Well, the poor dears at Cox are probably clutching their pearls.

We had several outages on Cox over the Memorial Day weekend, and Cox fixed all of them, eventually (one took five hours).

So I called them Tuesday to complain generically, because the service people were somewhat less than friendly, and didn’t want to authorize me on the account (even though I’d reported the outages without incident.

After much discussion, it’s pretty clear that the Cox culture isn’t too customer friendly, despite what they say in their ads. And there are a lot of ads, leading us to think that they’ve exceeded their capacity, at least in our area, which is Northeast Scottsdale.

I also had problems accessing a part of the Cox website for an area that was supposed to be there.

I was sufficiently annoyed with their lack of caring that I filed a complaint with the AZ Department of Consumer affairs alleging that Cox wasn’t doing a good job.

That kicked over the hive.

I got a call from Tracie, assistant to the President of the Cox Arizona/California Division. She was very earnest about how Cox was trying harder, but she really didn’t get the idea that the Cox culture had to become more customer facing (along with the website). I have one of my Solutions Forum members, who heads a website design firm investigating. We don’t hold out hope.

What this tale means for you small biz owners is don’t let your culture freeze up and become static. Keep it customer facing. Empower your people to delight the customer in deeds, not just words.

And keep your website customer friendly. Test it.

I’m not optimistic that Cox still won’t clutch its pearls when someone like me complains.