If you are the CEO of a company should you make it easy for your customers to reach you or should you make it as difficult as possible?
The answer...it depends.
If you and your company specialize in happy customers (like Zappos) then you have nothing to fear. If your company is part of the axis of misery (banks, cell phone providers and airlines) then in order to get your important CEO work done you have to make it as difficult as possible for your customers to reach you (just try to find a way to reach Ralph de la Vega, AT&T Wireless' CEO).
So here's my question...if you are having to avoid your customers...what does that say about your company?
Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos) started following me on Twitter...just because I was a customer who had blogged about the company. I gauranty you if I had a problem, not only would he want to know about it, he'd get it fixed right away.
I have a problem with AT&T (a company I would love to be able to rave about because of their relationship with Apple) and its virtually impossible for me to find someone who cares let alone someone with the authority to actually fix my problem.
Ralph de la Vega and the AT&T Wireless executives would do well to study Zappos Core Value #6: "Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication."
If you find yourself doing everything you can to build an impenetrable wall between you and your customers maybe you need to ask yourself why...and if you're the CEO maybe, just maybe you could do something to change it.
P.S. If you're trying to reach the folks who care at AT&T...skip customer service and go straight here:
The phone numbers for AT&T Wireless office of the president are:
Eastern States 877-707-6220
Western States 800-498-1912
