dealing with GM’s SPAC department the call center personnel all work from a script. If the customer’s problem does not follow the script, we’ll that’s where things get off the rails.

Another GM story, Buick Customer Service called as the car’s owner was calling them in regard to a long time back order situation. Call center person had the customer’s name, my SPAC case number (assigned by the parts division) and knew all the “levels” I had gone through at this point including the request being elevated to SWAT (GM loves these names!). I also called around the country (really) to the handful of dealers that showed that part number in the parts locating system hoping someone would sell it to me, no luck.

So,now I’ve gone as high as I can, my district manager can, now it’s a just wait case. But the Buick rep said to me “So what are yo doing to address the customer’s concern?” Well, hit me with a baseball bat below the waist!

So I very calmly said to that person “well, on my lunch hour today I plan on cruising the local parking lots, find a car that has what I need and steal it. Will that make you happy?”

She than said “You don’t need to be sarcastic” and my reply was “You don’t have to be that stupid! You have all the information in front of you including the case numbers and all the steps and levels that the facorty reps and I have gone through. It’s a past model so there is no production line part pull available, we have to wait. Or do you have a better solution?”

She hung up.