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Can you hear me now?

Today, there are more options than ever to communicate with businesses. Between help lines, contact forms, email options, Twitter, Facebook, and live chat, there should be no problem getting a message to a company. So I find it more than a little annoying that, despite all these innovations, it’s still near-impossible to get anyone to actually LISTEN to you.

I’ve run into this issue more than once recently (as my LOFT posts will attest). I’ll spare you the McDonald’s story and relate today’s incident with AT&T, which prompted me to write this post.

I was on their website to pay my bill, which I accomplished easily enough. While I was there, I saw a tab for Marketing Preferences, and I thought, “Wonderful! I can tell them to stop sending me offers in the mail every other week.” But, as it turns out, that tab is only for email preferences. Undaunted, I looked for contact options. Surely there must be a way to tell them not to send me all these letters, right?

Wrong.

The contact options are a maze of predefined choices. Want to send a message that doesn’t fit those categories? You’re out of luck. Oh, I’m sure I could have called, but I’ve been down that road before. I don’t want to spend 30 minutes getting passed from rep to rep today, thank you.

The real irony is that AT&T currently has a contest to promote their paperless billing option. They’re giving away $15,000 for the sake of getting your statement to you via email, but persist in sending promotional letters and cards to customers who don’t want them. So much for their commitment to the environment.

Companies need to learn that communication channels that don’t work might as well not exist. People want to be heard, and communication needs to be on the customer’s terms, not yours. I’d much rather have one efficient way to tell you what’s on my mind than half a dozen options that only let me express the messages you want to hear.

Where Are You Going?

Where Are You Going by Dave Matthews is one of my favorite songs -- and for some time now, it's been the $64,000 question, so to speak. After Hurricane Katrina, my parents and I decided that New Orleans was no longer a good place to be and that we would relocate as soon as we were free to do it (translation: after my grandparents died). We debated a lot about where we would go. I wanted to return to my adopted home of Raleigh, North Carolina; I'd only been gone a few years at that point and still had friends and contacts there. My Dad wanted someplace farther south, closer to the family, and suggested Huntsville. In the end, Tennessee was the middle ground, the compromise we all liked: big enough to find work, close enough to my beloved North Carolina mountains to make me happy, close enough to family to make us all feel secure. The decision was made -- we just had to wait.

Then the drama started. A few members of Dad's family live in Tennessee and have been embroiled in some serious conflict. (There have recently been court proceedings. It's not pretty.) Suddenly, Tennessee seemed much too close to the craziness. We reopened the great relocation debate last summer and took Tennessee off the table.

A couple of months later, my cousin Kristi had news: she had a job interview with a college in Asheville, NC. We had been discussing North Carolina since I'd gotten a lot of work last summer from my contacts there. It seemed like fate, the obvious answer: we'd go to Asheville. But the Universe was playing tricks with us and the job lead turned into a red herring: Kristi was their second choice, and the relocation debate was once again wide open.

Just contemplating the question seemed overwhelming to me. Even limiting our choices to three states (Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina), with the additional restriction that it had to be no more than 8 hours from Dad's family in Meridian, didn't help. There were too many possibilities and the decision was too big. What if we didn't like the place? What if we chose wrong?

I brought up the question with Dad at lunch today -- told him the little bit of research I'd done, the few cities I'd marked for study -- and I asked for his thoughts. And in a wonderful bit of fatherly wisdom and insight, he said "Why don't we think about Tennessee again?"

Okay, maybe he didn't say it quite like that. But something in our conversation led us to that question, and he said that we can't let the family drama keep us from our best choice. And suddenly, it all seemed so simple and obvious. We know we like Tennessee. We have good family in Tennessee. We can find work there. And it's closer to Meridian than anything else I was considering.

So. I think -- I hope -- that the question may finally be answered.

I think we're going to Tennessee.